 the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Noland and on behalf of everyone here at JSA, thank you for tuning in to our JSA virtual roundtable, Edge Data Centers, Critical Low Latency Solutions for Big Cities. We do have a couple of housekeeping notes before we begin. Our first 100 registrants for today's roundtable have now received lunch delivered to your door or a gift card, so please enjoy. We do have nearly 400 registrations for today's roundtable. So if you weren't one of our first, hopefully next time, make sure you register early for our monthly roundtables at jsa.net. We want to hear from you and make this roundtable experience as interactive as possible for you. So please add any questions that you might have into the chat or request the mic to come on camera and ask your questions directly to our panelists. Also, stick around, because once our virtual roundtable is over, you can join virtual networking tables immediately following for a unique opportunity to talk face-to-face with other event attendees and speakers. Simply join a table in the lounge area and let the networking begin. Okay, so let's get started. Our topic today, again, is Edge Data Centers, Critical Low Latency Solutions for Big Cities. To introduce our speakers and to moderate, please welcome Fedor Smith, President and Managing Partner at Atlantic ACM. Fedor, thank you for joining us today and the floor is yours. Thanks, Laura, and thank you to JSA for putting this all together. Obviously a topic of great interest based on the registrations and attendance. I'm very excited to have a, not just a great list of panelists, but a great range of entities within the industry represented. So we'll get right to it. I'm actually gonna ask the panelists to introduce themselves. So if each of you can run through, give a quick introduction of who you are and a very light background on the role your company plays in the industry. Let's start there and then we'll jump into questions. Starting out with Todd, please. Thank you for the introduction and thank you for the opportunity. Todd Cushing and I'm based in Omaha, Nebraska I'm the president of 1623 Farnham. 1623 Farnham is a right in the middle of the United States. It is a Edge Data Center that hosts hyperscale connectivity. We've seen a lot of growth through content and the ecosystem has just developed a lot over the last couple of years. So that's really what we're seeing is important for us is to grow connectivity and the interaction. Excellent, Doug, you wanna jump in there? Sure, I'm Doug Rekker. I'm the founder and president of Edge Presence. We deploy micro data centers in tier two to tier four markets, bringing better connectivity into the community and providing co-location where there currently isn't any. Excellent, Mark. Hi, folks, thanks for having me. Thanks to JSA. I'm Mark Thiele. I'm a CEO and founder for Edgevana. I have a long time IT career. Love to participate. I've been on in groups like IBM Cloud Minds, IDCA chair for their technical committee, founded Data Center Pulse with my brother-in-law back in 2008, things like that. I more recently have gotten out of building infrastructure for others and have started my own firm called Edgevana. And at Edgevana, we're attempting to help enterprises and technology companies more effectively leverage global resources of networking and services and specifically Data Center through effectively speeding their adoption and allowing them more flexibility of choice globally. So that's where Edgevana plays in this market. Excellent. Jason. Good afternoon, Jason Bourg on the Vice President of Revenue and Strategy for Edge Micro. We build micro data centers for the co-location market in underserved and large metropolitan areas as well as dedicated solutions for our core anchor tenants. Excellent. Kristina, hope you're muted. Hi, good afternoon. Kristina Witt here. Thank you, JSA, for the opportunity of this roundtable. A director with Solutions Architecting for EdgeConnex. We have been building data centers for over a decade through the Edge. And I've been in the data center industry for, I would say, close to two decades now. So just happy to be here today. Thank you. And last but not least you. Well, hello, this is again, good afternoon. This is Hugh Karspeck and Fedor. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time hearing you. I can hear everybody else. So if someone else, if I get a direct question, just repeat his question and then I'll be able to answer. JSA, thank you so much for having me. My name is Hugh Karspeck in Chief Strategy and Co-Founder of Dart Points. Dart Points owns and manages Edge data centers focusing on the smaller tier twos, the tier threes and what we call the tier four markets that are underserved with respect to high quality interconnection, peering, Kolo and cloud services. Excellent. Thank you all very much and thanks again for being here. We'll start very high level and I want this to be an open discussion. So I'll put our questions and please contribute as relevant and I'll obviously call some of you out on very specific things. Starting with the generalities, this is a very young technology. It's still very early days, but the vision of Edge and the buzzwords associated have always been 5G, IoT, AR, VR, autonomous vehicles. Obviously a lot of things that are still in development themselves. With the now growing actual deployments out there, where are you seeing these facilities being utilized both in terms of number of deployments and amount of capacity in terms of who's using them and how? Go ahead. I think for us it's been medical has been taken advantage of AR, argument of reality, virtual reality. There's been a surprising amount of content that's needed to be moved on their campuses as they develop it