 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scott-Okutaya here at JSA and coming to you from virtual PTC 2021. Joining me today, my good friend, Ben Edmond, he's the CEO of Connected to Fiber. Ben, welcome to JSA TV again. Thank you very much for having me, Jamie. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak today. It's always a pleasure and happy new year, my friend. So much has gone on since the last time we chatted. Yeah, I wish we were at the beach in Hawaii, but we'll be there virtually. We shall, we shall. And for our viewers who may not already know, they're just catching up. Tell us a little bit about Connected to Fiber. What do you do? Who do you serve? Absolutely. So Connected to Fiber is a industry cloud built specifically for the connectivity market. We help service providers identify, prioritize, and search their total addressable market and have activated a seller's cloud and a buyer's cloud to help transform how companies sell connectivity and how companies buy connectivity. Our customer base is entirely made up of the service provider community that's present here at the PTC event this year. For sure, for sure. And of course, 2020, you guys had a heck of a lot of news coming out of your newsroom. What is the latest coming out of the Connected to Fiber newsroom today? We had some exciting announcements, most recently, a press release that we issued with our partnership for Newstar, which is an exciting move for tying the automation that we create around pricing inside the connected world with the automation that they brought for many years to the market on order management processes across the ecosystem, and bringing those two worlds together in a directly connected API flow for end-to-end automation. Super exciting and something we're really proud of. Awesome. Yeah, Newstar, US Signal, there's just so many logos that you guys have been making news waves with. And as per my Connected to Fiber team's usual way to market. Now, of course, having the CEO in the hot seat, I do love to just give a moment for predictions. Any thoughts or predictions around industry trends coming up here in 2021 specific to your niche? Absolutely. Great question, Jamie. I think there's three things that stand out to me. First and foremost is the year of the edge. The edge is a real thing that's happening now. I think people are wrapping their heads around that thought process and realizing it's not just the physical reality of where to place data centers and put the content and the applications closer to the users. There's also a fundamental change in network that is happening. You can't use edge locations as aggregation points to bring everything back still to Ashburn. That the peering fabric to connect those applications at the edge or the content at the edge to the users in the mobile community or on broadband applications. That peering fabric has to exist locally in the edge as well. And that's a big radical change. But it changed. It's really important for next generation 5G applications we haven't even seen yet. The second trend would be centered around the role of the MSP and who's becoming an MSP as the cloud has won the IT war. The recognition that network is the primary delivery for cloud services. And the cloud services don't work without connectivity. It has put the managed service provider in a great position to attack the revenue opportunity and uniquely position connectivity to help win that cloud services revenue with enterprise customers. I think the third trend is digital transformation overall. It's a big buzzword. From our perspective, it's about automating and creating a customer experience that differentiates and allows the connectivity industry to grab more value, participate fully, and really create these sticky relationships that generate fantastic returns for the providers themselves. And we're helping do that. We're helping the providers transform their up-for-and-go to market processes completely. Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing it here too. I think for better or for worse, the pandemic has really fast-tracked this digital transformation for many businesses and residents. So really incredible predictions there. I'm very much a fan. And from a connected to fiber perspective in 2021, what can our viewers expect to see from your company? You're gonna see a lot. We've been busy over the last five years since the existence of connected to fiber, growing faster than 98% of all SaaS companies and existence in something we're really proud of. I think from a 2021 perspective, you're gonna see significantly more growth as we expand geographically, as we expand the use cases to support the service provider community that we care so much about. I think introduction of new capabilities around concepts like bid management, where we're not just automating transactional success, but really helping systematically attack major transformation projects or large awards and keeping the ecosystem communicating with intelligence. I think we'll see a move to service ability checks to real-time inventory in 2021, which will be a big milestone for the industry as we mitigate fallout and really help get people to align network services with the reality of cloud where you can click a button and get an instant response. I love that. It is certainly a growth story, one that we're proud to report on and tell our viewers who might be listening. And of course they wanna go ahead and learn more about connected to fiber. Where can they go? Absolutely. So welcome you to come out to our website, connectedtofiber.com that is to the digit two, fiber.com or go to LinkedIn. Our company profile has the latest and greatest on a daily basis. And we appreciate the opportunity to tell our story. There you go, connectedtofiber.com. And by the way, great new website. We love the new look. I love it too. So thank you for that. So then as always, we appreciate your time and insight, some great predictions there. And we look forward to more news ahead from connected to fiber. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast. As always, happy networking.