 Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'll tell you, this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people. I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000. And it's a little overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable, and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here. He's the Vice President of Development and Ops at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. So Jay, maybe you could take us through for those people who aren't familiar with your company. What do you guys do? What are you all about? So PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong Telecom. So if it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 685,000 kilometers of diverse cable. We've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity. Came into business in 2005. If my brain is serving me correctly right now. So we have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports all the way to IP transit. We're a tier one service provider from that perspective as well. So we do one of everything where it comes to networking. And that's really what was the basis of Console Connect was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on that, our network and our assets. Okay, so 2005, obviously predated cloud. You laid a bunch of fibers, it's not going to the ocean, I mean global networks. I mean there was a big trend to do that. And you know, you had to think, you had to go big or go home in that business. Yes, you should do. So, and Console Connect is your platform. Is that right? Yeah, it's software defined. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Console Connect is our software defined interconnection platform. So we built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports. They get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. And that may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office or it could be building a circuit into the cloud via Direct Connect. It could be building a circuit into an internet exchange and all of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. So when you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the cloud came into play but it was still early days. But it sounds like you're kicking the cloud model, AWS cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting if you will, and provisioning and management. Yeah, we've heard many people and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my endpoint and how do I do that? And AWS, yes, they had Direct Connect but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to and we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a VLAN tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay, AWS has Direct Connect. People think, oh, that's directly competitive but it's not, you're adding value on top of that, right? So describe where you fit Garrett inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem. Where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem, what's that like? Okay, so where we fit into the AWS ecosystem as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in. Not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other cloud platforms but they're also able to access each other. So we have a marketplace in our platform which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. Okay, so and you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? No, that's not inside of AWS. So okay, so your platform is your platform and then so your relationship with AWS is to sort of superpower Direct Connect, is that right? So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe and this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW Global Network but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform and cloud. So wherever there's a cloud, you plug into it, okay? That's correct. And then another advantage there is the customer obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS, they don't have to be in the same geographic region. If for some reason you need to be connected to US West but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. Does that happen a lot? It actually does. How come, what's the use case there? Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints but the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these cloud-based companies are beginning to kind of be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these pockets of use and they'll go, well, okay, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there and so then we want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them and then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. What are the big sort of macro trends in your business? I mean, broadly, you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, you know, the world's changing so dynamically, we don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? Because that's what our granularity is. So we allow for anything from one day up to three years right now and then even within that term, we're dynamic. So if something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a subsea cable and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really, at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. How does that affect pricing, I presume? So I can have one day to a three-year term, if I commit to three years, I get a better deal, is that right or? You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. So yeah, if you sign a 12-month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. Yeah, so it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just you want to reduce the transaction complexity and that's why you would sign up for a longer term, not to get the big discount. Correct, and then like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a floor and then everything above that is, I can flex up, is that right, how it works? Okay, and then the more I commit to, the better the deal is or not necessarily? No, no, it's pretty much flat rate. So okay, so I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, I know I'm going to use X. I'll sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more. Somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. And another really neat advantage, and the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect or I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense I don't want and we, fun. Take your one gig port, run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. So we allow you to multiplex your port and provision as many services as you want. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw a picture of the ideal partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but. Sure, so our ideal partners are internet exchanges, cloud partners and SaaS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the cloud and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SaaS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the cloud much easier and flexible in a flexible format for their customers. Yeah, so what can you tell us any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? Well, of our business, one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that by 2023, I think 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. So now instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to kind of understand that, now you're going, well, okay, so it's in the cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there and well, wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply? If I'm going across the public internet, well, okay, what exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? So the platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, that's just at the end of the day that's a really long ethernet cable. So your glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. So that's really one of our guiding principles is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. Well, I understand that because in the early days of cloud, a lot of enterprises, CIOs, they were concerned about security and I think they realized that AWS is pretty good security with CIAs using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's bad security, it's just different. And we move slow, Dave. So how do you accommodate, now I don't know if that diversity, I mean AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the cloud? Is that kind of how it works? That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and the better for you as a customer and the better really for us because it normalizes things. It makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. And is it such now in the ecosystem, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns that you guys can kind of accommodate most of those use cases? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. Now we do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem, we can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. So we're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. Well, I would think 5G actually, I mean, I can see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business, because it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I mean, I could see somebody arguing the counter, but what's your point of view on that? No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone, you know, here on the show floor. And it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. And we're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge, rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and hairpinning it. So, you know, again, the ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing, and in the push of a button, modify that or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. Yeah, and ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data, and that's just a tailwind for you guys. Yeah, and then you look at some of the car companies that are coming on, you know, Tesla, you're driving around with like eight CPUs in that thing, communicating back over the air. You start scaling that, and you start getting into some real bottlenecks. Amazing business you guys have. Obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat, and then it's a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress, and thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, no, thanks for the time. Thank you very much. Yeah, great to meet you guys, good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. Right back.