 Hello everyone and welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan and on behalf of the team here at JSA, thank you for tuning in to our latest virtual CEO roundtable. Our first 100 registrants for today's roundtable will receive a fresh lunch delivered to your door or a gift card that you can order your own meal. So while you are all beginning to enjoy those delicious meals, let's get things underway. A quick reminder though for everyone who has joined us today, we look forward to your participation during this event so please feel free to add any questions that you might have right into the chat. And as usual for the last 15 minutes of this hour we will move our conversation over to LinkedIn where you can engage with our participants directly. Simply type in hashtag JSA virtual roundtables or click on the direct link that will be posted in the chat. Stay tuned. Once we're over there we'll answer any questions that may not have been answered by the panelists while on camera. If you have any questions about upcoming roundtables, whatever it might be such as how to register or how to participate, feel free to reach out to us through our website at jsa.net. By the way, we have a reminder to mark your calendars. Our next virtual roundtable will cover taking the pulse of 2021, the state of telecommunications around the world. That one will take place January 21st at 1pm Eastern. So without further delay, let's get started. Our topic today is lessons learned from COVID-19 and predictions for the new year ahead. To introduce our speakers and to moderate, please welcome Philbert Chi, Managing Director of Structure Research. Philbert, thank you for joining us today and the floor is yours. Thanks. Good afternoon and I guess good morning to some of you who are calling from the west, calling in from the west coast. My name's Phil Chi. I'm the founder of Structure Research and I'll be guiding the discussion today. We're sorry, Structure Research is an industry research firm focused on infrastructure services, data centers, cloud edge. I will, as you can see, have three panelists joining me and we're going to quickly jump into it, but maybe we'll start clockwise and let you guys self-introduce and as well quickly tell us about your company and what you do. So we'll start with Marshall. Whoops, point to the wrong direction. Sure, I'm the president of GRS Software Services. We implement and support Oracle's NetSuite e-commerce solution. Also brings an insight today from our sister company, which GR is a spin-off of. The sister company operates the largest NetSuite e-commerce website. That business is wholesale retail and e-commerce. So we have a lot of insight. Unfortunately, we were in the sporting goods space, which actually had an uptick this year from COVID and that brought its own challenges. So I'm glad to be here. Todd? I appreciate the introduction. I'm Todd Cushing. I'm a morning race Omaha guy who had been a worker for CBRU for a number of years in the data center space. 1623 Farnham is a interconnection facility that's under construction. You can see the crane behind me where we're doing upgrades. So we've we've combated construction and COVID. So we've had two distance crews as they work and that's had its own challenges, which are it's kind of applicable. We are in the middle of the U.S. If you put crosshairs on the U.S., we're right in the middle and we're the interconnection spot that the hyperscale come through when they're traversing the U.S. Philip? Yeah. Hey, sorry for a confusion audience. Also another Philip on the call here. Philip Marangela, I'm the chief marketing officer at Edge Connects. I've been here about five years, been in the data center for about a dozen with, you know, working with the likes of Equinix. And prior to that, also in the telecom space, right? Verizon Business, Nortel and some other other providers. So, you know, hence the lack of hair and the gray beard. But in terms of Edge Connects, you know, we've been around for about 10 years, you know, building and operating data centers for some of the biggest, most demanding customers in the world, be they network service providers, content service providers, cloud service providers and the like. Currently, we have nearly 50 data centers across 35 markets, right? We started out in North America, quickly built out a kind of national footprint. From there, we went over to Europe and built a number of facilities across several markets in Europe. And most recently, have established ourselves in South America in both Buenos Aires and Chile. So, and again, it's all about our customers and giving them exactly what they want, where they want, when they want, right? And it's a kind of a simple model, but it's been successful to thus far. And having been recently acquired a few months ago, you know, we're now on to the next chapter in the company and our future growth plans. And thanks, guys. I think that, you know, in any discussion around around the pandemic environment, I think that it's pretty clear that, you know, us on this call, working in infrastructure services, working in the digital infrastructure world, we have been a sector that has, you know, been had more, probably arguably, and more tailwinds and headwinds of one of the better performing sectors and coming out of this recovery, you know, there's probably we would argue, maybe a kind of a K-shaped recovery where certain sectors are going