 Welcome to JSA TV Live, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today live from the beautiful French Riviera, where we're speaking today with investors, data center platform owners, energy specialists, all converging here at this first annual platform congress event. And joining me today, I have the pleasure of introducing to you Lena Tayera, founder and CEO of Orient Consulting Services. Lena, it's a pleasure to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself just as an introduction? Oh, hi. The pleasure is mine. I've actually set up my own company or in consulting services. After having had a career as a television producer, actually, and working in market research and business intelligence, having met the chairman of platform, Philip Blurr, and he's opened this opportunity for me to collaborate with him on a platform that brings in for inclusivity in the TMT space. We felt in 2008, if you remember, there was a crash. And the only sector that was still working, you know, against the grain was really the telecom sector. And where specifically was them at least, a lot of the big telcos were loaded at the time and they were looking to actually expand and invest elsewhere. So this is how I start being involved in the TMT sector and kind of build up to this point where we're talking in the conversation has moved so much, you know, because now we're talking about, you know, the future technology that's going to enable the metaverse, you know, what's it going to be, you know, kind of is it going to be cloud or is it going to be edge, et cetera. So the whole set of conversation, the fundamentals are the same is that we're talking about the infrastructure that's powering our digital future. And so the other dimension of this, I don't know if you want me to mention now my own initiative. I've created a publication called Let's Talk Tech. And this is a personal initiative because I feel these conversations that we having here, which is amongst specialists and geeks and technicians, what have you, need to be expanded. We need to bring in people into this conversation, widen the debate, not only geographically, but also different cultures in different regions. And there's so much being talked about on that front here. As you said, a lot of people are coming back together for, you know, one of the first times really since things closed down a couple of years ago. But it's, you know, sustainability, as you said, the metaverse, all the new trends in the industry are being discussed. And you mentioned your Let's Talk communication, Let's Talk Tech, Let's Talk Tech, these letters. What are you? It's supposed to be catchy. Yeah, yeah. Let's Talk Tech. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about what you're hoping to gain here from being at this event this week, from financial insights and more. Well, I have a practice that is a long term practice to follow the information or the story from the story maker, from the original source of it. And there is no better source for government or corporates than level C, CEO level. When they get, especially when you put them together in a third party event, so they're not actually speaking a written word by their PR team, so some corporate communication. They're actually sharing their insights and their knowledge. This has helped me grow a lot. It's helped me gain a lot of perspective from, you know, but you have to be curious as well. You have to want to. And I would like to relate this passion for learning and this curiosity to other people by writing storytelling about technology and what's going on in technology, trying to interest people. So hopefully they will meet me halfway and be interested because it's, for all our good. People who are designing and thinking about the technology and planning the future cannot do this in a myopic way on their own in some plush office or at home, whatever that may be. I think they will benefit from mining and baiting, including a variety of people because of the, you know, it's the correct ethical thing to do. The future of this planet is we're sharing it. So it's for all of us to be knowledgeable about what they do. But also you want to make sure that if you like the marketplace is knowledgeable enough so you don't face problems and you have what I call informed adoption. So ever it's going to buy your technology or use your product, et cetera, will be informed about it. And will do so if you like responsibly to themselves, to the society, to the environment. And this at the same time it has a third dimension, sorry I'm going to go on about this, but the other dimension it will lessen the work for regulators because it's self-regulating when people know about something. People have enough wisdom and intelligence to know how they will interact with it. And I think you mentioned a little bit about, you know, bringing different people to the table in this conversation and that is a nice segue I think into talking about diversity which has been a topic in our industry for quite some time now. But we, I know that tomorrow you're speaking on a panel actually with Jamie, our founder and CEO is moderating a panel with you on the role of women in technology. Yeah, I'm very excited. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Yeah. So you want me to talk about what you think is, you know, what are the benefits of implementing that sort of viewpoint? Okay. Well, okay, I think about things in different ways. I'll try and introduce that thought. So we tend to look at, I mean the old fashioned way to look at the value of introducing something new as in KPI. But we cannot roast above this because I think there is a new metric, if you like, in the corporate world which is called ESG, so this is something that everyone will be looking at your investor, your financier, the general public. And I hope that this ESG is not going to be a box-ticking. It's going to be a genuine conviction on behalf of a big organization that don't have diversity to rethink that and think how they kind of, how this could be, how their performance can be better improved by having different perspectives from different cultures and different geographic location. I'll mention two examples for you maybe to bring the idea closer. One is historic and one is very modern. So I'll take you from the days of, the days of Marco Polo. Yeah. Okay. So he... Let's start there, shall we? He's traveled the world and he actually, you know, his dissertation was China. So he wanted to serve or work with Jenkins Khan and be very close to this man who controlled all these armies and who pretty much ruled the whole world at the time. What he did, he sent him on an expedition to go to different places and figure out how people do things, to learn from them. Right. Okay? Yeah. Now, bring you back to current history. I've been watching some of the things I do when I don't have the chance to see CEO's face to face is actually to watch podcast of CEO, sorry, I self-admitted podcast product of CEO. Please continue to do them. So before I came, I've