 Welcome to JSATV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine coming to you live from Metro Connect 2023 in the beautiful Fort Lauderdale, not Miami, in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Venice of North America, I'm told it is. I'm here with my new friend, Mr. Luke Kipfer. Luke is the Vice President of Data Center Development and Construction at Powerhouse Data Centers. Luke, welcome to JSATV. Hey, thanks to be here. I love talking powerhouse and I love talking data centers, and you guys are always willing to listen. So I'm glad to be here. Outstanding. Well, that's what we're going to do right now. So Luke, for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell us a little bit about powerhouse data and how you can do what you need? Yes. So to talk about powerhouse data centers, powerhouse is a division of American real estate partners, AREP. It's their data center technical division. So AREP has been a developer across the east coast for over 20 years, over 20 billion acquisitions, 200 million square feet. So long history developing real estate assets in the Northeast across the country in both good and bad economic times. So in 2020, 2021 really started acquiring some key strategic landsites throughout Northern Virginia. That year we officially launched the powerhouse brand. So now we've got over 600 megawatts of deployment of data center within development and construction right now. Very good. So let's go ahead and talk about that development. I understand that you are planning to build six data centers in Northern Virginia in the heart of data center alley, as we like to call it, as you very well know. What can you tell us a little bit about the progress of those six buildings there in Northern Virginia? Yeah, so we've got ABX1, that's right on the corner of Bohmian Circle, that was our first property acquisition. That's going vertical now. We actually have the topping off ceremony next month. We've got that building delivery in October of this year. So we're really excited that that's in a key strategic location. And that's really our first building to go to the market. We've got our powerhouse specific site, which is the old AOL World Headquarters. So we've got a re-envelopment of that site and planning now. That's going to be three building, 265 megawatt. I'm a real hyperscale campus there. And then we've got a site in Arcola across from the Google data center. We're 120 megawatt, two building campus that we're designing there as well too. Very good. So you're segwaying better than I could ever segway myself. So let's talk a little bit about that Arcola project. What can you tell our viewers about that one specifically? You know, that's a great one. It's a key location. We've got an onsite substation from Dominion being planted right now. Right across the Google, that Arcola stock market, South Vashburn is really picking up in terms of development. And it's a great site that's entitled, ready to go, with power, well, I have first delivery in early 26. So that's really one of the key sites that's really going to help out an end user. I love it. So now for something a little bit more fun. I understand that you are partnering with 7x24 Data Center chapter for a 5K race. Probably not something that I myself would be doing. But why don't you tell us a little bit about the 5K and what that's all about? Yeah. We're hosting it in our Power Out specific site. So right in the center of Data Center LA, it's 7x24. It's a DC chapter. They're local chapter that we're partnering with. They've got some amazing folks over there that are doing all the planning and coordination for the race. We're doing the easy part. We're just providing a place for them to host it. But we're very excited that I live right in Ashburn. I live right down the road. Very active in the data center community and also in our local Northern Virginia community as well. So love to do events like this where the public can come. They can learn about data centers. We've got a job fair going on. There's food trucks. And if you love running around big concrete buildings, I mean, that's a place to be. I imagine hanging out at big concrete buildings, fine, running around them. Probably not my thing, but I get it. But Luke, one of the things that I am absolutely sure that we are going to be discussing at length over 2023 and well beyond that is sustainability. So why don't you tell us a little bit about any sustainability efforts that you folks might have going on over there at Powerhouse data centers? So recently we just joined the I-Mason's Climate Accord, which is something, I've been an I-Mason's member and sustainability has always been one of their four key pillars. But when they launched the Climate Accord, that was a great opportunity for us to be able to coordinate with the rest of the industry on what they're doing in standards. So everyone's got their own metrics. Everyone's tracking different things. So it's very challenging as an industry for us to figure out. We don't know if we're getting better if we don't know where we're at. So the Climate Accord really puts everyone on the same page and the other thing it does is it brings the hyper-scalage in the conversation. So they've done a very good job of getting those key customers, those key users in the market that are really driving the demand and driving the change of technology in the marketplace. So we've got a forum where we can work directly with them to understand what kind of product we're looking for and how we can help them in their sustainability goals as well. I love it. So let's talk more about sustainability maybe at the next show that I see you at. Sound good? Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. All right. Well, Luke, if the first interview at Metro Connect 2023 is a litmus test for the rest of the day, I think things are gonna go just fine for us today. So thank you for being here today. We appreciate it. Absolutely. You bet. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon. Welcome to JSA TV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine coming to you live from beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida at Metro Connect 2023. And I am joined right now with my good long-time friend, Mr. Philip Marangela. Philip is the CEO and product officer at Edge Connect. Philip, it's always great to see you, man. So yeah, thanks for being here. So for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about Edge Connects? Sure, yeah. Edge Connects is a data center, global data center operator with presence across four regions, over 60 data centers, either built or under construction, serving some of the biggest hyper scale cloud customers around the world. So we've been around for about 10 years, build a kind of robust platform and looking forward to the next 10 years of growth. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of growth, there's a lot that goes into growth in addition to building data centers and things like that. But let's talk a little bit about the company's growth, maybe culturally. I understand that just recently, you won a Diversity and Inclusion Award. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about DNI at Edge Connects? Sure, sure. Well, great honor to win that award at PTC. So straight from Hawaii here to Fort Lauderdale. So it's no complaints for January. But look, in terms of the award, it says truly an honor that our Edge Connects has this mission around customer, people, and plan. And the simple notion is you take care of your customers, take care of your people, and you take care of the planet, and the rest take care of itself, right? And so it sounds trite, but we try to kind of live by that credo. And so there's a ton of initiatives that I was involved in and the team was involved in in terms of the capstone program where we partnered with the I-Masons to create a senior level, graduate level training course with students at various HBCUs. Proud to say two of the students that participated in that effort are now Edge Connects engineers. And many of the others have gone to work on some other great companies. So that's a great program and continue to kind of foster for the broader data center industry, not just Edge Connects. And then internally, we have programs like Women Connects and there's different kind of employee resource groups to kind of work with various constituents with Edge Connect and share experiences and health. And lastly, the other one also very proud of is kind of a veterans initiative to give recognition for not only their service, but their continuing work and sacrifices that they've made. Salute Mission Critical is a key partner of ours and there are many of those employees are working throughout the Edge Connects platform. So it's a great collaboration and together we did a fantastic salute to the veterans that worked for both of us. So, well-deserved honor, Phillip. It's been a lot of fun getting to know you and to getting to know a lot of the efforts that you have at Edge Connects. One of the other efforts and one of the other kind of pillars that I am familiar with with Edge Connects is the whole customer experience, the user experience. Now you mentioned at the beginning of this interview Edge Connects is a global provider and increasingly global. So how does that kind of global expansion change or alter or what are you doing to make sure that you are ensuring that user experience stays the same as when you were just a stateside company? Well, it's, you know, what's important. I talked about the first 10 years and much of our success was predicated on giving the customer what they wanted, where they wanted, when they wanted it. Obviously that was focused around the Edge. As our businesses evolve both globally and then in terms of scale, building massive data center campuses like we have in Amsterdam where we're on kind of to our 10th data center and hundreds of megawatts and so forth is not losing, it's not about necessarily the Edge, was always about where the customer needed to go to get closer to their customers, right? And so that's always been fundamental to our ethos. I talked about customer people and planet and obviously the customer sits there first and that mantra continues, right? And so it's driven us to India, it's driven us to China, Indonesia and other parts in Europe and obviously South America. And so collaborating with our customer, we work to give them the capacity where they need it, when they need it. Ensuring that end user experience remains solid regardless of where you are in the world, very cool. So let's talk a little bit about the world, where things are going. I think one of the questions that I will probably be asking everyone who sits in that chair is, where do they see the trends going? We hear a lot about 5G and a number of other buzzy words in the industry but from your seat, where are we going? Well, yeah, we often get these questions and you can talk about some of these far-flung use cases and it sounds a bit sci-fi but still fundamentally one of the big core drivers sits around cloud and there still remains a ton to do with regards to building out cloud capacity. It's gonna become more distributed, obviously globally and then also to kind of bring that cloud closer to their customers, right? Our business started with content. It's the same thing, the content is kind of evolving into kind of gaming and the content is shifting in terms of being pushed out to the customer, to being created by the customer and so that's what we're trying to help facilitate. And then the third thing I think AI is just erupting and machine learning and so forth and the amount of data center capacity and digital infrastructure needed to kind of support that is really, it's early stages but it's the speed and pace at which the requirements are significantly greater than we saw with cloud even. So a lot to be done, I think all of us in the industry are building