to do better than others. Digital, obviously, squarely in the middle of the healthier segments on the kind of top of the K-shaped recovery. But let's kind of, you know, we're at the end of 2020, times kind of fitting. Let's kind of look back. I think, you know, to set the backdrop here, love to hear how your businesses have performed in this environment. You know, any interesting tidbits, you know, any things that you may have, you know, may have come as surprising or not. Maybe I'll go back to Marshall and then come to the two data center, guys. Sure. So, you know, lots of surprises. Like I said, you're right. In our space, there was a quick uptick. So you had to say, not fear of what do we do because there's no business and people can't come in. But how do we support the growing business when people that have to work remotely have never worked before? And, you know, one of the lessons I think every company should take out of it. Think of the other what ifs that could happen. We live in Houston where you hit floods. What happens if we had seen damage to the building and customer service now can't work in their data center, right? Which we had happened with COVID. We wanted them out of the building. We wanted a few people in the building as possible. So we had to quickly say, how do we get, are they going to answer the phone square emails easy? But, you know, that work should have been done ahead of time because of other potential disasters that could have taken them out of the building. So I think going in the next year, what people mean to learn is there could, a lot of things that unexpected can happen, think about it ahead of time, right? And again, there are natural disasters, just one of them. But, you know, there's that the, the equipment and training for people that don't normally work remotely. For companies that always work remotely, it was a fairly smooth transition. But if you didn't, you know, it became, it was painful to get up to speed. And I think we all know that going in the 2021, people will realize a lot more people can work remotely than we ever thought. The quick follow up, and how has your business performed in general? You said, you mentioned that early spike with transition to e-commerce. Love to hear your perspective. Well, so again, we, we, we reacted. So we, you know, again, the sister company has a pick pack and chip facility. And since e-commerce continued to operate, we said, we've got to keep this open and safe. But we had the very specific COVID requirements there of testing, taking temperatures, sanitizing, putting up partitions, going to 24-hour shifts, so there's fewer people in the building. Then the other side of it is, wait, if someone can work remotely, keep them out of the building. Keep as few people in the building as possible, few people that can bring COVID into the building. So it was a massive undertaking to shift the people out that are normally in. And I think we performed reasonably well, but again, it was in the sporting goods space where if you tried to buy, you know, anything related to exercise equipment or self-defense or anything like that, it was all backward. So you had the immediate response of, wait a minute, now we've got mortars to ship than we would in normal time. You know, how do you bring on contingent workers, get them trained? So it was interesting. I think we did fairly well. You know, again, will you learn going into it? Be prepared for the unexpected. Think about the what-ifs all the time. And run a little bit scared of what could happen, because this was a real eye-opener that things that you never predict can happen. Yeah, I think that's a great point. They call it a once-in-a-100-year pandemic, but there's certainly many other things that can happen, even in recent history with other kind of virus outbreaks. And even the economic crisis, not that long ago, 0809, just a decade ago, which also provided a push, I would argue, for the infrastructure sector. Maybe Todd and Phil, you guys love to hear what you guys are seeing. Let's start first with, you know, just the business itself. Did you, you know, data center cloud is done well through this environment? Maybe argue a little bit of dip in the first few months, but then, you know, a recovery back to normal growth trajectories. But, you know, Todd, maybe start with you and hear from your side. Sure. For us, it was, you know, the smart hands, virtual hands, clients didn't want to come on site. They needed upgrades. They needed to expand, but they didn't want to travel. So there's national, international clients, so we're trying to set that up. And then internally, we were the old ways of doing things that we couldn't change before the pandemic, those sacred things that people felt had to be that way. A lot of innovation had to happen to make it so we could do it. So we let go of inhibitions we had and found out new ways to do things that we probably wouldn't have done and maybe quit doing some things that we would have tried to cling on to because of the change in the way we had to staff and perform for our clients. And we also found that the clients need to be up. We've had several new routes come in from, specifically Chicago or Denver or other places that were dedicated and bigger. So we've had a lot of new connectivity coming to the facility to support that. But people were worried that because of their need to be electronically connected, it had to be