 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell. Joining me today is Hugh Kelly, VP Marketing for Volta Networks. Hugh, thanks so much for joining us. Well, it's great to be here. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. So why don't we start by just, if you wouldn't mind, for any of our viewers who may not know. Can you tell us a little bit about Volta Networks? Sure. So Volta is the first cloud-based routing control plane for the industry. So it probably is worth unpacking that a little bit. So routers traditionally have been what we call appliances, right? You buy a router from Cisco, it comes with the hardware and the software, everything is complete, but you also have no choice. What we're seeing now is a movement towards open networking or routers becoming disaggregated, right, where you can choose the hardware and the software separately. And that's particularly important for service providers who are looking for very specific features and functions and generally a pretty aggressive price points. And so that's important because this allows them to do a lot more innovation and meet their financial needs and it's open. So they can mix and match solutions. That's a, I think a general trend in the industry. And so having a cloud-based control plane means that the routing protocols, BGP, OSPF, ISIS, and protocols like MPLS, all that processing is done in the cloud. And I think it's everybody in the audience would know the cloud is generally the least expensive place to do something that requires a lot of processing. I can guarantee you it's not on a router. And so if you need to be able to scale up your routing because you need many virtual routers and virtualization is clearly a trend in the industry, running all that processing in the cloud is far and away the least expensive, most scalable, and the easiest to manage of any of the potential solutions out there. So we're coming together today virtually, but I think it's a great opportunity for you to share some, maybe of your latest updates. Is there anything you want the audience to know right now that you're announcing? Well, yeah. So we just announced our participation in a new open forum, the Telecom Infra project, which is a consortium of service providers, Facebook is involved, and lots of vendors, ourselves included in many of our competitors. We are a software vendor for the Disaggregated Cell Site Gateway project that's going right now, so connecting all the new 5G cell sites. I would just announce support for their Disaggregated Open Routing Initiative. So you can tell from the terms, the Telecom customers are clearly embracing both Disaggregated Approaches as well as Open Approaches to their routing. So we're really excited to be part of that because it's our customers telling us exactly what they want. And so that's a great thing for any software vendor. We have that kind of clarity from our customers. It's giving you a lot of great insights potentially into the future as well, which I'd love to hear from you on. So when you look to the year, years really ahead, what do you see? And what does that look like for you? Well, I think a couple of things. One, we can't underestimate what a great job most of the service providers have done in responding to the COVID epidemic, right? Their networks changed almost overnight, very dramatically. And a lot of them had pointed to the fact that they have done a lot of virtualization in their network. So they were able to be much more responsive to their customers' needs and the changes in their traffic pattern. So one of the takeaways that we have is that virtualization has just demonstrated its value enormously. Customers are also continuing their investment in 5G, right? They recognize that 5G is their future and it's tied into so many new services, Internet of Things, much more bandwidth available, being able to eventually connect cars, deliver much more bandwidth at the edge of the network. And so the projects that we're working with is really exciting to see the service providers continue to move forward. I think we feel fortunate as a software provider that we don't really have to worry too much about hardware and labs and so we're able to actually keep working with our customers even with all the lockdowns and restrictions that have kind of come about because of COVID. This is also interesting and I feel like we're just scratching the surface here. I mean, I think that our viewers are most likely going to want to hear more. How can they connect with you? Where can they go to find more information? Sure. So everything is available through our website which is voltanet.io. On there we've got a lot of white papers, some application notes, and actually a whole series of videos of the webinars that we've done with some of the leading analysts like IHS, Omnia, and Light Reading over the last year. So there's been some great discussion there that not just our thoughts on it but also some of the other vendors and leading analysts. So there's a lot of great resources on the website. Great. So yeah, no shortage of information. People can connect with you and find out more on your website at voltanet.io. Hugh, thank you so much. Thanks for joining us today. We really look forward to hearing more from you down the road. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.