 This is JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data centers professionals. I'm Dean Perine, EVP at JSA, coming to you from ITW 2020, the virtual ITW. Joining me today is Mr. Mike Collins. Mike is the Vice President of Marketing at Connected to Fiber. Connected to Fiber provides a location engagement platform for network buyers and sellers that uses detailed location intelligence to provide insights and automate processes around deal participation, account targeting, and product pricing. Mike, welcome as always to JSA TV. Great to be here, Dean. Thanks for inviting me. You got it. So Mike, you recently announced some significant news regarding channel sales transformation. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. Good question. So we had recently announced at ITW the launch of our serviceability portal. So essentially what that is, it's the capability for our network provider customers to selectively advertise their serviceable location information to essentially their channel community. And from an end user perspective, essentially what they'd be able to do is search a particular provider has location, serviceability at a certain location, understand the products available at that location, and even the pricing for the end user at that location. So really this type of capability enables a lot of our customers to be considered in more deals within the market. And there's an interesting also kind of additional effect of that is within our platform, the connected world, users, our network provider customers will be able to gain insight into all of the locations that were kind of queried in their instance. So they'll be able to use the information for future pricing decisions, right? If they're getting a lot of queries for a particular location, sending out prices, but not getting the orders possibly need to lower price. And they'll also be able to use that information for building decisions. Are there certain locations and close proximity to their network that a lot of their channel community is requesting, but they're not building too. So that should also be a good capability that our customers can have for future revenue growth. Outstanding. So Mike, let's keep on the customer tip there. Let's keep going. A lot of competitors, a lot of industry players have been relatively silent over the last few months. You guys really have it. There's been a lot of activity on the partner and the customer side really since the beginning, the end of last year, the beginning of this year. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So we've had quite a few customer announcements. We've done some joint announcements already this year with companies like Unity, IFN, Aluvion, BeyondReach. We have a lot more to come on that dimension as well, which is very exciting. A lot of customers are doing this for transforming their go-to-market operations. And we'll be soon kind of announcing more of our kind of technology partnerships within the space to help customers kind of integrate connected world more effectively into their operations, which is great. I think a lot of what we've been talking about really kind of plays into our ecosystem, kind of ethos. So certainly our ultimate objective as a company is to help our network provider customers digitally transform their operations to quickly and sustainably achieve revenue growth. And a lot of what we build ultimately comes from a place of having deep location insights being able to understand for any commercial location in the world, here are the networks that are servicing that location, the tenants within that location, and then help take that information and make better decisions from kind of planning to pricing. There's a particular kind of heritage and history we have around the wholesale world, kind of a partnership oriented phase of the market, which allows customers to more collaboratively engage with each other for the sake of winning deals. We think that's fairly unique within the connectivity space because no provider can service every location. So we really kind of invested heavily in those types of approaches, that type of ecosystem approach, the serviceability portals, a piece of that. But a lot of our customer announcements recently have been around how do these network sellers identify serviceable locations within their footprint and then communicate with their partners to participate in deals. And we've had certainly in the past, a lot of network buyers that have used us to help identify partnerships, to help manage those partnerships and serviceable locations within our platform, ultimately do the same thing to participate in deals. So I really think that a lot of these announcements as well have kind of been driven back to this type of ecosystem ethos we have as a company. Yeah, no, I mean, that's exactly what it sounds like. It sounds like you're building a substantial ecosystem. Let's talk about that just a little bit more. So as far as your ecosystem of network buyers and sellers, there are trends that are kind of driving that buying and selling. And you guys are facilitating that ecosystem and frankly making it easier for them, much easier for them. But what are some of the trends that ultimately are impacting that ecosystem? Sure, yeah, so if you come to mind, certainly I would say that there's still natural kind of competitiveness within the connectivity market. A lot of our customers are coming to us just figuring out, how do I monetize the existing network routes I've already built, right? Certainly they have not monetized every location, every mall, school, et cetera, kind of along their routes. So they come to us for that. We still think that's gonna continue that natural growth, as well as naturally figuring out how to expand. Folks are still interested in understanding how do we build new routes? Where do we build new routes? What routes that we ultimately are considering, what are the optimal paths that we take to build those? So that's certainly a trend that natural competitiveness is gonna continue. What we hear a lot about as well is stuff that many industry players are talking about, 5G, SD-WAN, folks in our ecosystem are figuring out how to capture revenue opportunities associated with servicing those trends, right? Identifying where small sales are from an SD-WAN perspective, being able to help those enterprises convert to this network-driven, software-driven network, and be able to do that effectively by particularly identifying them by partners to work with for that particular location. The final thing I'd say would be more around what's recently occurred with our pandemic that's been going on in the world. Certainly, I think a lot of customers are trying to figure out ways to adapt kind of a post-COVID-19 world. So a lot of that, we're hearing from our customers is, how do I engage customers? How do I engage prospects? How do I engage partners? Kind of more effectively in the digital sphere when I can't rely on meeting them at events or going out and physically prospecting. So that's certainly an element of that. In addition to saying, how do I craft a new strategy for servicing enterprises where not all their employees are going to the office anymore, right? There's gonna be some residential needs from a connectivity perspective as folks kind of continue to work from home. So what we're seeing and what I believe our customers are gonna see is a continuation of kind of the natural kind of dynamics within the market, as well as things like F5, GSD, WAN, and being able to service customers and sites as those trends continue to emerge. And then obviously, how do we figure out how to adapt to this world after kind of COVID-19? Yeah, well, it sounds like you've got your hands full over there. It's a fiber height. That's right. That's right. So for our viewers that wanna learn more, where should they go? Sure, yeah. So the easiest way to learn more about us is head to our website, www.connectedtofiber.com, or we're pretty active on LinkedIn. If you just search Connected to Fiber as a company on LinkedIn, you should be able to kind of keep up to date with the latest going on. Excellent, Mike. Thank you very much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV and listening to JSA Podcast. We'll see you soon.