hardened. It had to be up. So we've had a lot of new connectivity coming as a result of that. How about customer, just as a quick follow up, how about customer demand? Pretty steady. Have you seen up, you know, a lot of people, you know, more orders for cross-connects? Yeah, cross-connects are out, but we also, we own the iX. And so the iX ports, right away, we went out and looked at where we were going to buy optics. Were they from China or were they, you know, in March, we went and bought 100 gig optics. You know, all we could get our hands on. And we've had a need for hyperscalers and people that are providing content to homes to be able to have that kind of bandwidth. So that proved to be a good move. Also, we're doing construction, as I mentioned earlier. And so we right away work with Vertiv and other suppliers to make sure we got our hands on UPSs, PDUs, bus stock as quickly as possible, to make sure we could keep going. And so that was important as well. Yeah, great feedback. Philip, similar question, a little different challenge for you, you know, one major site in Omaha versus, you know, definitely when this started happening, I thought of the companies who have facilities around the, you know, basically around the world or in many different locations. You've got a lot of things tonight. Love to hear your perspective also and relate that to, you know, the challenges of handling so many different sites with relatively lean team. Right, right. So, you know, look, you know, at the end of the day, right, our homes have become the new edge, right? We're all working from home. Our kids are studying from home in many instances. Since we're stuck at home now, we're streaming and doing all kinds of other kind of gaming for sure. And then, you know, even exercising, right, between the Peloton and the Roying and all that kind of stuff, that's all creating a huge burden on the network, right? And to deliver these services and the role that the data center has been, why I think we as a collective have been so successful as an industry and kind of an outlier to stand out from an economic standpoint is because we're like this essential infrastructure to make all these things happen, to allow us to be virtual. And so you've, we've seen tremendous uplift in the number of network circuits that existing customers have. And then all obviously, you know, new network connections needing to be built out to continue to have that continuity of the user experience, right? Because you're putting this burden of all these different things, you know, drawing, you know, and all these different services, drawing the need for greater capacity and so forth. And that's where for us, having data centers at the edge that are closer to the end user has been a big benefit to a lot of service provider customers, right? And so we've seen tremendous growth, tremendous demand across the board this year, as we try to help our customers ensure that kind of continuity of their service. But how do we then do that ourselves to, you know, we're building in, in South America and Europe and so forth, you have to quickly adapt and be flexible and, you know, your crew in, in terms of trying to mitigate the potential effect of crews, one person on a crew building, you know, you have hundreds of people trying to build these large data centers, you know, so you have to get smart in terms of the shifts that you have, people become, you know, color coded on what areas they work on and they're not allowed to kind of cross pollinate. So you, you, you might have one person, you know, getting vectored or one crew, but it doesn't bring the whole operation to a halt, right? So that's key as we build as we operate, we've always, because we've built a lot of our data centers lights out. So we've built our own kind of operating system that we call Edge OS, but basically what that allows you to do is operate remotely and manage remotely, you know, and so when COVID hit and people can't get to the data center, they still, this, this system still allowed people to provision circuits and add capacity, check on their environmental and making sure everything is good and so forth. And so that's been really helpful, right? And just a fantastic benefit for our customers to be able to continue, you know, operating and staying up, you know, remotely as possible. But again, maybe I go back to you, Phil, right? I mean, you, you talk to myself, you talk to all the provider and all the cloud providers. I mean, I think you would agree that, you know, everybody's building at capacity. And this is not a kind of a spike. I honestly think a lot of the digital transformation that was happening or going to happen, this is just accelerated that, right? And people recognize they need to move to the cloud or to adopt, you know, and transform a lot of their IT infrastructure has just, you know, happening sooner, but it's not going to dip back after COVID ends by any means. Yeah, I mean, I would say that, I mean, if you look at what's happened this last year, right, you both alluded to it, Todd, Phillip, you know, the stress that you identified was, was network, right? But in terms of pure compute and storage infrastructure, I mean, there were, you know, not, not much, you know, chatter about people having any challenges, you know, this, the internet infrastructure ecosystem was built to support, you know, massive surges, as we have seen. So if anything, the