and with partners and then amongst other from one ecosystem to another. So we find that the medical community is really taking advantage of it in a way that surprises us. And this is Mark for Ajwana. We've seen an interest in on the medical side as well. I think what the assumption for most people when they think about Edge deployments is they're thinking it's gonna be like something that'll show up like a TV on every corner then they'll recognize it and they'll know what's being delivered. But Edge is actually being delivered in thousands of different ways already. And most of it is invisible, largely invisible to the average layman or casual observer from factory floor Edge, sometimes using private 5G to logistics oriented solutions to better traffic management, smart buildings, smart homes, et cetera, et cetera. And we're seeing things even like putting security out near the Edge for folks that are using remote applications. Oftentimes resolving security at the Edge offers a significant improvement in overall performance of their experience because otherwise all of the transactions with security have to go back and forth to some remote cloud location. When you, are these all, you mentioned medical, you mentioned security, are these all individual enterprise customers utilizing Edge deployments or is it the security vendors themselves and how much have the carriers or operators or software vendors been in play versus individual enterprise entities utilizing the facilities because of immediacy and adjacency? Yeah, I mean, I've had conversations with a few operators to answer that question first, but there hasn't been a lot of uptake from the operators that I've seen or at least not requested. Seems like the operators in most cases are waiting for someone to give them the workload and then they'll consider investing to support that workload. And maybe that's the right approach, but I think they're potentially likely to miss the opportunity if they continue to focus on it that way. We're seeing a mix as far as people that are actually requesting from technology-oriented providers that are creating a service to folks that are building their own service and deploying. In the case specifically of the security solution, it was a company that was creating security for remote control and remote access to highly secure control systems like a chemical facility or a dam or something like that where a combination of both latency, security and geographic sovereignty were important to the solution. I think for us, it's been we're neutral on carrying a neutral or interconnection facility. So we have found that maybe 5G on a campus from multiple providers. Omaha was early on 5G city and so multiple carriers providing a solution to a large facility on campus and then dark fiber being used to move large piles that would be 3D to holographic body parts or hands, parts, organs, whatever could be moved with that technology. And so they're sharing that data amongst regions. And Christina, you guys started out in a sort of carrier content-oriented focus. Has that continued to grow and how has that influenced your role? Yes, exactly. So, I mean, at Edge Connect, we have been building data centers for over a decade. We first started building edge facilities for content but we, of course, the introduction with the cloud, we have seen obviously that both contenders, the cloud and obviously content are driving our demand as well. So we're seeing both from the cloud side of the house and also for different reasons, obviously, they both want the cloud, they both want the Edge, but however, they have a different need for those, obviously for obvious reasons. For the cloud providers, they're looking more from the business aspect for the Edge, whereas your content provider, they're looking more for delivery basis. Yeah, that makes sense. And for Doug and Jason, you guys are obviously deploying in a variety of locations. Who's driving your deployment decisions? Early on, it was availability. Now, I assume it's more demand-driven. And what's... Well, I'll just jump in real quick. From what we've deployed already, and our markets are different. So tier two to tier four, the threes are really our sweet spot. We're not seeing 5G play yet. Those aren't our customers. Our customers basically, when you go into like a Statesboro, one of our facilities, we drop there. The connectivity is an issue in that town. So you have one major carrier and that's it. So when we come in, we bring our pod, we tie back to the closest carrier hotel and we bring all those carriers to that market, right? So now they can co-locate right there. They can buy cheap bandwidth, board bandwidth and have better connectivity appearing. So that's the option we're bringing in. We're building that infrastructure out. So when 5G does come into that market, that we're already there. They can plug right into us and the network is there. But we're seeing enterprise driving it, like the hospitals, the local governments, the education, where they can get a backup or they can get the remaining production through there. That's what we're seeing. Yeah, I'd say we're, early on our core anchor tennis for the content providers and cloud providers and still are driving a lot of our business. And from a cloud perspective, it was a combination of portions of their cloud stack that were latency sensitive, as well as some test dev to throw out there to see what kind of requirements and analytics they could get off of those stacks. The content providers, obviously pushing content out closer to the edge. And we're seeing some enterprise and some medical, but not directly through our integration partners. Those guys are the ones also providing the 5G services and platforms for their end user customers. So we're getting a lot