 Hi everyone and welcome to JSA TV live the live streaming newsroom for telecom and data center professionals I'm Barb Mitchell joining you here today Along with my guest Mike Jonas CEO at light River Mike always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you see you Yeah, normally we were saying normally we see each other in person this time It's virtual but nonetheless nice to catch up and and obviously we've we've chatted a lot over over the years and We know here at JSA about light River But I want to give our viewers just a little chance to I assume most of them have heard from you by now But just in case there are a few that don't if you wouldn't mind just giving us a little bit of background on light River and and Also just some of the exciting things that have been happening as of late Well for sure. Well light River actually just celebrated its 25th anniversary So 1998 to to current and we've been doing pretty much the same thing the whole time designing deploying Automating and supporting carry grade optical networks and and our customers are in the telco space Cloud and data center and regulated utilities. So it's a great bunch of folks to work with and it's Continues to be fun challenging and rewarding. So we keep doing that and from an excitement point of view most of our excitement typically revolves around our customer success or the success of our teammates or Maybe some technology news and I'm not sure if it quite crosses the threshold of of excitement But my change to CEO is recently been announced and My commitments to our customers and people hasn't been stronger. So With that focus on helping them to succeed. That's at least exciting to me if not to the rest of the world Yeah, and on that note I mean You've been in a you know a leadership role for a long time. You've been at light River for you know two decades I think it's spanned couple decades anyway, and and you've been in the role of president What's what's new in this new CEO role for you? What excites you about it? What's kind of on the horizon for you as you take the the reins in this way? Yeah, you bet and that kind of referenced it I mean our people are our superpower and they happen and so in this role I have more and in better ways to help them to help themselves and And our customers and our partners and that's fun rewarding and exciting to me I mean we built our brand on getting our customers promoted and not fired and With the support of our equity partners that grain management. We're able now to expand the ways means in Places we can help our clients grow and all of that's going to be great for the people inside and outside the company Yeah, and I know I mean you've talked about the the team and I mean as you said there's been so many great things done Over the years At light River and your predecessor Glen Johansson has had put a lot in motion And so can you talk about that in terms of what you're building upon from? You know what's been worked on to date and what you see the future to be Yeah, I know it's great question the you know the foundation of light River has been built on trust and engineering which is a pretty rock-solid platform to launch from and Obviously, we all live in a world today where the shortage of skilled technical workers is real and And getting worse in every market where we participate and we've been routinely asked to recommend innovative options for plaque practical network automation for network operations and services support in addition to our historical support for design deploy and automate and in that is Something that we're going to answer the call on I mean you're seeing greater investments and in SAS based network operations and monitoring along with Network services options that continue after we've delivered a network That's what our customers believe is going to help them to grow faster And that's an extension of the white glove service we've always provided that you'll see much more from light River in the marketplace and You'll additionally see an increased collaboration with our sister companies in the grain portfolio especially as it relates to broadband obviously much in the news and That will become a greater focus for us and then you'll see more expansion for us in international network delivery as well So I'm curious. I mean you talk a lot about The demands of your customers and how you're meeting those needs I'm curious as you sort of look ahead what trends you're seeing that even now And and into the future are are driving some of those demands So driving the demand at the base level is just the explosion of bandwidth being consumed by everybody So that is that is the basic premise How do you solve that problem? Well the move from Legacy optical to MPLS is underway in every sector and is accelerating not lessening and The value of white glove technical support in that area is highly valid value, especially post COVID but what other Solutions are we seeing to the problem? We've seen a huge shift to open and disaggregated networking Basically a mix and match of line systems transponder switches routers 400 cr plugs from any vendor Which ever is available and best suited to the business case coming on to the market and becoming real and usable and beneficial and With that multi-vendor multi-domain network Our customers need automation to match and support to Take full advantage of that automation And that's even for us now being followed in the near term by production ready features coming out of AI for certain applications And I guess the other thing we're seeing a lot more of is because of the shortage of skilled workers a lot more Benefits being recognized from the ecosystem as to collaboration and everything as a service world No one can do everything themselves not live river not our customers not our vendors and many I think the ones who are evolving most quickly stop trying to do so and Joint contributions that are built on trust and innovation and service can move mountains and that will help us You know meet the bell as it comes to what? Can seem to be an insurmountable increase in bandwidth Yeah, I mean so Mike your plate was already full. I feel like it's It's more so now But I wanted to personally say congratulations to you and to the whole Lake River team for the steps forward here Congratulations on your your new role In addition to the the role that you've already been playing there So we look forward to hearing more from you. Hopefully we'll see you again soon We tend to see each other. We do from time to time And I know there's another another series of events happening in the fall. So probably we'll see you out and about But for our viewers who may want to you know, maybe see you at one of those events or or to catch up with you online How can they do that? Well, there are multiple events where you can meet light river certainly the the upcoming events that fiber Connect next week. We'll be adding compass will be at Nanog There's any number of events where our customers asked for our support will be there But at any time late river comm is a great place to get a bit more familiar with us and the team that supports Support you all and then our LinkedIn page is also usually pretty helpful in that. Yeah, Mike Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to catch up again. Congratulations We'll be talking to you again soon and to our viewers. Hopefully we'll be seeing you again soon Keep tuning in to JSA TV live and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter so you can stay on top of the latest industry news and events and Here are all the great things that are happening in our industry Have a great day everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day Mike. Enjoy the rest of your day We'll see you all again soon. Thanks Barb. Thanks everyone