capacity, yeah, you're right, I would agree that the industry has planned well, has built out capacity and has obviously built out runway into the future. You know, the, if anything, the little twist would be that in terms of the large platforms, the hyperscale platforms, they've been a little, from our tracking, they've been a bit aggressive when it comes, or maybe not aggressive, but they've been judicious and smart about grabbing onto runway, like land banks or extra options on contracts. I'll take some more capacity to support the growth that I think is probably may not expected, but I'm going to leave myself a lot of leeway so that when that next surge comes, I'll have the compute and storage infrastructure ready. Network, you know, a little different beast, but yeah, I mean, overall, I think, I think the sector has, you know, been, you know, handled the surge well and is probably even better prepared for, because this is a very dramatic event, I guess, this word, but you know, it's something that could, in another way, as Marshall said, could happen in a different shape or form in the future. So that would be my kind of perspective on it. I mean, I'd like to, so you know, on that, I mean, maybe just quickly back to you, then I'm going to go back to Todd and then back to Marshall. I wanted to follow up with you on any, you know, supply chain, you know, that Todd, sorry, yes, Todd mentioned that, but, you know, you had to manage supply chain across sites and geographies, which obviously traverse, you know, across international borders. Any, any, any interesting insights, challenges that you faced? Well, for us, I mean, we sourced some, again, the sister company from China, so early on, the supply chain stopped, right? You talk about a shock that you got to think of, but now what, so now we won't ever not think about that being a possibility. And so I think that's, that's something that's changed forever. You know, look, we have a diverse supply chain from different regions and so forth, and we had kind of stockpiled in advance. So we didn't have an issue ourselves and being able to have adequate, you know, gear and infrastructure to support our growth. But what, what I, on the supply chain concept, right? I mean, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, Philbert, like I think that, you know, what we're trying to do is fundamentally, I see it is kind of re-architect the internet, right? And, and what I mean by that provocative statement is that traditionally, it's always been download-centric, right? From core, you know, I'm sitting here at Ashburn, which is the data center mecca of the world. And from here, you know, typically providers would serve from this market and serve all these different locales. But now you have so much data, like I mentioned, all those things that we're doing at home. But we're also creating TikToks, right? We're also creating data at home and all these other applications and workloads we're using. So it's now becoming kind of multi-directional in terms of those traffic flows. This again goes back to the network is you have these bottlenecks at the edge in, you know, other markets that are tier two, tier three, tier four markets, right? And so how do you help solve for that? And I think this is how the networks in conjunction with the data centers work together to, you know, create this integrated supply chain, like this underlying infrastructure to alleviate those bottlenecks and able to handle the traffic flows in the next wave of the internet. Because it's not just the stuff now, but now you have that we're dealing with, you're going to have the internet of things, right? You're going to have telemedicine, you're going to have virtual reality. And the list goes on, right? These are all bandwidth intensive applications and workloads. And so we have to work together to have the efficient supply chain on the services that we're consuming from our home and the data that we're creating at our homes to be able to seamlessly flow back and forth. So I don't know what Todd thinks about that. I mean, he's an interesting location. He's up the confluence right in the epicenter of the US. It's north, south, east, west in every direction. It's all passing in and through his facility. But, you know, that's what, you know, together we're trying to solve for. It's an interesting scenario. So you've got Facebook has got seven million square feet no line. Google's got three facilities, you know, 1000 megawatts plus. And what we find is their partners, their business on ramp partners, want to be ramped up as quickly as possible to support the need on the edge to your model. So they're looking for that edge play to support that tier two market to try to support what we see. So we see people that are multinational global players coming in to support those hyper scale to be at the edge. But that's happening. And it's causing us to spend a lot of money and to get new certifications we didn't have before things that we needed to do prepare for to be able to support that business that we did not know was going to come. But it's been it's been very active in the amount of build out that we're seeing happen with those partners of hyper scale that want to be they don't want them in their facility, but they want to put them on their network. We are basically the carrier hotel or the interconnection facility that we've become. And that's where they want to be. They