of traction through our integration partners who are coming in and providing hybrid solutions to end user clients, private cloud, public cloud, dedicated cloud, like Azure or Outpost, as well as private 5G and then on into analytics and IoT that they're providing as a service. This is you all jump in a little bit. I'm not unable to hear any of Federer's comments and questions, so my apologies guys. So dark points on our front with regards to the types of customers. We've been really focusing a lot on what we call kind of the ecosystem, the customer ecosystem. So you have enterprises, you have cellular carriers, you've got fiber carries, you've got content providers, you've got cloud providers, all of which come in and consume these resources at different times for different reasons. And it's quite a rich environment, but in terms of you'll see certain sections of the industries come in earlier than others and then those that are coming later are coming in because of those that are currently in that environment. So it's kind of that diagram that we always see about the fishy, small fish being eaten by larger fish and so on and so forth. We're seeing that very much alive in these sites. That makes good sense and you can't hear me, but my follow on question would be obviously you guys have a combination of partner and integration enabler, but also you own facilities now and a large number of facilities. How is that? And this goes to everybody. How is that relationship of enabler versus owner versus partner evolved in the market? Obviously no one's gonna be able to service this market across the board. Mark, your whole model is predicated on enabling connections. Yeah, no, absolutely, Fedor. It's interesting that, and this is probably being seen by most everybody on the panel, but more and more of the customers looking for solution set, right? And it sounds so obvious. I feel stupid even saying it because in IT we were taught from when we were in diapers to not offer a technology, offer a solution. But when it comes to global provisioning of infrastructure, most companies are still providing a piece of what makes up a very large complex solution, whether it's the type of hardware you pick, the strategy for redundancy and resiliency in that hardware, what the application design requires, what kind of network performance is required, whether or not data sovereignty will play into it, what kind of compliance or local government ability to pay taxes apply to what type of data center is needed, what the growth prospects are, all of those things individually for any one of us historically in the data center space or in the network space seem like discrete requests. But when you put the solution together, you see that for the average IT owner, the average head of infrastructure, head of applications, whoever is responsible for building this, it's 17 projects before the first rack shows up on somebody's data center. And so helping to solve for that, especially today, I think is critical for all of us, but it's sort of a foundational notion for what we're doing at Edgevano. That makes sense and that actually begs the question. This goes out to obviously, Christina, your model is enabling people who deliver a service. How much of this is going to end up being a sort of tower model where the Edge data centers are all different vendors who enable a variety of operators to deliver a service, not necessarily obviously the carriers, but software operators, et cetera, versus direct interaction with end user. And how is that playing out so far? I know, Doug, you have a number of direct end user relationships, but is it evolving towards a more third party relationship versus first party? I would say it's mostly third party. That's, I mean, it used to be a direct customer relationship, but we're seeing more of a third party type of relationships evolving through the various ecosystems that we're seeing in the industry. So I would say mostly third parties. Yeah, I would say it's more of a mix with us because the bigger enterprise we deal directly with them, like I said before, like the hospitals, the state counties, that type of customer. But yeah, most of what you call leads or people that are interested are coming through an integrator or a managed service provider. I say from our business, you talked about the partnership piece and the evolution, but we've got end user clients that don't wanna manage infrastructure at the Edge but wanna be in multiple locations. So our core has always been to kind of focus on the CDNs and the cloud provider. So we're able to refer at times customers that wanna buy VMs at the Edge to one of our clients that's already buying space from us to allow them to deploy. Obviously we'd love to get those guys to actually deploy physical infrastructure if there's another paying customer that wants to deploy in multiple markets, but they don't wanna manage their own physical assets. And then obviously I talked about the integrators. We're getting, that's really our key into the enterprise market because we're a smaller company and we don't have a hundred sales reps. Others are shaking their heads because they're in the same boat, right? It's a way to increase the feed on the street, right? And making things simple. So making things a simple line item for integrators to be able to sell, it's co-location, it's been around for years. We didn't reinvent the wheel with our offering. It's very simple, it's very easy to sell. When you start talking about use cases and you start trying to manage more than your box, that's when things get complicated. We've tried to keep things simple and it's resonated pretty well with our partnerships as well as our end users. And if you're operating across multiple platforms and integrators, et cetera, then