 Welcome to JSA TV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine coming to you live from beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida at Metro Connect 2023, and I am joined right now with my good long-time friend, Mr. Philip Marangela. So for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about EdgeConnex? Sure. Yeah. EdgeConnex is a global data center operator with presence across four regions, over 60 data centers either built or under construction, serving some of the biggest hyperscale cloud customers around the world. So we've been around for about 10 years, build a robust platform and looking forward to the next 10 years of growth. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of growth, there's a lot that goes into growth in addition to building data centers and things like that. But let's talk a little bit about the company's growth, maybe culturally. I understand that just recently, you won a Diversity and Inclusion Award. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about DNI at EdgeConnex? Sure. Well, great honor to win that award at PTC. So straight from Hawaii here to Fort Lauderdale. So it's no complaints for January. But look, in terms of the award, that is truly an honor that our EdgeConnex has this mission around customer people and plan. And the simple notion is you take care of your customers, take care of your people, and you take care of the planet, and the rest take care of itself, right? And so it sounds trite, but we try to live by that credo. And so there's a ton of initiatives that I was involved in, and the team was involved in, in terms of the capstone program where we partnered with the I-Masons to create a senior level graduate level training course with students at various HBCUs. I'm proud to say two of the students that participated in that effort are now EdgeConnex engineers, and many of the others have gone to work on some other great companies. So that's a great program continue to kind of foster for the broader data center industry, not just EdgeConnex. And then internally we have programs like WomenConnex, and there's different kind of employee resource groups to kind of work with, we're at various constituent with, to connect and share experiences and health. And lastly, the other one also very proud of is kind of a veterans initiative to give recognition for not only their service, but their continuing work and sacrifices that they've made. Salute Mission Critical is a key partner of ours, and there are many of those employees are working throughout the EdgeConnex platform. So it's a great collaboration and together we did a fantastic salute to the veterans that worked for both of us. So well deserved honor, Phillip. It's been a lot of fun getting to know you and to getting to know a lot of the efforts that you have at EdgeConnex. One of the other efforts and one of the other kind of pillars that I am familiar with with EdgeConnex is the whole customer experience, the user experience. Now you mentioned at the beginning of this interview, EdgeConnex is a global provider and increasingly global. So how does that kind of global expansion change or alter or what are you doing to make sure that you are ensuring that user experience stays the same as when you were just a state side company? Well, it's, you know, what's important. I talked about the first 10 years and much of our success was predicated on giving the customer what they wanted, where they wanted, when they wanted it. Obviously that was focused around the Edge as our businesses evolve both globally and then in terms of scale of building massive data center campuses like we have in Amsterdam where we're on kind of to our 10th data center and you know, hundreds of megawatts and so forth. It's not losing, it's not about necessarily the Edge. The Edge was always about where the customer needed to go to get closer to their customers, right? And so that's always been fundamental to our ethos. I talked about customer people on the planet and obviously the customer sits there first and that mantra continues, right? And so it's driven us to India, it's driven us to China, and Indonesia and other parts in Europe and obviously South America. And so collaborating with our customer, we work to give them the capacity where they need it when they need it. Yeah, ensuring that end user experience remains solid regardless of where you are in the world. Very cool. So let's talk a little bit about the world, where things are going. I think one of the questions that I will probably be asking everyone who sits in that chair is, where do they see the trends going? We hear a lot about 5G and a number of other buzzy words in the industry, but from your seat, where are we going? Well, yeah, we often get these questions and you can talk about some of these far-flung use cases and it sounds a bit sci-fi, but still fundamentally, one of the big core drivers sits around cloud and there still remains a ton to do with regards to building out cloud capacity. It's gonna become more distributed, obviously globally, and then also to kind of bring that cloud closer to their customers, right? Our business started with content. It's the same thing, the content is kind of evolving into kind of gaming and the content is shifting in terms of being pushed out to the customer, to being created by the customer, and so that's what we're trying to help facilitate. And then the third thing, I think AI is just erupting and machine learning and so forth and the amount of data center capacity and digital infrastructure needed to kind of support that is really, it's early stages, but it's the speed and pace at which the requirements are significantly greater than we saw with cloud even. So a lot to be done, I think all of us in the industry are building out at max capacity and all the while dealing with supply chain issues and what have you. So it's a busy time for all of us and that's why we're here networking at Metro Connect and collaborating and partnering and investing in the future. The best outro I could have thought of just was said to you, thank you very much. Phillip, it's always great to see you and be sure to check out Edge Connects at, what's the URL Phillip, you wanna get it? edgeconnects.com. At edgeconnects.com. So thank you again for watching and we'll see you soon.