want minimum latency. Now, before we move to the next one to follow up Todd, just, you know, Philip talked about some, you know, construction processes on sites. And I think you alluded to that, but I wanted to just kind of drill in and get some insights on, you know, how would all played out this last this last year with in terms of, you know, I assume this construction going on for a while. But did you have any pauses? What kind of new processes or protocols? Did you implement pain points? Love to hear a little more. I don't know if we lost time. Did we lose time? I'm here. Oh, there we go. So I'm sorry. I thought the question was was directed at Phil. I'm sorry. I missed it. No, it's coming back to you, Todd, just to just to, you know, Phil talked about some of the insights from from, you know, product new protocols and construction processes and just wanted to get any feedback from from your experience this year. Okay, yeah, I appreciate that. So we've had two and he mentioned color coding. So we've color coded, you know, different ends of the week, different trades. We've had 92 plus people per day on site. We've had a demo team maybe have an issue. The quick testing has helped a ton with keeping people safe on the site. The trades want to know they're safe. A lot of cleaning protocol going on. So as we've gone through working on the with the vendors, we've asked, okay, so you're going to deliver on this date. How does it look for you? Where's it at? And we've had on two occasions, non critical path gear that they said was okay, not be okay. So maybe a building air handler for hallways and bathrooms turned out were, you know, they hadn't done the diligence that they thought they they said they had. So we had a little bit of a delay getting that gear in the building. So it's it's cranes, it's coordination and getting the end and keeping people safe. Has to be reworked constantly as though who's going to be in what area that used to be where it was like, you know, commissioning and schedules. Now it's where who's going to be aware, how we're going to make sure everybody feels safe. So they'll continue to want to work and be at the office or you know, be in on the construction site. Great feedback. We talked a lot about your your your businesses and the operations and how the pandemic has impacted that kind of want to flip to the end user or the customer side. Both. So, you know, I think we have a pretty diverse audience today, but wanted to maybe I'll start with you, Marshall, but want to get some insights on, you know, and or just recommendations for the customers you serve. How can they better operate and operate their businesses in in this kind of unique environment? Well, I think the important thing, Lauren, is what goes in next year because it looks like we may have it into the pandemic and site, which is if you thought you should do something this year, don't forget about it. Stay on it and do it. If you were B2B and you thought, you know, we need to have a B2C component and I can give you a real-world example of that. Don't let go of that because the transition we saw this year, like we've talked about, is just accelerating what it was the normal, you know, process anyway. Philip was right, we were all going this direction, but we're dealing with individual businesses that maybe weren't going fast enough. That's the real thing. You know, the best example is B2B companies where their dealer base or their customer base is being eliminated. We had one and we were working with its food services. One of the restaurants, you know, we're struggling, right? Well, the restaurant industry is going to change forever with, you know, with the consolidated kitchens and food deliveries. And so they said, you know, we've got a product that could be a B2C product. They can't not do it, right? It sounded like a good idea this year. It's still a good idea in 2021. So we just, you know, that's a company we want to work with and explain this is how they do B2C, right? Because they've never done it before, but they now recognize there's a business we're missing. Yeah, that's a question just came in for you. And maybe I think you may have already answered part of it, but the question from one of the audiences, how can GIR help businesses that are looking to shift to an e-commerce platform? Well, again, it's going to be different for different businesses, where they are now. So what we're seeing more of is just what I said. They're already in B2B and they want to give them B2C. And the first thing, they really, they're going to have to get a partner that understands business. And I'll say this. And so if that's something that your company is considering either getting in the e-commerce, and that's pretty scary if you're not in it at all, anyway shape or form, or if you're B2B and you want to get into B2C, or even vice versa, that you get a partner that asks you about your business first. If somebody asks you, tell us what you want us to do. And they haven't asked you about, tell us about your business, walk away. Because if you're just now getting an e-commerce, or if you've only been B2B and you want to B2C, they have a company that understands those spaces. Right? If you just go to a technology company and say, building a website, and personal experience, I did that. Yeah, don't build your website. But does that mean it's going to really do what you need to do? They got to understand