obviously they're gonna be interacting with one another. I know Jason, you guys have put a lot of focus on locating your data centers and network hubbing or relatively high network presence spots. And obviously Todd, your interconnection is a major part of your business. How significant is that in the request you receive for EDGE, is it usually one site, one point of connectivity or is it usually the interconnection with third-party networks from multiple network access, a very relevant part? I think for us initially, because we were focused on the big guys, they have agreements with global providers and we just decided to connect them directly to those providers and not get in the way. And we partner with folks like the co-location providers, folks like Todd, folks like people that have good interconnection stints in different markets that we can tether to so that we're not really trying to run an interconnect business. We want an ecosystem built, but until the carrier's localized traffic in the markets that we're going to, creating an interconnect model is just gonna be a hub and spoke, which we're happy to do and tether to, but our clients really drive our connectivity model. I can chime in a little bit on that. We're seeing something a little bit different on our end. We just announced maybe about a month ago, two months ago, our own IACs that we're placing into our markets. It's what we call our bridge IACs. And that is enabling local peering out at these locations, which is really allowing the carriers to come in and regardless of what contracts they may or may not have, whether they tether or backhaul back to other locations, which is always a part of the mixture, that ability to get that content and that carrier peering at these remote locations directly in that space has been a huge positive. So I think for us to be on a single site, we're surrounded by hyperscale. So people come there that are on-ramp partners or that want access to the hyperscale, they can't be in their facilities, so their internet or their networks are in our facility. So they come to us to get direct access to those hyperscale folks, and they want access to the internet exchange or ways to peer data, to put content out there. So it's, again, it's latency to those hyperscale, it's the access to their networks, and then the ability to peer is what drives it to our single facility. That makes sense. And one of the questions that's coming in, I think is relevant because of the range of folks we have here is, how are we defining edge versus traditional data center? Obviously, Christina, you guys are, we're the first edge play, but by contemporary standards are hyperscale, for a lot of your locations. So how are people differentiating between the two and how much of it is site-specific to the client, how much of it is providing a latency solution in an urban market, and how much of it is providing, as Doug mentioned, sort of access into your three places where there's a complete absence of alternatives. Right, so right now we're with the cloud. We're seeing a lot of our clients drive basically our locations where we need to go, where we are having these facilities where they are single tenants, basically, for the hyperscales that we build, build to suit facilities. Where if you have to compare it to more of the traditional colo, where you have a multi-tenant facility where most of those clients in that multi-tenant facility are gonna be more of an enterprise, we're seeing more of a wholesale market now that we're, you know, have a big focus on the hyperscale. How would others define the differentiation between edge and how it differs from traditional data center? Obviously, it's, in a lot of places, the same service for all intents and purposes. Is it size, location, form factor? Yeah, I think for us, you know, it started out and it's still a core part of our business to build out and underserved and underdeveloped markets where colo doesn't exist, but, you know, we've got clients that, you know, Christina mentioned, you know, build to suit. I mean, we've got a few of those engagements going on right now where we're building custom footprints for a few clients where it's not really an edgy type market. It could be just outside of a major metro, but our customers wanna take back control over their deployments versus going into a traditional bricks and mortar building with an old, you know, colo provider that can only do 150 or 200 watts a square foot. So, you know, we kind of coin the edge anywhere phase because we don't really define at edge micro, we don't define what is edge. It's really where our clients wanna deploy. And I'd say it's modular versus, you know, traditional, you know, tilt wall, you know, bricks and mortar type construction. In our case. Yeah, speaking for EdgeVana or, you know, maybe just my experience, not really EdgeVana is that really an edge data center to what was just explained is wherever the opportunity fits what's available, right? Or you have to build for. One of the key opportunities for existing infrastructure that, you know, most people building edge solutions or who already have edge oriented data center facilities in tier two, three and four markets is that the biggest advantage they have is not the design of their data center. It's not how big they are, how small they are. Although those are all important, including the density per square foot and the number of carriers and the peering, all of those things are important. But the single most important thing is the fact that they are already there. And if you're looking at somebody like an Amazon or a Google or a Microsoft or even a Cloudflare, anybody in those types of categories of the need for getting to the edge or deploying applications, support systems out to the edge is that whether they're building a 100 megawatt campus or building a five megawatt facility on the edge of Fremont, California, the due diligence involved in getting to the point where they bulldoze the first blade of grass is largely the same. So economically speaking, for the large cloud providers, it makes no sense for them to spend on 10, 15, 20,000 eventual locations at the edge, the same per location and due diligence what they would spend in developing a 100 megawatt campus. And that's where the edge players really have an advantage and folks who already have built in a location, even if that location has to be augmented to support future work, that's where the advantage lies. I absolutely support Mark what you just said because that is the, I mean, first of all, edge has been around 40 years, 50 years, cut my teeth on a lot of the access technologies that have kind of driven a lot of that. It is exactly that. It is when people try to differentiate whether something centralized or core or edge or what have you, it's really kind of a moot point. It is exactly, and a little bit of Jason's point, when a customer wants to be in a location, if there's nothing there, their mindset is very different. If something is there, then it's, oh, you're there. Let me go take a look at it. And so some of these can be facilities that they are, you don't want to undercut any of these facilities that are out there. But the point being is it's a very different dialogue because right now when we talk to customers that are doing these massive network designs and things, they're all doing it with an ancient perspective in mind in a lot of ways. A lot of the hubbin and spoken and a lot of the going back to the core. However, what they're trying to do is create a brand new set of data that is highly localized, highly rich. We see less of a latency model and more of a new revenue model that they're trying to access. But they can't do that unless they can, there's something that will allow them and enable them to do that. Thank you. I 100% agree with what you're saying. And I think what we're hearing from our clients is that data has gravity. So it's latency and it's only gonna go so far and it's gonna hit the ground. So they're deploying different applications, new ways to communicate, new structures, but that gravity is what forces them to the edge and have to look for solutions. And just real quick back to Jason's point, what we're seeing in the micro data center business and going into these markets is we're getting some very interesting calls and designs that companies want to compute on site. These big manufacturing facilities like one of the largest grocery chains is looking at putting one at every location just for their AI and for inventory management. And it doesn't make sense to go all the way back to the main hub. So if they feed what they want back so they don't need this robust connectivity at all these grocery stores. And it's fascinating what they're doing. So when you look at the edge, where do you stop it? And what do you say the, what is truly the edge? To us, the edge is where the, like everybody says where the data is, right? And that's why we go into these markets, these tier three and tier four markets because that to us is where the data is, but there's nothing to help them compute there. There's no choices. So that's our market and that's why we're fitting out to those tier three and tier fours. But it's fascinating to go into Atlanta and hear that they need 36 of these micro data centers throughout their grocery chain just in Atlanta. So it's gonna be kind of interesting to see how all this compute goes. I had a meeting this morning just with a company that wants to deploy them throughout their facilities just for eye recognition and all the data that they're collecting, 13,000 people come through every day at each location and they wanna capture that data. They wanna keep it on site but they wanna back all it as well. So it's extremely interesting on how all this, computer, these autonomous vehicles are using in these warehouses and now they're delivering pizzas and all this kind of stuff. So it's really interesting to see if where this is gonna go. I'd love to see that piece. Yeah, I mean, if I could add a little bit to what Doug said, I mean, I agree with the points everyone's made and just kind of to add some additional weight. As a long-time IT practitioner, one of the things I hated the most was the pragmatic decision, right? The pragmatic choice. And IT historically has always been about making pragmatic choices because either the technology wasn't ready or the cost to adopt the technology that could solve your problem was too high. Whether that was extra bandwidth, whether it was a data center in a remote location, whether it was the right type of hardware, et cetera, et cetera. And today, logically speaking, there has never been a better set of selections with easier adoption models, including even new chip sets in order for IT builders, technology builders to build the best fit solution. And yet when the average buyer looks to the market today, I'm certain, and I'm not gonna mention any large company names, but I'm certain almost everyone in this panel has experienced this at some level is that when you talk to somebody about deploying, they say, well, you know, I looked at the market and I decided to go all with this one company because they have the most data centers. And it's too hard to go with multiple data center providers. And yet, if everyone is using one data center provider, which in truth, even the largest actually only have about 80 unique locations, regardless of number of data centers, just think about what Doug was just saying as compared to 80 data centers globally, how many just Atlanta or Georgia needs, what the autonomy institute is looking to do in Texas might require as many as 1500 little data center locations across just the city of Austin, right? So when you think about the pragmatic decision people are saying to be, I'm gonna put my edge solution where every other player in the entire market has put their edge solution because pragmatically that's the easiest thing for me to do to get something deployed, right? So it's important for us as an industry to try to help facilitate how customers can absorb the infrastructure we build, not because we have a better logo or a bigger footprint, but because we can apply what we do to solve problems most effectively for the customer. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. That makes perfect sense. And if that is the end game, if it is gonna be very specifies in case specific deployments, and they go to edge data center is basically what Doug has out there and Jason's out there. People think about a shipping container size entity, are we gonna go from micro to nano to Pico? And is this gonna be a box drop at each location? And then the role of an edge connects or a farm is to just hook them all together? Is that sort of where it's all headed? It could be, but this is a whole nother apple we're gonna deal with, right? Because these facilities that we build currently aren't cheap, right? And you have to have the revenue to support dropping one of these. So I think you're gonna see a whole different evolution of micro data centers as well. I mean, dropping a half a million dollar box behind a grocery store and they take five cabinets isn't gonna work. But yet they want the redundancies and they want what a brick and mortar has to offer. So I think people are realizing you're not gonna get that, but you're gonna get close. But I think the evolution of the micro data center is gonna change a lot too, which it has to, I mean, it has to. There's gotta be some give and take here. There's no doubt that the edge data center is gonna go up the stack. There's no doubt. And towards your point, deploying these things is not simple in the form they are now. What have been the biggest deployment issues for bringing this edge to reality? And how is that, how do you think there's a reasonable solution for that going forward or what has to happen to make it more efficient to get these facilities in place? Here at edge connects, one of our most challenges that we had obviously is as we go into the tier two and tier three markets, just to get a lot closer to the customers. It's been mostly, there's always somebody mentioned, I think the cost of these facilities. It is not cheap to build those facilities, plus if you go abroad where we're seeing a tremendous amount of explosion at edge connects, we're seeing a tremendous amount of explosion in the Latin American markets and the Western European markets. We're seeing a lot of that. It's dealing with the local permitting that delays. And with COVID, there's been a whole set of challenges dealing with that. So for us, from our perspective, we're seeing a cost, but also dealing with the permitting, with the crews on site and so forth. I think with the facilities, there's a lot of money. The infrastructure is what you used to chase, used to chase the multiple power feeds or the facility things or the good or the bad. And now you're chasing the ecosystem. You're chasing the fiber, you're chasing the connectivity, you're chasing latency, you're chasing where your customer's at and stitching that together. And there's a lot of ways to do that and that's what we've talked about. But I think that you're either gonna build the ecosystem or you're gonna try to go where it's at. Or near it. We've seen an increase in the deployment size. So in the beginning, deployed out our markets, 8KW per rack, socializing through our core anchor tenant base who were driving us these locations, this was fine. And it still is for a lot that we're talking to, but after COVID's come out, we've seen kind of that demand go up as much as 22KW or rack. And I think it kind of goes back to, well, I do have these five or six locations that I need additional capacity. I've got to buy five times the amount of square footage to deploy that type of environment with a traditional provider. Maybe I wanna take back over some control. And we're even seeing it to bear, it's a long-term MSA with our client base and they're treating it as an owned asset through their organization, almost like they're, because it's a dedicated build. Even though we're doing it in a co-location MRC type engagement over seven or eight years, they're looking at it and treating it as an owned facility under their umbrella because they do have a lot of control over how the stacks are deployed and what they do and what they want. And Doug Shakin has said, he's probably seeing a lot of the same things. I think all of us are seeing probably the same use cases but we're focused on a couple of different ones. So I think that that's what it takes for the ecosystem is we're all gonna be in multiple markets. I don't think it's gonna be like it was in the old days where one edge provider moves into MarketX and no other edge provider goes there. I think we're all gonna be in a lot of the same markets and probably work together on a lot of things like we do with the Colos today and other partners. It's gonna be a fun, it's been a fun ride so far. I think COVID slowed some of these deployments down but it's been interesting to see the change. COVID has changed the dynamic. Vader, we do have another hand raised to join our discussion. Matthew Haynes from KDDI America, let's put him on. Hi, thanks for putting me on. I have a go to market question for you guys. Is the, what percentage of the go to market is sales outreach and what percentage is fulfillment from enterprise customers that want access to the edge market that you built the infrastructure in? I'll jump in first real quick. I mean, I'd say for us, and I think Doug had mentioned it earlier, when you've got a multi-tenant facility with say eight to 10 racks of capacity, we wanna fill a certain number of those, maybe it's three, maybe it's four to go into a market and then the next four to five to six racks are all outreach to fill with customers. So if we can get our ecosystem to commit to, let's say a third of the capacity, we feel confident that with our outreach and our marketing and our partnerships, we can try to fill the rest with 100% outreach. But to get to a market, it's fulfillment first and then outreach second. If I could just jump in, Jason, I mean, that we see the problem not really differently but we see a different part of that problem. And I would sum up what you were saying as one of the key problems for folks who are attempting to build net new infrastructure, even at small scale, like an Edge Micro, is that it's finding someone who wants that minimum success first build that's the hardest part because the vast majority of buyers that I've spoken to over the last five years, even before starting a company, seem to be mostly looking at small incremental initial deployments in many locations, one to 10 servers as an example. And so it's really hard without existing infrastructure as in data center location, networking, et cetera. It's really hard to justify a build for someone, even if they want 1,000 servers, if they want 1,000 servers in 100 locations. No, and I agree. And also what we're saying is we pick a market, right? And we start selling into that market before we deploy, just like, let me give you another one, like Lecter on Valdosta, Georgia, that's our next location. So, you know, 60, 90 days ahead, we start calling into that market. But what's interesting, and just like the brick and mortar, as we've all built them and ran and managed them, the customer wants to see it. The customer wants to know where their gear is going. So, hey, can you drive the Statesboro, which is two hours away to go walk through that one? So traditional, I mean, typically, it's how do you manage this process? Because a lot of them wanna see it, they wanna know the networks that are in, they wanna ping test it, they wanna see where it goes back. So it's the chicken and the egg, man. So to get in this business, you've gotta put it out there and, you know, you gotta put them on the ground. I know Jason's doing the same thing. You know, a lot of us on the call are doing the same thing. And that's the challenge, right? The challenge is telling your board, hey, look, we wanna go in this market. They sound great, we've got interest, but no one really gonna sign for that Ferrari without test driving it. It's amazing how few customers will say, no, trust me, we'll be ready when your deployment is ready and it'll match what you want. Yeah, right, right? I mean, it was great about like, well, the only engagement can really talk loud for a sense is public, but, you know, they're in 200 markets already, 250. So it's co-location to them, it's a commodity. So for them to kind of, and is, like you had said, it's a small deployment. It's not something that you would go and build a facility for. But they understand, right? And these were, you know, the way that they do their deployments with, you know, being able to, you know, run their entire, you know, platform on, you know, seven to 10 servers is amazing. But it's commodity, it's a budget they have to, it's like connectivity for them. You know, it's space power and connectivity and they already had their connectivity kind of defined. So that was an easy one. I wish they were all like that. And I think in the early adopters that we've probably seen and talked to, some the same, some different. You know, they understand the infrastructure comes first. And, you know, when the carriers, you know, we're getting a lot more feedback from the carriers, but, you know, being able to pop here and localize traffic in certain markets, it's a task and it's coming. But infrastructure is gonna come first. And that's, you know, the early adopters have realized that and we've been lucky enough to have a few of those on board with us to kind of drive our builds. Yeah, and I wanna check on Laura. I realize we're getting low on time. I have a few other things I'd love to cover if we can go over, but your call, if we give a concluding question or keep going. I think we need to wrap up, unfortunately, Fader, but we've got more to come. And we're gonna tell our folks how they can keep the conversation going. So if you'd like to wrap up now and we'll move it over to the networking lounge, but I'll let you wrap up. Yeah, and we have zero minutes, but if everyone can jump in, I'd ask everyone to give a quick snippet on what you saw in the edge market that you didn't anticipate and what your one unconventional forecast is for the future. I'll go first from the edge-connect side. What we're seeing is sustainability. You're gonna see a lot of that. And we're seeing just the beginning of it. You know, data centers are built all over the world. They have a demand for resources, natural resources, water and power. So we're gonna see, we're trying to get ahead, we are doing our job trying to get ahead to become zero carbon footprint. So, but that is, we are seeing that to become more of a topic in the data center world. Yeah, we're seeing the same thing, Christina. And just to reiterate the carbon neutral message is that many of the customers or potential customers that we've spoken to have made it very clear that it's not a maybe. It's, if you're not on a path to get to zero carbon, they just won't do business with you. It's that simple. If I had to pick another prognostication, which is maybe a little bit more forward-looking with less evidence is that as more and more companies globalize and they go through their business transformation and or look to adopt edge strategies, they'll be struggling with the things that companies like Lyft and PayPal and eBay and Uber, et cetera, have struggled with over the years. And those companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars to literally build global teams so that they could have a group of people in France that worried about communications and a group of people in Sweden that worried about data sovereignty, et cetera, et cetera. So they could do business everywhere and they could do it safely. How we as an industry potentially help facilitate that, I think could be a big difference between people adopting sooner rather than later because the vast majority of companies don't have $100 million to set aside to build global capabilities around local traffic regulations or network regulations and other services like that, even paying taxes in local currency, right? So these are all areas of opportunity, I think, for partnering and for providing a more comprehensive service to lower the barrier to entry for people to get into the edge market. I think for us, again, we're one side, but it's the insatiable need for connectivity. The amount of new fiber or new connectivity coming in and the amount of connectivity gets used up and then has to be refreshed, but it's, I don't know that it matters where you're at, but I think everybody sees a lot of need for bandwidth and connectivity. There's a lot of data and that's what's driving a lot of growth for us. It's just new infrastructure to bring in more fiber or new pathways to get more things in our existing building, 50-some carriers in the building and growing in Omaha, Nebraska. So Omaha is not Chicago, it's not, it's Omaha and there's 50-some carriers. Why is that? It's because of the edge. That's what drives it. I think I'm coming in here. We look at it as, I hate the expression, but it's been overused, but it's gonna take a village. We're all gonna have to work together. And one of the main reasons is for the kind of unconventional prognostication is you're going to start seeing that the local market will influence the macro market. Up to now, it's been going from the larger tier ones into the kind of the urban to suburban kind of mentality, but you're starting to see from gaming industry from obviously the phenomenon of the YouTubers and things, you're finding an outside is starting to come into the inside and drive things just from an entrance standpoint, from a social standpoint, and that infrastructure that's out at that local market needs to be connected to and emulate that, which is in the core. Yeah, and just, I'm gonna be real quick because we're short on time, but what's fascinating to me now that I'm out of the market, you know, we all carry a bag every day. So, and we're seeing this firsthand is just the amount of data that people are interested in collecting now and what they're doing with it is amazing. Just like I was talking about that grocery retailer, it's just, who would have thought walking down of the Kellogg's aisle, you pull that Kellogg's cereal, put it in your cart, you come back three weeks later and you get a coupon that pops up on your phone and you walk down and say, how did you like those Cheerios? Here's $2 off. That kind of stuff is fascinating and that's what we're seeing. Even a bottling, the Coca-Cola bottling plant that's outside of Atlanta, the same things going on there. I mean, it's just, there's so much data that they're capturing now. It's just, you would never thought five, 10 years ago that you would need that data to use it. So, it's just amazing. Totally agree. The carbon footprint piece for us as well, but you know, that's why I don't get mad when I'm on a social media site and all of a sudden something pops up and it's trying to sell me something. I'm like, that could be a good customer. You know, anybody that's trying to learn more about their buyer and like I said, by killogs or whoever it is, you know, they want so much data on their audience and it's smart. I mean, they need to understand my buying patterns and who I am. And that's great. That's gonna drive more commerce and revenue. It's gonna drive the industry, but it's also gonna drive more compute, more workloads, more deployments, which everybody on this phone wants. So have at it, you know, keep monitoring me. I think it's an interesting time that we're in right now. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Fedor, our guest moderator, Fedor Smith, president and managing partner of Atlantic ACM. Keeping us on point, so great today. Thank you so much for that. And thank you to our insightful speakers, a great conversation and we're not done quite yet. Just a reminder that our speakers are staying on for the remainder of the lunch hour to answer any more of your questions. All you have to do is meet them back in the networking lounge and then go ahead and table hop and talk to as many as you can. And viewers, if you were one of our first 100 registrants, we hope you enjoyed your lunch. Make sure you visit us at jsa.net to register for more upcoming JSA virtual roundtables. Our next one, marker calendars, it's August 29th. When leaders in our industry will talk about the COVID-19 effect, lessons learned around the world for critical network infrastructure. Well, that is a wrap. Look out for the playback of today's roundtable coming soon to JSA TV and JSA podcasts on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify and more. In the meantime, see you back in the networking lounge. Hopi Networking.