 This is JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA. And joining me today is Mr. Mark Bunnell. Mark is the COO of New Wave Communications. Mark, welcome to JSA TV. Yeah, thanks for having me. You got it. So Mark, it's a pretty exciting month right now. We're kind of winding up summer a little bit. We've got ITW at the end of the month. And you guys have got some big news coming out as well. So let's go ahead and get started here. But as a starting point, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about New Wave and your work as it relates to the latest Microsoft release around Operator Connect? Yeah, sure. Thanks for that. So yeah, Mark Bunnell, Chief Operating Officer here at New Wave. And we've been around since 1998. We're a voice focused company. And that's basically how we got our start was just really good quality voice. TV commercial used to be you could hear a pin drop and now they're, can you hear me now? So we really set out to make sure that that voice quality is back to the standards of the TDM times in the 70s and 80s. And so through that, and having that quality and being carrier grade, we haven't had any kind of customer facing service interruptions in over a decade now. So 100% uptime. And because of that quality, Microsoft called us up and said, hey, we'd like you to come be a part of this new thing called Teams we have is this new product that's gonna replace Skype for Business and we wanna make it more adoptable by the masses. And so we helped them work on the carrier hosted model to deploy teams, direct routing and really have mastered what no one else has been able to do there. And so then we were also invited to be a first wave carrier into Operator Connect where our iPilot platform helps to automate the entire process for both services. Outstanding, and I'm glad that you mentioned iPilot because that's my very next question revolves around that bit of news. So you recently published some news around iPilot. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about that news and ultimately why it's significant? Yeah, so iPilot was born out of necessity of our own use. And so basically we wanted to eliminate the swivel chair. We wanted to have telecommunication services beyond demand where you could do everything from A to Z, from service procurement, all the way through configuration and management of your voice services, specifically for teams. And so we didn't really understand how complex and things that that was gonna be moving forward. We just decided that we needed a product that was going to the service and make it really easy to use teams and manage that system. And then so iPilot was born from that. And then as we started using it in the marketplace to turn up our customers, we really found that there was a gap in the market. And so now other carriers, operators, companies are coming to us to get that same level of access. And so that's why we decided to make it available as a product globally for all these service providers, SIs, distributors, everyone who really wanted to have a team's practice and make it super easy because it can tend to be a little bit difficult to manage. Yeah, I get that. As far as like getting it out to the masses, does it sound a bit like a channel play to me? Is that kind of the direction you folks are headed? And how does that ultimately shape your current and future ecosystem of partners? Yeah, so it's kind of all the above. I mean, first and foremost, we were a service provider. And I used to say that we're a telecommunications provider that happened to do some software. And now we've rapidly evolved into a software company that happens to use some telecommunications. And so two to our roots, we still turn up on direct customers to provide our same level of quality and service that we have. However, we have shifted more to the channel. And that channel is not just traditional channels of master agents and things like that, but as a channel of anyone who can look to adopt a practice to service all of their customers. So that includes master agents, it includes SIs, MSPs, other carrier operators, anyone who really just wants to have the ease and ability to turn up customers at scale. Got it. So let's talk a little bit about those customers actually. How do you see iPilot shaping the future of the enterprise or even the future of the IT landscape? Well, I mean, as the work at home and distributed workforce, kind of has really come center stage here and you have a lot of different use cases, a lot of different services that have really exploded here in the last year and a half or so. Finding the quality people and employees to really help those enterprises, have a team's practice are really hard to come by. Not only are they hard to come by, but now the salaries and things that go along with those folks are double and triple what they normally are. And so there's just a real lack of quality people that can do this job. And so, you know, case in point, we turned up a big medical facility. They had 17 people in their IT staff and only two of those people knew PowerShell to be able to support something like Teams. And so when we bring an iPilot and we solve all those use cases, no PowerShell required, it's all point and click, now all 17 members of their staff can now provision and manage their team's environment versus just two. So now we've really taken the need away from having to find those people and have those expert resources on staff because iPilot makes it so easy to administer and control with just a couple of clicks of the mouse. Very cool. So I feel like we could probably talk about iPilot for the next hour, but we need to move on. So why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about what else is new with New Wave? Or maybe even what they can expect to see from New Wave over the next like six or eight or 10 or 12 months? Well, I really think that you're gonna see just a global expansion capability. We're moving into new continents, new countries all the time. Really the flexibility to provision multiple services, multiple cloud environments over time. We currently provision Cisco Broadworks, Kandy, others that are coming that are relevant. And so you'll be able to do a one-stop shop with all these different cloud providers. And I think that some of the next really interesting pieces is you can just plug into our software and you can choose the areas of the world that you wanna sell in. You can choose the different products that you wanna sell. You can even choose the underlying SBCs that you may have in your network. So you can control, say Ribbon and audio codes, MetaSwitch, any of these other underlying SBC providers. So it really becomes a mix and match menu of what you have in your network to be able to control the different levels of service without having a swivel chart. Yeah, very cool, very cool. So for our viewers that want to know a little bit more about New Wave, where can they go? You can go to our website at newwave.com or ipilot.io, either place gets to the same people that can help. Very good, Mark. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. You bet. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. And on all of you folks that are headed to ITW, be safe and above all, happy networking.