business. And so that's the real focus that the companies have to have in 2021. Like I said, first thing is don't back off on it. If it seemed like a good idea this year, it probably was. Yeah. So Todd, Philip, trying to look more from the customer side now, recommendations, insights that you would, you know, advice that you would give them in terms of how they should face the current environment, how they should plan going forward. Look, I'll start. I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to suggest to my customers, given the fact how large and sophisticated they are. They run circles around me and just laugh at me. But that said, I think one of the themes we touched on earlier is centers around user experience. It's now becoming that competitive advantage in terms of having that better user experience. And by that, I mean, if you have a service and it's competing with others, that my son's a huge gamer, for example. And if his Fortnite, if it's running slow, not because I didn't get him, I don't have a gigabyte of network or whatever, but the way it's being delivered by the service provider is because it's coming from the other side of the country. That impacts his user experience for Fortnite or Destiny or whatever. I don't know what he's playing. And so that's why you want to go to the edge. You want to bring your game closer to the gamer. You want to bring your streaming service closer to the eyeballs. And that's the key, right? Don't make the customer come to you. You bring your service closer to the customer. And that user experience will create that stickiness and that happiness and the recommendations for others. And that's what we're trying to collaborate with our customers to ensure that they can deliver the best user experience. And so everybody wins in that respect. I think for us, it's the onboarding experience that's become more important that we understand the communication and who's got what to do for roles because there's a lot going on. Everything needs to click. It needs to happen. And so we're tighter and tighter or relative to the onboarding to make sure the client experience to that point is going to work right out of the gate. So it's going back later and figuring out an Arriba issue or some of their problem. Nobody wants to do that. They want to move on and keep going. So we have had to improve that process ourselves. And from a client standpoint, you know, we've also seen, it's funny from a gaming, we have seen new businesses pop up that are directly cabling from our building to condos and things, apartments downtown, all because these folks are gamers or college students that are gamers want to have that edge. So they are, you know, not getting their gig from a retail Cox guy. They're getting it at 100 gig, you know, because they're finding out what the internet wholesale folks can provide to them. And they've got an edge over their gamer friends. So we've seen a huge increase in people in just downtown Omaha wanting to be connected directly to the facility to get that wholesale speed uninterrupted edge that they're looking for. No pun intended, no pun intended, of course. Yep. Or to keep going along that over to the back to the opera, the sales and marketing side, the way you engage customers and back to how your businesses operate. You know, I know that for many of you, virtual kind of engagements are common in the nature, but just by the nature of the business you're in. But you know, what changed this year? There had to be different ways since you weren't seeing people. Obviously not getting on airplanes nearly as often. Change is best practices for engaging and doing the business of selling your business, upselling customers and continuing to raise awareness and market your businesses. Maybe start again, Marshall, we'll go clockwise again. I think, you know, for us, it was the panic and urgency. And I think all of us on the panel, there's nothing you can do to say, yeah, I'm going to have your website built and you'll be doing, you know, B2C in, you know, two weeks is, you know, how do you deal with that level of panic in some cases of I've got to change my business and keep them engaged in the process, based on what I was selling earlier, is it's still the right thing for your business, right? That doesn't mean you don't have to go back and say, what do I have to do today to survive? You know, the company that services restaurants is the best example is, you know, in the early days of the pandemic, their customers were shut down most every month. As they started opening back up, the panic subsided and they stopped focusing on the changes that they need to do. So, you know, so they've disengaged from this B2C initiative, right? So again, it's, you know, how do you communicate with them? You know, no, this is not going to happen overnight. Let's stay the course, talk it through, talk through your business today and where you wanted to go and talk through the changes that are going to happen because of the pandemic. Again, this is one example, but there's others. They make another client or the same thing. They sell, you know, Christmas ornaments and seasonal products and their customer base has gone away. A lot of their customers were in malls that were closed early on. So again, we've got to keep them focused on the long term because their business is not going to go from B2B to B2C overnight. But as things open back up and some of