heard Elon Musk describe the, if you like sustainability of a company is its usefulness or it's not just perceived usefulness, how useful are you to society or to consumer or to a citizen. So he believes in, okay, you are useful to people. You will continue. You will be a useful company. This is pretty much ESG in a nutshell. So ESG is, I agree, I mean, it seems to be, it's something that every single organization has a position on or is developing a position on is thinking about how to advance their efforts towards this. And that's an important part of what's being discussed, I think, this week at this conference. Talk about some other tech innovation specifically in the MENA district and are there some things that you could highlight? Yes, there's a couple of trends maybe worth pointing here. One it's at the highest level. There's a difference between the Western region developed economies and the developing world major developing economies. So for example, in the GCC countries Gulf Cooperation Council, it's the government that is driving the tech advancement and the growth, not the private sector. So eventually, you know, they'll have to come on board and so would the general population because you can't, you know, you can't, we say, you know, they're saying in Arabic one hand doesn't clap, right? So you need everyone on board. I'm talking who's driving, who's leading, whereas here you see it's all of this is a private sector. They're driving all the innovation, OK, and the government is way behind. So this is the one trend is going to be. There's a lot of funds, and especially that this year has been a good year. I mean, Saudi Arabia is the fastest growing economy this year. It's faster than Asia, than the G7 and other major emerging economies. And they're very dedicated and investing heavily in innovation. The old money is sovereign in the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. So watch out for mergers and acquisitions. They'll be looking to expand, if you like, their capabilities within the tech sector. And it's going to be very competitive because there are a few potential unicorns and everybody wants them, right? So that's the trend on the one side. On the other hand, I think the region itself, we have our own innovation. I consider myself from the Middle East. So I'm an Arab person who's lived in London forever, so I would say we. So yeah, there is innovation that is happening in the ecosystem. I'll give you one example now, but they're not very good at communicating about. It's back to that kind of weakness, the weak spot of communication. People don't know what other person is doing. Like, you don't know what the left hand was nor the right hand is doing. But I think in the the blockchain and crypto space, one. Emirates is driving forward with just Dubai. So there's a lot of people who are working in the crypto, Bitcoin, Web three metaverse and what have you this whole ecosystem. They're finding it very attractive. There are incentives to get set up in Dubai and to create. I mean, this is this is the generation of, you know, innovators. They creating, you know, the next ground breaking usage of the blockchain. Because at the moment, the blockchain is still interconnected with crypto and Bitcoin, but there are much wider usage for it. And once you've got this system is established there and it's kind of slightly they will have to figure out, I mean, they have regulations and incentive in place, but it's interesting for us to see what mistakes are made, what we can learn from that. And there's so many applications that are yet untapped. We were actually just speaking of that this morning that you can't have crypto without blockchain, but you can have blockchain without crypto. And in fact, there's so many applications that are still being discovered and still being explored that exactly are of benefit. Exactly. We're talking about the creators creating communities and ecosystem. I think that's the way forward, going forward and collaborations. Lisa, I leave you with these, my pet love words to the civilization. We all want a better world, but maybe he's quite defined it. So let's just end with one final question. And I think because as we start to think of the future and I think that it may be nice just to highlight a couple of things. I know you're leading a panel tomorrow on the future of Neon. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Just a couple of key points. Neon was what Neon was today and I can give you a little. I think we had a very nice insight because not everyone knows what Neon is, but we just figured out what was what was the name of a new future. So we we had today a man who is helping create the infrastructure. That's going to power up this future. So what do you hear from now and now and again? You know, you will have articles about Neon and the line and Augusta gone and this and that, but how are you going to power all this up? So there is there are people already thinking about the digital infrastructure that you will enable this dream, right? So this is the kind of moving from smart city to cognitive city to move to cognitive city. You're going to have to, if you like, analyze a lot of data, maybe all you work to be done. There's a lot of work to do. So we we've had those insights from Neon, but we also heard from them call to partners and they trying to attract. They know they can't do this alone. Nobody can. The future to be created is going to be a collective thing is too massive. Collaborative. Collaborative, my favorite word. Yeah, so it was they called for people to say, come and work with us. And it was a very interesting. And yeah, so we've learned. I mean, I think they broke they breaking the ground of the new, the first data center, which will be massive. But there are more in the pipeline and data center is, you know, it's a high capital business that there's a whole ecosystem connected with it, including financier and investor real estate. You know, you've seen the kind of people. Yeah, everyone that's here. They're all part of it. This is what was amazing. Making it exactly. That's what's what is amazing is sometimes you go to events and you hear one thing, but today we've had we've been walked around every corner of the whole picture. Yeah. Well, this has been really interesting. Where can we send our viewers who want to connect with you or learn more about all these great insights that you can share? Oh, my LinkedIn profile. I haven't. I have to admit I am behind to develop. I want to develop much more platforms, but please bear with me until I do. At the moment, I'm finding it. I have enough time and bandwidth just to maintain a presence on LinkedIn. I need maybe more support to develop this initiative of mine. So anybody who can support my initiative. Let's talk. Please contact me. I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen for you here. And and thank you again so much for tuning in to JSA TV live as we stream today from Platform Congress in Antibes in the French Riviera. Happy networking.