 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine coming to you from ITW 2021. And joining me today is Mr. Robert Kenney. Robert is the Chief Revenue Officer for Connected to Fiber. Robert, welcome to JSA TV. Dean, thank you very much. I really do appreciate the opportunity. You bet, you bet. Robert, so for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about Connected to Fiber and a little bit about yourself? Sure. So Connected to Fiber is an industry cloud SaaS platform connecting the buyers and sellers of not network connectivity in an amazingly efficient manner, driving speed and accuracy into a problem that's in scale is, we think of it as a $30 billion industry problem. And we're bringing that speed and accuracy to this problem, leveraging technology. And it's all built around location truth is our term for it anyway, location accuracy. And if we can provide the buyers and sellers of network connectivity with accuracy around the location, who has connectivity location, what type of location in a massively efficient manner, we're solving a big problem in the industry. Yeah, it certainly sounds that way. And other people seem to agree with you earlier. You guys have, it seems like to me for the last two years there's been like one milestone after the next with Connected to Fiber. But just recently I saw where you guys landed on the Inc. 5000 list. So congratulations on that. Obviously that means there's some substantial growth there. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what your growth has looked like and really where you see it going? Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, I'm celebrating my one year anniversary at Connected to Fiber. So I can't take a lot of credit for the good work that's been done to date and enabled candidly the Inc. 500, excuse me, Inc. 5000 recognition. Maybe next year for 500. Yeah, we're working on that. But no, I think it's massive for Connected to Fiber. I mean, really truly a validation of what we're doing in the marketplace and the recognition of the growth we're driving and so forth. And candidly, I think it's an honor for any company to be recognized within that group of fastest growing privately held companies. And while we're really fired up about having earned that honor, we also recognize we're really just at the infancy and the starting point of what we need to get done to continue to be a market maker around driving efficiency into the buying and selling process for network connectivity. For sure. And I think that my next question really does apply to what you just said. And specifically, you folks just a couple of months ago, maybe at the beginning of the year, you announced a significant funding round. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that funding round and ultimately what it is enabling you to do? Sure, yeah, thank you. It is a significant accomplishment. It's our Series B funding round, which there are not a lot of software companies that have been founded and built over the last four or five years that can speak to getting to the point where Series B funding is achieved. But I do think it's massive recognition of the fit that we have in the marketplace based on the number of customers we have, the growth in the business and so forth. So you look at fit in terms of the problem that we're solving and investors have realized, okay, these guys are making some things happen. You couple that with an absolutely massive addressable marketplace and investors want to get involved pretty quickly. So we're really excited about it. All of our initial investors, original investors have stayed in the business and we've added new investors to the equation. So we're pretty excited about it. With that, certainly any Series B investment comes responsibility in terms of how you're gonna use your investor's capital to build your business. And we are putting that capital, excuse me, to work very efficiently right now. And we're really targeting on three big areas to drive scale into this particular business. We're adding lots of new team members across the entire business, whether it's data scientists, engineering, sales, marketing, every function in the business is being built out to enable the scale that we need to really take advantage of the opportunity that sits in front of us. Number two is our product portfolio and a big investment in product. We're looking to continue to enhance all of the products that we already have and also continue to bring new products to market to support the demands in the marketplace. But one of the ones that we're literally announcing today is customer bid management. And we feel like that's a game-changing announcement and game-changing product offering and it's the funding from our investors that are enabling that kind of work to get done. And then finally is continuing to drive depth and accuracy into our data. We consider the data moat that we've built to be a competitive advantage. You couple that with the ecosystem that's taking advantage of it. And that's really our secret sauce. So we're continuing, whether it's with data scientists personnel and or the acquisition of data, that's a third portion where we're making significant investments in the business. Awesome. No, that sounds wonderful, but I am not gonna let you go without telling me a little bit more about this bid management solution that you quite literally are just dropping. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about bid management and why it's so important? Yeah, thank you. We are pretty fired up about it. Customer bid management is an enhancement to our CPQ or our configure price quote product offering that already exists in the marketplace. And what we're continuing to drive scale into how our customers are buying network connectivity. So think about the buyer of network connectivity an MSP case in point that is got an opportunity for a several hundred site or even several thousand site opportunity to deploy a technology like SD-WAN. Traditionally, that has been a great opportunity that everybody gets fired up about. And then all of a sudden they realize the work that's gonna need to go in to be able to go identify the right connectivity at the right location at the right price point. What customer bid management is enabling is to leverage our software and the inclusion in our connected world platform to leverage that technology to automate that process. So being able to push a request out into the marketplace within our ecosystem of 6,000 plus providers of network connectivity and allow them to respond to you against those particular locations driving a significant decrease in fallout which is sort of an industry term for inaccurate data. And secondly, driving the best possible price point for the particular type of network connectivity that buyer needs. So think about having done it in past days with spreadsheets and lots of spreadsheets and waiting for people to respond and translating all of the information on those spreadsheets and the potential errors that might take place. Introduce technology, introduce the connected world, our software at the click of a button you can push that out into the ecosystem and have people responding to you in near real time kind of fashion. So with that, there's no one else that can do that right now in the marketplace. And we feel like we're just gonna continue to differentiate and push our lead as industry makers in this particular space. Well, congratulations. That sounds pretty great to me. And Robert, thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Enjoy it thoroughly. Before I go, if folks wanna know a little bit more about Connected to Fiber, where should they go? Connectedtofiber.com. Outstanding, Robert, thanks again. We really appreciate it. Awesome, thank you. You got it, you got it. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. We'll see you soon.