their businesses start placing orders, again, they lose that focus. And so that's been the real challenges that keep them focusing on the future and what's going to change even when there is a vaccine. Todd, Philip, changes in how you engage market sales? I'll start, you know, certainly from a sales standpoint, it's obviously a challenge. You know, myself, I've typically flying 150,000 to 200,000 miles a year around the world and meeting with clients and customers and prospects and all that kind of stuff. So I'm actually grateful not to have to get on a plane on the one hand. But on the other hand, you know, I think it's easy to continue the conversation with existing relationships, right? And you can kind of adapt in terms of that. It's the new ones that's hard, right? And that's where sales is leaning on me and marketing to try to help, you know, open those doors initiate, you know, where you would typically meet somebody at a conference or some other way, right? And so trying to be creative in that respect, you know, touring a data center is vital to our business. So, you know, quickly adapting and creating virtual tours so people can kind of still get a sense of what's, you know, they can't get their test drive, but they can still kind of virtually walk around and get a sense of the look and feel of the facility and what's there and available. And so you just have to kind of adapt in that regard as well and find new ways to reach new people in different ways. But like everybody, we're adapting even this format, right? You know, typically, you know, we would do conferences and panels in person and, you know, the audience you would reach were the attendees for the most part. But now, everybody's adapting and doing these, you know, video webinars and what have you. And so beyond just the people who are attending live, there's going to be many more they're going to be able to attend and watch in their own time at their own larger topics and discussions that they might not normally be exposed to. So there's pros and cons to both sides and benefits and adaptations that we're all trying to do and in fact, but that said, even with the vaccine coming, I think a lot has changed, right? We're not going to like, is it really necessary to get on that plane for eight hours when we can do it virtually and just as well, right? And so there's, like I said, there's pros, cons, there's new ways of doing things that that's open to our eyes. Do we need a huge facility anymore for our offices, right? When maybe, you know, a quarter and you can have rotations, things like that. So it'll be interesting next year and beyond to see how everything, you know, what goes back to normal or previous normal and what becomes the new normal for sure. Yeah, I mean, I live here in Toronto and I, three months ago, I didn't even bother with the 20-minute drive. We walked through your data center here on the laptop. Yeah, you were in Asper and we were here and somebody else, I think, was on the call in the US. So yeah, and that's in the same city. So and by the way, it was a great experience. Actually, Todd, I mean, do you guys do that? Yeah, and have you done that? I think you did echo the conferences that certainly paint for all of us. You know, we would have had strategy and spent a lot of time and now you still, you do have it in a different way. So and you maybe last year in March or April, Warren is good at it. And now, you know, PTC is coming and other things and JSA, I'll say it, I'll get the cookie. They're awesome. But they help us prepare and making sure that we're best before to do those kind of things. But we are adapting also to that point where clients want to see something specific. And so it's Facebook live, it's Microsoft team meetings. So a person or a bunch of people are on a phone, and you're literally walking them up to a panel. So they don't have to come see it or dispatch a tech to that risk. And it's like, you know, Bill said, you're getting on a plane, there's a risk involved with that. So do you send one person who just informed I think that's going to change people are going to look at that and say, do we do that strategically? What's the risk if something happens? We're going to look at it differently than you would have before. But I think it's those little tools that you just didn't use a year ago, you've got proficient at you've got several apps to go to now that you can interface with people one or a bunch. And I think we're all better communicators probably for it by the time we're through this. Yeah, one one quick follow up I'd have for I guess all of you, which was, you know, Phil talk, Philip mentioned that it's been more difficult. We're not that difficult, but it's been more challenging with it getting new customers right serving existing relationships, continuing conversations, we just transitioned to digital infrastructure and just kept going. Love to hear maybe I'll start with Marshall again. Any kind of any insights that you've anything different? Have you been able, you know, just in terms of your business, have you been able to to still get new business during in this environment or or like more and existing? Yeah, so again, there's two sides to it. DR side's a fairly new spinoff. I think what's changed there though was in the past, the customer engagement with again, they were more in tune with this is the direction we're going, it's more measured, they knew the