 This is JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Dean Perine, Executive Vice President at JSA coming to you from ITW 2020, the virtual ITW. And joining me today is Mr. Mark Halbfinger. Mark is the CEO of PCCW Global. The PCCW Global Network supports a portfolio of integrated global communication services, including connectivity applications and tailored solutions facilitated by the on-demand console connect digital platform. Mark, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Dean. Thank you very much for introducing. I appreciate it. Happy to be here. You got it. You got it. And we're happy that you're here, Mark. You actually moderated the ITW opening keynote panel, the future of connectivity after COVID-19. A very big topic right now. So how is PCCW Global coping with the impact of COVID-19 and the fluctuations in demand for network services? Well, first of all, from the employee base, we have colleagues all over the world. And so we were impacted by COVID-19 step by step, first in China and Hong Kong. And then as things evolved all over the globe and probably the last country that got hit the most from our point of view as United States and a few colleagues that we also have in Latin America. Severe impact to some of our colleagues in Europe, actually. And it's been difficult. And so first of all, to the employee base from PCCW Global around the world, I congratulate you for your resilience and to all of the colleagues who've been involved in providing all forms of ICT services during this period. I think that we've demonstrated that the industry is both critical and resilient all at the same time. We've been coping okay, thankfully. The business has actually done better over the score with the notable exception of roaming, which obviously as people are not traveling, we haven't had that opportunity to deliver on the roaming base except for a few permanent roamers that exist in various countries around the world. But other than that, in terms of bandwidth and all the applications around it, we've certainly seen a spike. And all of our colleagues, whether working from home or under strained conditions have been successful in delivering value to users. Outstanding, so let's talk about bandwidth. You mentioned it, let's go there. We're hearing a lot that a lot of businesses are having to kind of reconfigure their networks in very short time frames because of this bandwidth necessity. And it's driving many carriers to accelerate their move into on-demand services. Let's talk about those on-demand services and the role of automation and SDN and kind of how you address those demands. Well, we started getting involved in software-defined networking about six, seven years ago, quite frankly because of HR constraints. And we viewed the necessity to go to automation quite clearly. First of all, the business cases associated with the paradigms of products as we had used to deliver them in the legacy network environment was changing. Productization was becoming more complex and therefore wholesale and even downstream retail settlement becomes more complex. And whenever that happens, you definitely need to automate the economic platform, let alone the technical network platform. And we acquired Console Connect at the end of 2017 with exactly that in mind, Console Connect by definition was an automated platform that was facilitating the provisioning of cloud-to-cloud applications on an on-demand basis as much bandwidth as you needed at the moment. And it also created a second component which was a social platform, a community platform, if you will, to allow network engineers in clouds or applications or networks to interact with one another. And we saw all of that value. And so Console Connect together with the PCCW global platform really is the epitome of what interconnection on an automated basis is supposed to be. It creates the value associated with an economic platform, a social platform, and most importantly, a technology platform that facilitates cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-network, and very soon we'll be launching also network-to-network automation. And all of this is quite key, I think, in delivering what users have clearly demonstrated during COVID-19 is necessary. But even without COVID-19, it was upon us. What's clear from COVID-19 now is that automation is not an option, but rather a requirement. Excellent. So, Mark, let's shift gears just a little bit here really quickly. Your bread-and-butter customer has predominantly been carriers and telecoms, but now you're serving the wider ecosystem of enterprise, cloud providers, and SaaS businesses with more global interconnection. Can you talk a little bit about that shift into serving the wider ecosystem? There's different components, and I want to get into a very long response to an excellent short question, but I will offer the following. If you assume that at the moment we have in this ICT world three core infrastructure components, which are comprised of data centers, clouds, and also, oh, by the way, networks, which we always used to be in, right? Those are the three main infrastructures that applications providers, SaaS providers, any type of X as a service requires, but also the users that are driving their automation, their transformation through those applications on top of those infrastructures. We acquired Console Connect and put it at the center of what we do, effectively replacing for a moment that we used to come from network