 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scato-Cutaya of JSA, and here at ITW28 in Chicago is my friend, Mr. Todd Coleman, the CEO and president of eStructure. Todd, welcome again to JSA TV. Jamie, thanks for having me. And every time you're on, it's like new fireworks, you're on a streak, my friend. You are tearing it up. We have big news, of course, hitting the wires. We're expanding further into Canada, Western Canada this time, after successfully building out three other data center locations in Montreal. So tell us more. Well, we're pretty excited. Obviously, we started this business with the full expectation that we're going to become a Pan-Canadian data center provider. We spent the first sort of 12, 13 months of existence in Montreal building that out. We're super excited that we identified really a niche data center operator called Backbone Data Vault in Vancouver, really right in the heart of the film, the VFX studios in Mount Pleasant right off the downtown, fits well with our target segmentation, a very, it's a small 10,000 square foot data center, but focused on super high density. Their average deployments are 20 to 30 kilowatts a cabinet, fits right in with our current niche of going after that market segment. But more importantly, it gives us a West Coast presence. And just like we did in Montreal, we have full expectations of not just operating this, but using that as our hub within Vancouver and spreading our wigs from there and building something more significant within the market. So I'm hearing acquisition is sort of the key strategy. Is that something you're planning on delivering, short-term, long-term? Yeah, well, so funny enough, we run an acquisition funnel like most people run a sales funnel. That's not our only strategy. I mean, we have pretty significant organic growth plans, but I do like entering a market where we can go buy an existing customer base and an existing team because look, we're big believers in localizing our touch, whether that's salespeople, customer service, engineering, et cetera. And so, you know, we wrap our model around it from an ops and engineering perspective, but we rely on the local people really to run that market and have intimate detail of the customer base. And so we like that model. You should expect that we'll do more acquisitions, but every time we do an acquisition, we usually expect to write a fairly significant capital expansion check on the back of that. Now you're obviously one of the leading thought leaders in the data center field. You're on the speaking circuit. And I heard this question posed to you at the Capri event in Vancouver a few weeks back and I thought this was a good one and perhaps I could get further insight from you. But can you tell us the difference that you're noticing? You know, again, former CEO, of course the founder of Collogix, you've been in the industry for so long. But what is the difference that you're seeing between the Canadian and the US marketplaces? What's driving all this bandwidth? Is it OTT? Are the US players factoring into the Canadian marketplace at all? Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, the Canadian markets changed quite a bit. I mean, one of the reasons why we look at Canada and Canada is not indifferent from Europe where you can kind of follow the trends of the US market and then add another 12 to 15 months and you probably see that play out in Canada. Some of those trends aren't exactly hitting. In fact, they're ahead of the curve in some respects. But look, I think for the most part the large hyperscale folks have awoken to the benefits of going into Canada. You got great climate in some of the places, Quebec in particular. You have the lowest cost of power in all of North America. I think historically, if you would have rewound five or six years ago, we had kind of an immature data center market. And not only did we have an immature data center market, but we had operators that had a lack of capital intensity and capability. And so while we've seen that market evolve through a couple of different trends and we've seen it mature, but there's still not a lot of operators that have the balance sheet to go take this on and become a prominent player in the Canadian market unless you're a telco. And that's where we found our niche, which is looking at Canada and saying, hey, with the balance sheet, with the operational expertise, with the right people and the right customer touch, we can become a significant player of Canada. So what are those trends? I mean, look, I think there's a couple of things that are helping. Certainly the hyperscale cloud providers waking up to the benefits of Canada. Along with that, we've seen Canada at the forefront of data sovereignty. So in Europe, we used to call it data protection. Now we call it data sovereignty. But certain types of data, certain personal information, financial information, medical information, the countries are requiring that to be housed and stored within the country in which it's being accessed from a control perspective, Canada being at the forefront. So we're seeing more and more data migrate north. That's on top of a trend that's been going on for 10 or 12 years, which is the localization of data. In other words, the telcos don't want to backhaul the data from one large market to another large market in order to get to the end user. And they're concerned about the cost of traveling a bit across the network. And then obviously the latency involved. So those are important attributes. And then finally, I think with the economic situation going on in Canada, funny enough, we used to talk about some of the political instability in Canada. Funny enough, we don't talk about that anymore. So we talk about political instability in the US. We talk about things like the Patriot Act. Those are factors. And then finally, the strength of the US dollar against the Canadian dollars is playing out pretty significantly. If you're a US dollar backed company, Canada's on sale 25% to 30% off. What a great time to plant your data and your server capacity in Canada. It's certainly been attractive for our model. Of course, we expanded into Canada two years ago and leading the charge with our e-structure partnership. We're happy to be partnered with you. Loving it. And how is e-structure positioning itself with this deployment and barrage, if you will, of 5G and IoT deployments coming up in the... And as well as cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Like there's so much going on these days that are really stressing traditional data center models. Yeah, I think it's stressing the thinking of the traditional data center model because it is no longer a one-size-fits-all. Oh, by the way, we built out a tier three data center. So you come fit into our model. We're finding more and more that you have to be on the cusp of understanding what those applications are, the hardware that they're using, the intensity, the power requirements, cooling requirements, and they're all unique. And so if you sit back and say, you know what, they're going to fit into my model and it's only my model and it's one-size-fits-all, then that's great. But you're probably going to get left by the wayside. You know, we're big believers in having to understand where the trends are and whether or not we think that trend is a temporary trend or we think that trend's a long-term trend. So, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say, for example, on blockchain. Is blockchain going to be here tomorrow? Well, blockchain is a type of cryptocurrency. I don't have a crystal ball in terms of the cryptocurrency side. But is blockchain as an application, as a platform, going to be here long-term? Absolutely believe in that. And I think that's challenging traditional data center infrastructure and how we deliver it. What kind of redundancy do they want? What kind of power architecture, cooling architecture? IoT devices, no different. You know, Montreal in particular and other parts of Canada have been hit by AI craze. And so the large content providers are figuring out that, hey, Canada's also known for something else, known for AI. And so they've started driving partnerships with the University of Montreal and other universities across the country. And so those are all things that require us to take a step back and say, let's understand that application. And what are its needs? And what are its drivers? And how does it grow? And then architect a solution around that. So we're on the cusp of trying to understand how do we sort of customize and remain flexible in our approach? Because it's definitely no longer a one-size-fits-all environment that it might have been five or six years ago. So that was five, six years ago. This is today. What do you see in five to six years from now? That's a great question. I wish I knew. But look, I think a couple of things. Canada is going to continue to explode, I hope so, because we're making a significant bet there. We're seeing continued market consolidation. Hopefully we're at the front end of that. So we're going to take it kicking and screaming if we have to. But look, there's more and more investment. If you believe in all of the statistics around data proliferation, and you think about today a red stat, less than 1% of the total data created sits in the data center. So it's not about whether or not we're going to go take 20%, 30%, 40%. It's just, can we get another 1% and then you know that we need more data centers? And we need more throughput. And we need more power. So I think those trends continue. There's a lot of other factors that aren't within our control. What do the financial markets do? What does the currency do? What's the political climate? Those things are outside of our control. But what we do know is the more data we create, the more data we want. And I think that trend plays out really well for data centers. It's always so amazing to talk to you, Todd. You opened my mind. And I really appreciate all of your thought leadership, not just here on JSA TV, but to our industry. Absolutely catch him out on Telecom Exchange. He is coming to us in June in New York City. So he will be another distinguished speaker at Telecom Exchange. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV. Happy networking.