 Hey everybody, welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott Okutaya joining you live from ITW 2022. This is so cool. We are live streaming here guys from this wonderful show and it's 15th year. So congratulations ITW for 15 years of excellency. Joining me today, I'm very excited to introduce you all to Howard Stevens. He is the CEO of Tomia. So for our viewers who might not know, tell us a little bit about Tomia. Well, thank you Jamie and it's very nice to be with you today. Very nice to be back in person with all of our industry colleagues. So Tomia, we're in the business of helping the mobile network operators operate into connectivity together in their business to business relationships. So whether you're phoning someone abroad or whether you get on an aircraft which we're starting to do again and you phone home, we help facilitate all of those relationships between the operators. Well done, well done. So tell me, what are some of the mega trends that you are seeing in the wholesale industry currently? Yeah, I mean, the first mega trend quite frankly, given that we're in the business of interoperator connectivity in roaming is that we're actually starting to get on planes again. So the last two, indeed the last two years has been pretty challenging for us all but that's all starting to change. And I think with that change comes the operators also starting not to think about cost saving in the interconnectivity world, but how do you invest and how do you grow? And in terms of the other trends, one of the interesting things about COVID is when we stopped traveling on aircraft and the operators still saw roaming sims in their network ultimately it had to be machines. So it helped the operators focus quite significantly on what was happening in their networks and what was driving these sims and IoT became a reality. And I think we're seeing now that people are looking not just to understand where those sims are but how to rate them and monetize them. And we're going on several journeys with our customers helping them do that. And 5G is now starting to happen as well. So 5G will accelerate all of that IoT. And ultimately all this is about enterprise. So I think the last overarching trend is that enterprise and reaching out to your enterprises and being closer to them and seeing that as an opportunity is the overarching trend that we're seeing in the marketplace. Unbelievable, so interesting. And of course, leveraging all these traditional services to address new business needs really does require this level of sophistication. And I can see how, how has Tomia positioned to really support your customers to reduce this complexity that lies within the process? Yeah, so the traditional way of operating is going to be changing, particularly in the network roaming side as IoT and 5G comes to the fore. So the average operator today is managing two, three, 400 roaming connections with their partners and within those two to 300 connections they're managing voice, SMS and data. And there's been a very traditional way of moving those connections around to make sure they're getting the right sort of efficiency from a margin and a revenue point of view. But what we're seeing with IoT is that it's not going to be individual partner agreements, there's going to be individual agreements per line of business for IoT. So for shipping containers, there'll be a contract. For solar panels, there'll be a contract. For cars, there'll be a contract. So this means that you're going to be dealing with tens of thousands of agreements as an operator. So you have a lot of complexity coming if you're going to be able to manage that in the most effective way. So we're in a very unique position to help them with that complexity and pull in automation. So we have the ability, we have all the ability and the history on the network roaming side and on the clearing side. And we have a very, very powerful analytics tool in the middle to allow the operators to automate significantly larger parts of that process to ensure that they don't get caught out with that complexity. So simplify it for them and automate it for them. I love it. Simplification and automation absolutely makes sense. Now, when we talk A2P messaging, applications to person messaging, it's been around for a long time. It has. But you guys, particularly now, doing a little bit different MNOs, looking for something a little bit different now in the marketplace? Yeah, so this is a, this is quite an interesting one actually because I've been involved in A2P directly myself over the years. And everyone thought that text messaging was going to fade away with new technologies coming in. But that just simply hasn't happened. And it is still the most trusted mechanism today for people to communicate with each other. The MNOs traditionally have handed off a lot of the relationship building and the connection side to the enterprise, to aggregators. But with the text messaging continuing to be so strong, this really has started to become an opportunity, I think, for the mobile network operators to take back that relationship and also to control the pricing in their own environment. And we're seeing a lot of mobile network operators actually now take that control back and we're helping them and can facilitate doing that. Given all the history we have on the board, it's very, very similar to do that from a text messaging point of view. And we've done that with a few operators with many more talking to us. So it's something that just hasn't gone away and continues to deliver value for the mobile network operators. So long may it continue? Yeah, well, I mean, I know if I'm getting a text, I feel a little bit more like it's a secure, I mean, how many even texts to confirm applications do we see out there? Absolutely, here to stay. And obviously, Tomeya leading the way. Can our viewers learn where they can go to learn more? Well, they can come onto our website, Tomeya Global, or they can reach out to us here at the show if you happen to be at ITW. So feel free to come by our booth on the exhibition board. It was so wonderful, Howard, to have you here on JSA TV. Thank you for your time, especially during this great, crazy day of ITW. Welcome back, everybody. And thank you so much for joining us. Thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast. As always, guys, think green and happy networking.