centrism to the point where we're now technology centers. And we've formed Console Connect as the meeting place for infrastructures and applications so that a user of infrastructure can meet a user of applications across the social community side of Console Connect and deliver its technological automation side. I think that's the basics of where we're at. We've had to change our mindset in order to do it and I'd be happy to share more if that's of interest, but I think that's where we've come from and in doing that, we've obviously step by step migrated our wholesale capability to also enterprise. We've always been an enterprise. We've always been a B2B player, but we've often been to B2B through interconnect relationships that we have with other carriers, with other service providers. These were physical N and Is. That DNA of interoperability and interconnections we've brought with us to our technology-centric space and I think it's been valuable to us and now enterprises are being increasingly attracted to the platform because it's dynamic, automatic and it facilitates what they require. Excellent, Mark. And perfect segue really into my next question. So thanks for that. But we're finding that a lot of carriers are finding it kind of tough to transform both culturally and their technology platforms in the existing environment, knowing that this is really kind of the new normal. Software development and being more agile and working on becoming part of their overall core competencies. Well, how is PCC global kind of changing in this regard? I suspect that it kind of starts from the ground up, but why don't you tell our viewers a little bit more about kind of the existing in this new environment? Well, it's interesting you say because when you're a tech company that's in startup mode and entrepreneurial and so on, you don't bring any baggage with you. You're just coming sort of with a knapsack or carry on and that's it, right? And here we have a large amount of background. I don't wanna call it baggage, but a large amount of background to the point where we're integrating network hardware capabilities together with software capabilities. So first step is to get to common nomenclature, common language amongst the employee base of what it is that we're doing and where we're going. If I say the word infrastructure to a guy who focuses on code, he's thinking about databases, different types of code languages and so on. If I say infrastructure to one of my physical network guys, they're thinking duck, they're thinking fiber, but someone else might be thinking data centers. The first thing is get to common language and then you have to assure that you have a common objective. You have to set that mode in place. You have to make sure that it's happening from the top down and from the bottom up and that everybody understands it. And so after we acquired console connect, we took a big stop amongst our management team. We went away for thought processes and training and we came across agile, but in the form of safe. Safe is an acronym that stands for Scaled Agile Framework and we decided to adopt safe 4.0 and later 5.0 throughout our organization and that's been deployed over the last couple of years that required us to train up the entire employee base, the management team themselves to certify and it required everyone to think along the same lines to make sure that we are all headed in a common direction with the same toolset and that we understood when physical network was priority and when coding and software was priority, all of it in order to achieve the objectives of the value that I described to you in the earlier question. And so I just wanna, you say agile and it's common for people to think about the word agile as if it means speed, but frankly agile was created as a framework. And the wonderful thing about safe is that it facilitates that framework also for large corporations and not just for software code designers and that's been the good thing for us having that common framework having everyone aligned to it. We did take our time in order to get there but now we have multiple agile release trains running throughout the organization. Everything is transparent. We know where things are going and we have a very clear roadmap for deliverability, bad word, but nevertheless, that's what we do in terms of everything that's happening both on the physical side as well as on the soft side. And I think that it's been outstanding for us as a cultural transformation. And it's helping us move from old style telco to new style technology provider. We take a couple things with us from the old days and that includes concepts of good service for manual intervention when it is necessary but now that service layer is capable not just on the hardware side and the network side but also on the code side and how to deliver the applications in a sensible way. And I think bringing the right things with you from the old days to where we're going with absolute clarity to the new days that's been quite important for us. Mark, I feel like we could spend all afternoon talking. Unfortunately, we are about out of time. Thank you very much for your time today. Let's do this again sometime. I look forward to it, Dean. Thanks very much for the time and I appreciate you and your team giving us the moment to share what we're up to. Have a great day. You got it, Mark. Thank you very much and thank you viewers for watching JSA TV and tuning in to JSA Podcast. We'll see you soon.