out at max capacity and all the while dealing with supply chain issues and what have you. So it's a busy time for all of us and that's why we're here networking at Metro Connect and collaborating and partnering and investing in the future. The best outro I could have thought of just was said to you, thank you very much. Phillip, it's always great to see you and be sure to check out Edge Connects at, what's the URL Phillip, you wanna get it? edgeconnects.com at edgeconnects.com. So thank you again for watching and we'll see you soon. Hey there and welcome to Metro Connect 2023. JSA TV Live is here on location in Fort Worth. I'm sorry, Fort Worth, we are in Fort Lauderdale, Florida coming to you live and I have a big announcement to make, a big congratulations is in order. Congratulations to XKL on the hire of my new friend, Juliana DeAngelo. She is the chief financial and administrative officer for XKL, congratulations on your new role. For our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about XKL? Well, XKL brought me in during a time of leadership transition. They are a established company of 30 plus years and they make optical networking equipment that is simple and reliable and easy to use. So yeah, that's a quick. That is a nice, simple, easy to understand description of XKL, thank you very much for that. So you joined just recently, so what brought you to XKL? That's a great question. I came on board as a consultant over the summer and I instantly fell in love with so many aspects of the company. Our leader, our founder and CEO, Len Bosak, he was one of the original founders of Cisco Systems. He has a wealth of industry knowledge and I'm constantly learning and I felt very pulled in by that. Our systems are reliable and they're established out in the industry and I really was excited to get behind a company that produces such wonderful products out there for our customers. But ultimately our leadership team is fabulous. They're some of the most collaborative and brilliant individuals I've had the pleasure of working with. And yeah, thank you. And so it was a no-brainer at the end of the day. So were you looking for a new job as a consultant? I wasn't, no, I was established as a CFO consultant. I've been doing a lot of merger and acquisition work and I was not looking to leave and they just pulled me in, so. Well, and at an interesting time, right? We're coming out of a pandemic, you might say. And there were a lot of issues that might have cropped up along the way with supply chain and things like that. Especially as an equipment manufacturer and provider, XKL, you guys seeing any of that supply chain issue? If so, how are you addressing that? That's a great question. We are lucky enough to have systems available now that we can customize for customers. So I think what happened is that over the last couple of years, we built up a really strategic supply of safety stock. We have been overly collaborative and communicative with our suppliers over the last couple of years. And through those strong relationships, we were able to mitigate as much of those, as many of those concerns as possible. And so now, now we are here and we're positioned well. We manufacture all of our equipment in the United States. So we don't have to deal with a lot of those extra issues. And- One less link in the chain, so to speak. Definitely. And since everything's manufactured in the USA, I think we might be a little bit more of an attractive system to a lot of companies out there that are- I like things made in the good old U.S. of A, yeah. Definitely. But all in all, we're really proud of our supply chain management over the last couple of years so much that our CEO is actually speaking about it at NANOG in a couple of weeks in Atlanta. So I hope everyone can catch that. Yeah, very good, me too. Next question for you. Okay, so this is one of my favorites. As the newly appointed CFO at XKL, any advice that you would have for other CFOs as you manage the waters right now? Because it does feel like, we learned about client quitting and things like this in over the last year, 18 months or so. What advice do you have for other CFOs? That's a good question. Definitely, everything has to do with what your return on investment is going to be the ever capital you're putting out there. And so whenever we make a significant investment we're working out with that. And just a project, I think- Please do. I'm here for you right now, go ahead. I think a lot of companies would be really happy with what they see. There's no licensing fees. We have low operating costs. And one of the issues I think when you're quiet quitting is employee bandwidth. Sure. And system administrators can use, set up and maintain our products easily so you don't need to hire optical engineers. It's almost like a set it and forget it mentality. Our systems have objects included and we have flexible payment options available. And so generally speaking, trying to add value to our systems that we would want to find that when we're trying to buy systems out there as well. So we want to make sure that we can meet our customers where they're at and just help them with their technical solutions. I love it. You are helping, as you address kind of your own internal waters as CFO, you're also helping others. So, absolutely. So for our viewers that want to learn more about XKGO. I think you should follow us on LinkedIn. Follow them on LinkedIn. Because we have some announcements coming up and that's gonna be the best place to go. Wait, you can't tell me about those today? I can't tell you yet. So next time. Next time, come find me. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn personally and I will get them in touch with someone to help them with their solutions. And then of course our website, xkl.com. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dean. You bet. You thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We will see you soon. Hey there and welcome to JSA TV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perain at JSA and we are coming to you live on location in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at Metro Connect 2023. And I'm here with Mr. Jim Bowie. Jim is the president and CEO of Involta. Jim, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Dean. Glad to be here. It's nice and warm. Beats Colorado. Yeah, it beats Northwest Indiana where I'm from too. I'm not gonna lie about it. There was a blizzard right before I was leaving. But anyway, Jim, for our viewers that don't already know why don't you tell them a little bit about Involta? You bet. So we're celebrating our 15th year in business here at Involta. We are a data center company with 12 data centers. We build own and operate. We're building 44,000 fiber miles and just one of those companies that focuses on enterprises in the secondary and tertiary markets really delivering digital transformation. Digital transformation, we hear a lot about that and I suspect we're gonna hear a lot more about that as the world transforms that we're hearing chat GPT. I'm gonna be talking to a bunch of people about this but that transformation, that's one of the things that people are going, I'm not sure I understand that. But for this interview, why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the latest coming out of the newsroom over there. I understand that there was some big executive hire too. Yeah, so we promoted Carl Gordelick to our chief financial officer. Really, Carl's been in the industry for more than 15 years from the beginning and he has really been instrumental not only in our debt financing, but we're celebrating our one year anniversary with our equity sponsor Carlisle and Carl Gordelick was very instrumental in getting that equity deal done as well with Carlisle. So very proud to see him promoted. That's great, that's wonderful. And it says a lot about the company too as you are advancing on your technicals, you know, picking up the other personnel and stuff like that. So wonderful speaking of, you are in high demand right now, I understand that you were speaking on the edge strategies for next generation networks tomorrow, correct? You're at MetruConnect, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that? Yeah, so 4.50 p.m. local time and really just excited, like, you know, every edge has been quite a buzzword. It is, yep. You know, and Envolta has been at the edge before it was cool, we should have named the company Edge Volta, because we've been in low latency. I know a good branding company. But we've been in this game a long time and I think there are some use cases for enterprises that are very interesting both in healthcare and manufacturing as compute needs to be closer to deliver patient outcomes in the case of healthcare or in manufacturing. Really just producing goods, better, cheaper, faster. And if you've heard of industry 4.0 in manufacturing or smart manufacturing, really delivering technology to key verticals, there's some real stuff there. So I encourage everybody to tune in to that panel. We have some great panelists and really discussing what's real and what's really happening on the edge today. Yeah, to me, that is the definition of transformation. When we're talking about patient outcomes and the real change that can happen when you get that kind of compute right next to the the origination, it's changing, literally like changing. So very, very cool. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what's ahead for Envolta? What can we expect to hear or see from you in the next 12 to 18 months? Yeah, well, I'm excited to announce here at Metro Connect that we have dropped our latest version of a new product and it's disaster recovery as a service. And really we focus on creating, differentiating capability of both reliability and flexibility. So our disaster recovery product sits in our tier three concurrently maintainable facilities that we build on and operate. So that's a big differentiator. And then really it's about flexibility. When we saw the marketplace for disaster recovery, really two things are challenges for people. I think it's the flexibility in terms of the services. So we have, if you would like a self-guided model, if you will, for that service, or if you need engineering level expertise to actually build the plan, declare disasters. So flexibility in that regard. And also if anyone who's been in the disaster recovery space knows that clients don't wanna buy it until something bad happens. But what they should know is that, I'm gonna give you a number. Per minute, downtime can cost you between $900 a minute to $17,000 a minute. So if you don't have a disaster recovery plan, you're going out of business. So the other flexibility in the product we're launching allows people to step into their disaster recovery plan. What I mean by that, rather than 100% coverage of all of your mission critical data, you can do a 25% to get the most critical 50% and 100%. So you can kind of step into, so I think reliability and flexibility, I think we're industry leading in what we're doing in disaster recovery. I've never heard that ever. This is the first time anyone has ever said we had this tiered approach to disaster recovery. And that's what it's about for us. It's customers giving customers choice. And we feel like we've created a matrix that is really top notch for the industry. No, excellent, excellent. I'd love to talk to you more about that. That's very cool. But for our viewers that want to learn more, as I do about Involta, where should they go? You bet, www.involta.com. Awesome, Jim, thanks for being here. Thanks, Dean. You bet, you bet. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV Live. We'll see you soon. This is JSA TV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine coming to you live on site at Metro Connect 2023. And I'm here with Mr. Ken Parent. Ken is the CEO of Element Critical. Ken, welcome to JSA TV. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. You bet, you bet. So for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about Element Critical? Sure, well, we're a company that we were formed about 2016, middle of the year. We're a co-location provider. We own and operate our own data centers across the country. We're presently, we have six data centers in five markets, two of them in Chicago. So that's the six on five math and looking to continue to grow. But we basically play in that space and folks, hybrid IT stack, we provide the best in-class co-location product that we can with a certain amount of services to go along with it, kind of the requisite services that you would have with co-location. So we're not high up the stack. We're not really bottom of the stack. We're somewhat in the middle. So you must be doing something right because I know based on some research that I did prior to this interview that you've had some pretty historical growth over the last 12 to 18 months. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that growth? Why did that happen? Well, it happened because I can hire smarter people than myself. Very, very smart answer to that question. Yeah, well, it happened for a number of different reasons. And frankly, the last year that we had, we were leasing into more verticals. We were able to do a couple of hyperscale deals, which was the first time the company has done that. Frankly, the growth that we saw last year probably eclipsed the last three or four years combined. I think we're up 122% quarter over quarter, 85% or so for the full year. So in terms of the actual sales activity, it was phenomenal. And we reconstituted the company in a certain way. We have a new C-suite that we've brought in over the last two years. We brought in some great sales leadership, a new CRO, Steve Weaver. He's brought in some new folks, brought in a new mindset. And I think that's been a lot of it. Frankly, it has been a good year for a lot of people, but I don't think they've achieved quite the numbers that we have. So just the fact that we have a good product, a good market between our teams can really execute. And it's the internal infrastructure that we build as well. It's not just a sales organization, but as we know it's, everybody sales in a company like ours, right? So it's the people in the ground. It's the quality of the technicians, the technical staff. It's everybody is the responsiveness. So I think it's, I think the name is getting out there. People know who we are. We continue to grow, be a viable entity. And it's really all about the team, about the product, and being in the right markets. No, outstanding. I'm familiar with Steve Weaver. Good guy and glad he's a part of your team over there at Element. You recently announced a partnership with Megaport. They've been around for a long, long time. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that partnership and how it ultimately benefits your customers? Well, everybody knows in this space, interconnection is a big part of the team, right? So we have data, all of our data centers have fairly robust interconnection. A lot of carriers coming into our meet me rooms, connecting them to the outside world. Obviously a big part of the sort of table stakes if you're going to be a good co-location provider. What Megaport does is takes that and really puts that connectivity on steroids. It allows you to basically virtualize every meet you room that Megaport already exists in through their network. So it's, it allows us to really capitalize on kind of the infrastructure that they have built up and gives us a cloud on-ramp. Effectively in all of our data centers that we may not have one today. So today I think they're all in, but they're coming into all of our data centers are not quite there yet, but we intend to have them in all of our data centers in the short run. And they're in at least two or three right now. Outstanding and great. So it allows our customers, I mean basically the finish of question allows our customers to access their network. Yeah. To be anywhere that they need to be. They can't get through our own network, which is fairly robust as I said. Yeah, great partnership to have. Absolutely there with Megaport. So I'm gonna ask you to take out the crystal ball now. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what they might be able to expect from Element Critical over the next year or even two years from now. Acquisitions, anything, any of the good dirt that you can drop on us now? Yeah, well strategically growing is kind of gets me up in the morning. So it's something that I really enjoy being very involved with acquiring M&A activity. It's that there's a little bit of a lull right now in the market because of the capital market's destruction. So a lot of people are out there selling, but we still seem to have built up a really good pipeline. Been able to do that through marketed and non-marketed deals. Frankly, most of the data centers I bought my 10, 11 year career have been non-marketed. So we built up a good network to be able to do that. And we have the capital to execute. We're under contract right now for one of the Midwest. So you never could say never that it's done until it's really done and you signed or so we're under diligence. So we expect to announce something in the next two to three months there. And basically to answer your question, I think we'll double the size of the footprint in the next two or three years. So if we have six assets today in five markets, I expect to double that within three years, certainly in that timeframe for sure. And then next year or two, add another three or four assets and markets into the portfolio. And I love it though. Those are lofty goals, but if anything has been proven over the last, again, 12 to 18 months, it's that you can achieve those goals. So congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate it. It's a pleasure. You got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon.