 Welcome to JSA TV the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott Okutaya here at telecom exchange Los Angeles. Joining me here today my good friend Kirk Ophel he's the managing partner of overwashed mission critical or Overwatch MC. Kirk welcome to JSA TV. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And thanks also for speaking just just moments ago here at Techs. We appreciate that and all of your insight. Thank you for having me. It was such an amazing panel some very intelligent people. I just I'm always overwhelmed and humbled to be able to sit around such intelligent people and learn more about our industry. Thank you and for sure DCAC an event series that you produce another great example of just bringing in really thoughtful insightful people and brainstorming together so sort of you know partners in crime there. So Kirk I want to talk about your brand new brand Overwatch MC tell our viewers more. You got it. So we just launched a consulting group called Overwatch Mission Critical 100% owned by military veterans like myself and there's two elements of what we do. One element is the very traditional owners rep which is where we simply parachute onto programs for data center operators that have no desire to go out and hire full-time employees and hope that they are the subject matter experts they hoped they would be when they hired them or they don't want to take the risk of maybe having to downsize our labor forces projects are dynamic and they scale up and scale down. So they will use owners reps to come in take over a schedule take over a budget bring the ecosystem together to deliver a program and then when the program is done the owners rep will traditionally hand the keys over to the operators and then we we pull back out and then we wait for another program to come along. That's one element of what we do and that's very tactical and very traditional. The other element of what we do is is what we consider to be more strategic. It's such an exciting time to be in our industry. There's a ton of infrastructure asset groups and financial capital partners that are entering the market for the first time. Sometimes they don't know what they don't know. They don't know who's who in the zoo is what we say. So we try to strategically help them either create a unique marketing plan to enter the market or sometimes we just help them simply troubleshoot an existing one that aligns more with their revenue goals. And when we do that we help them with a lot of their messaging and marketing that allows them to pivot as a business so we can help them position the way they're perceived in the market. Yeah brilliant and so much needed in our industry for sure expertise and strategy brought in on on consultancy basis perfect perfect. So what type of organizations are among those target markets for you? Yeah it's a fair question and obviously you're a brand new startup company so the answer is all of them. But the reality is is there's certain folks that are moving at a high speed and a high volume and they simply don't have the bandwidth to keep up and nor do they want to go out and become data center construction teams. So they'll they'll just expand with consultants and those groups that are deploying the largest volume of capital or the people that in spot of ourselves we spend time in front of because they just simply need more bandwidth more cycles and more resources. So that's the very sophisticated teams where their procurement teams are armed to the teeth and know exactly what they need and how they need it. The other client is on the other side of that spectrum which is the ones are the new developers that are in the market for the first time and they don't know what they don't know and they just simply need someone to help them discover what are the benefits or the capabilities limitations of a market or a product and we help them understand how to leverage the rest of the ecosystem by creating a very unique marketing strategy for them. So those two clients can include all the publicly traded mission critical REITs the hyper scale what we refer to as the G1K or the Global Fortune 1000. There's a lot of regional players that just build data centers in certain pockets to the United States. Those ones are people that we would love to roll up our sleeves and work with. But again we're seeing such a large group of people entering the space for the first time and those people seem to be the ones that find the most value immediately and having someone guide them through the process to get in the industry. And boy does your resume bring true to these new entrance folks as well as others. Your resume is very respectable many, many years in our data center industry. So with your point of view what are some of the major challenges facing the data center industry today? Another great question. So I was just recently at a data center conference and one of the topics was the existential threat to our industry in the shortage or the pending shortage of talent. And I got to tell you I agree with that whole hardly. There are a lot of people that could create impactful technology and we as the consumer are waiting for that the adoption rate is here. We want it. The pent up demand is already existing. What is limiting the ability to unleash that technology to us as the consumer is a labor force sophisticated enough to be able to build data centers at the velocity and volume that the industry is demanding. I think that what we need in infrastructure nations is a great job of focusing on education. I think that with my background what I'm trying to do and what I'm going to be excited to announce the next month is a unique partner strategy where we're leveraging the veteran community. There's a lot of people that are coming out of the military that have tremendous talent. They've been pressure tested. They have a unique skill set and culturally they're a good fit for our industry. I had no doubt that they could bring the same level of commitment and duty to our industry as they did in serving our country. So we're going to try to harvest them and I think that's the greatest threat is finding that talent. One of the initiatives that we have in addition to helping clients unleash technology that will hopefully change the world is we want to help veterans transition into our industry. So that's another part of our mission. I come from a family along lineage of military. Every man in my lineage is military so we do everything we can. We were born and raised to serve so selflessly we want to grab those people coming out of the military and help them transition into our vertical of industry. Looking to the future. How prepared is the data center industry? Especially when we're talking about supporting the capacity demands that are anticipated with this rise of data traffic and wider adoption of next gen tech just seemed like this this bandwidth tsunami is coming at us. How do we prepare? That's fair. So conferences like these are helping. Right. So what you have is you have a fragmented group of subject matter experts. I just sat on stage with infrastructure studs that can go high wide and deep on connectivity and fiber and dark fiber and pain within. There was a cloud guy there that has forgotten more than all of our know about cloud. That being said is I'm a space power and cooling guy. I focus on MEP and dealing on how to get power from the grid to two whips that go into a client's rack. We have to have dialogue between all of our little elements so that we can bring these challenges together because you can't get ahead if you can't get even right. So for us we need to have more dialogue. We need to have a greater exchange of these ideas that we could bring these together because we all are so focused on our own specialty within our vertical of industry. But we're not overlapping each other. We're not leveraging each other and we're not working in parallel with each other. So these events, these conferences and conferences like this one are helping bring these conversations together. This is the first time I've attended this conference and I'll have to come again because I think that there's people here that are dealing things in this industry that have a direct impact on me and they don't even know it and I would imagine that I'm doing things in this industry that has a ripple effect on them too and although we share the same objective we don't talk about it. So we're kind of in some ways working against each other. Does that make sense? It totally does. It totally does and I'm really excited to see more events that have been coming up like DCAC, like Nathan's events. Really I feel like there's there's even more of these types of really brainstorming type of safe spaces where we can all through our respective perspectives and up and down the other side of the stack we can really come together and share and hopefully make an impact together. So I am so honored that you are here. Thank you so much and thank you for serving our country. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.