plan, the people that we've talked to this year were again more in the panic mode. And that's just a very different dynamic. So there's still plenty of them out there in both sectors. But you just in, you know, JSA, you know, we rate the partnership there is to engage with more. Because we know that there's customers now that were not focused on e-commerce that are. And again, so yes, there's plenty of people to talk to, just you've got to understand what mode they're in. And I'm hoping, like I said earlier, I think now the customer that people are talking to will fall back into that camp of let's take a more measured approach and understand where we need to go. Because these are probably not as long as building a data center of any means, but these typically are long projects. They're six months projects from start to finish. And so half the people we talked to were in panic mode, and you really didn't have an answer for them. So yes, they're still out there. Todd, Philip, your customers are slightly different, probably less panic mode, longer sales cycle, but you know, kind of different dynamic, I think. Any insight? Philip, you've been going first. Let's keep you going. Well, I wasn't going to say, what I was going to say, I feel like, and Todd, you mentioned PTC, right? So making that long trip from the East Coast was always worthwhile, right? But it wasn't about the panel discussions. It's all about the networking and being able to directly interface with your customer. And, you know, Phil, you ran a great event in Toronto every year. And obviously, the content is great. And I think in these new formats, the stories that we're telling and the experiences we're sharing, they have to be of interest and relevant to keep that audience in tune, right? But the, you know, for me, always the big benefit was the networking, right? Coming up to, you know, Toronto, you know, to meet with, you know, and learn from other great executives and companies. And it's that networking thing that we lost that I, you know, that's one thing I look forward to getting back to, right? Because it's just not the same virtually, right? You just can't, a virtual drink isn't the same as a, you know, beer across the table from another guy or whoever, right? And, you know, that's, how do we overcome that? Because that's where you build the trust, right? And that's where you, you know, go beyond just talking about your business and so forth. And, you know, that's going to be interesting going forward how those things return to the normal. I think we have like a minute or two. I'll give you guys one last word, quick kind of predictions for 21 or anything else you'd like to remark on. Maybe Todd, I think you're going to, I'll start with you and then go to Mars. Sure. I think that the edge, the cloud is going to get closer to you to the end user. So that's what you're going to see happen in 2021. It's closer this year. It'll be closer next year. The edge, the cloud is going to come closer to you and be better than it was before. That's what I think is going to happen. I mean, I don't disagree. We've hammered home that theme. And, you know, as good as this year is, I'm looking forward to put it behind us, right? And just moving on. It's just, it's been a tough draining year, you know, COVID's touched my family and many others. So it's been tough and grateful in spite of that, of the success that, you know, that we've had in the industry, but definitely looking forward to getting this vaccine and, you know, moving on to 2021 and hopefully put this year behind us. Yeah, we're all going to get back to what the new normal will be. And I think again, what I look for, there will be a new normal and the business is going to embrace what's going to change, right? We want COVID to be out of the picture, but yeah, cloud services, the Oracle, that's what it product is. It's just businesses that aren't thinking about it need to. Yeah. And my final take from this call was, yeah, there are a lot of lessons learned, but those lessons should not, as things change, should be kept front and center and top of mind as, you know, as the world shifts, there is going to be a new normal. So, yeah, it's been as much as this year was not as fun. There's certainly going to be lessons learned. So with that, I'll pass back to Laura and let her take it to the next phase of this session. Thank you, panelists, and a big thank you to you as well, our guest moderator, Bill Burt Shee, Managing Director of Structure Research for keeping us on point today. Just a quick reminder, our speakers are staying on for the remainder of the lunch hour to answer any more of your questions on LinkedIn. All you have to do is search hashtag JSA virtual round tables or click the direct link in the chat box to continue the Q&A. And viewers, if you are one of our first 100 registrants, we hope to you enjoy your lunch. Make sure you visit us at jsa.net to register for more upcoming virtual round tables, including our next one and the first one for 2020, which takes place on January 21, where leaders in our industry will talk about taking the pulse of 2021, the state of telecommunications around the world. That is a wrap. Please look out for the playback of today's JSA round table coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcasts on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify, and more. In the meantime, see you over on LinkedIn. Happy networking.