 Aloha, and welcome back to JSA TV Live, the newsroom for tech, telecom, and data center professionals. Buffy Harakitas, and we are live from PTC23, and it's the biggest PTC conference today here in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii. Unfortunately, it's our wrap up day, but we still have some great interviews lined up for the rest of the stream. And joining me today is Scottie Benda. He is the chief product officer of Light River. Scottie, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. It's been a great week here. Yeah, it has been a great week. It's been a long week, but it's good. It's been a great week. I love your shirt. Hey, aloha shirt, right? You have to in Hawaii. Yeah. You got the Hawaii vibes going on, so how's the conference been for you so far, Scottie? The conference has been fantastic, and we've had an opportunity to meet with a number of our customers and a number of our partners, and I've also attended some of the breakout technology sessions. The future of the submarine networking is quite impressive, and also the open and disaggregation themes are fantastic as well, so it's been really good for me. Well, that's good to hear. Yeah. So, like, for viewers that don't already know about Light River, I mean, I'm sure many of them already do, but can you just give us a little bit more information about Light River and what makes it so unique? Yeah. Light River, it's going to have its 25th anniversary here in the end of February, and it's been an advanced solutions provider of fiber optic, packet optical, and routing and switching solutions with a little bit of network management and automation built into it. And right now, the company is positioned very well inside the service provider space, inside the utility space, inside the data center space, and the cloud vertical. So it's, this show is right up its alley. Yeah, it sounds like it for sure. You just joined Light River not that long ago from what I understand, so congrats. Yeah, it's been six months. It's amazing. It went by in a blink of an eye. I know. It does seem like time's going by faster these days. I don't know. Yeah. It's a little bit better that we're out of the pandemic because the pandemic was groundhog day. Every day seemed like the same. So it is nice to be back to business and to be with our customers face-to-face. And live here, you know, in beautiful Hawaii, this is my favorite trade show. So I'm so glad. Right. It is mine too. 5,000 attendees this year, the biggest PTC conference to date. What made you so excited to join Light River? So as the market has been evolving to more open and disaggregated solutions, and by the way, so Light River for my former company was our premier partner and had worked really well with them. The people are fantastic. The technologists are fantastic. The solutions they bring are fantastic. And for me, the fact that they work with the premier vendors in the space from a routing and switching perspective, from a transport perspective, it just was a really good fit for my skills. And it gave me an opportunity to continue to grow. So I'm very excited about being there. Yeah. Well, congrats again. It seems like you've settled right in here representing Light River at PTC. And Light River did have quite a year in 2022, a monumental year there. Can you give us a little bit of the highlights? Sure. I mean, probably the biggest highlight was we were acquired by a private equity firm, Grain Management. It's a fantastic company. They actually are a conglomerate of telecommunications specialists. So they've got a number of operators, such as Hunter, Ritter, Great Plains, Communications, et cetera. They also have some construction firms and they also have a lot of wireless assets as well. So for us, you know, it creates a very nice palette for us to not only serve grade management and the properties that they own, but they give us best practices that we can share and take to the field with our other customers. Yeah. Well, that sounds like it's been an exciting year. And then 2023, we jumped right in. I'm sure you have plenty of exciting new developments and things coming up. What can we expect from your company coming up the road here? Yeah. So, so, you know, kind of closing out 22, we had a lot of new logo wins for our software management and automation platform called Netflix. And it's moved us into Europe. So we've got some new wins in Europe. Some major operating companies there that we'll share later online. But and at the same time, we're also having a lot of success moving to what we view the vision of the future network, which is an open and disaggregated network and meaning that you can have an open line system for your transmission systems. You can choose your best of breed from a transport platform or even the optical plugs. And so not only that, it's also managed by our Netflix platform. So it's just been a really good year and moving into 23. We see more of those themes at the same time. We're looking at the back half of 23 for the supply chain challenges to start to clear up, and that's going to be huge for us. We've had a lot of pent up demand and it'll move us into more of the professional services arms side of our business implementing these networks at the same time. We're also expanding. So broadband has continued to be an investment point for the federal government here, like rural digital opportunity funding to get more, you know, it solves the digital divide between the more rural type of subscribers. Right. And so we've got a, sorry, guys, we've got a number of partners that we're working with and we're going to help them, you know, roll out the next generation broadband solutions. So it's exciting. It does seem so exciting and that's such a critical. All those pieces of the puzzle that you just mentioned are critical in today's world, closing the digital divide and all these supply chain issues that we're dealing with. So so excited to hear that Light River is moving into this direction and has such great announcements coming up for the next year. I mean, you've been a thought leader in our industry for so long and what trends do you see impacting the marketplace? Yeah, so there's a couple of different forums that I'm participating in. So one is the OpenXR forum and the other is the OpenZR Plus forum. And those are really about getting, you know, the standards for having the ability to do IP over WDM or point to multiple types of networking with, you know, really best of breed, best of class. And at the same time, both of those solutions are allowing us to deliver the next generation open optical solutions. So we're excited about that. At the same time, you're also starting to see in the routing and switching space, the platforms have, you know, for aggregation of 100 gig and 400 gig and delivering those next generation services. They're now available and so it's allowing us. We've got a lab that we've built where we're actually participating with the OpenZR Plus forum, for example. And we've got a lot of proof of concepts that allow the members to test and, you know, see how their equipment performs. And it's also allowing us some learning lessons so that when we're working with our customers, we can be an authority on that technology, which is great. Yeah, that is great. Is there anything else that you wanted to add today, Scotty? You know, I'm looking forward to 23, even though we're already in it. There's a lot to do and a lot to achieve. You know, for us, you know, we're going to have a special push on our net flex platform this year. We've integrated a lot more functionality into the platform. We've got our next generation user interface coming in. And so customers that are building their open and disaggregated solutions, they'll have a platform that, you know, what you saw on 21 and 22 with some of the supply chain challenges is that customers started investing and adding other vendors into their network infrastructure. And that flex platform really allows them to handle a multi-domain, multi-vendor type of solution mixed with automation to allow you to manage all of these, I would say, maybe a little more complex networks and turning them into a more homogeneous solution. So it's it's really good. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for joining us today. Where can viewers go if they want to learn more about Light River? Yeah, go to lightriver.com. And, you know, I mentioned grain management. You can also look up grain management on the Internet as well. And you can actually see all the different operating companies. And of course, you can always email me, benda at lightriver.com. It's easy to find me. So Benda at Light River. Yeah. All right. Simple enough, right? Yeah, that is simple enough. Well, thanks again, Scotty, for joining us here live at PTC 23. And thank you viewers for tuning in to another fabulous episode of JSA TV from PTC 23. Happy networking. Meloja.