 This is JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine and welcome to JSA TV. With us today, we have Mr. Kirk Ophell. Kirk is the founder of DCAC, Data Center Austin Conference. Kirk is also the executive vice president of platform delivery at Aligned Energy. Kirk, welcome to JSA TV. Hey, Dean, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk. I'm very excited. Outstanding. Well, Kirk, we're gonna just jump right in. I understand that DCAC is entering its fifth year and there has been a lot of talk about this conference, these events, with a number of people actually saying that it is quite a diversion from the more sleepy or maybe stale would be a good word for some data center conferences. DCAC is disruptive and defies convention. That is one of the things that I've heard quite a bit about DCAC. But for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about the event and ultimately what you set out to accomplish when establishing the event? Yeah, you got it. Thanks for the question. So this was really a David versus Goliath opportunity for some people like myself that have been to a ton of tech conferences that were just kind of sick of the same tech conferences. We decided to break out our slingshot and go against the regular industry standard of what a conference should look like. And we tried to create what would be the Anti-Data Center Conference, which is what hopefully now is discovered as one of the most disruptive conferences in our space. It's not the largest, but it hopefully is the most meaningful. So selfishly, I live in Austin, Texas. It's a live music capital of the world. It has a great deal of energy, a strong tech vibe here. And we decided that we were gonna write a code of requirements to make DCAC come to life. And it's taken on a life of its own in the last four years. This will be our fifth year. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm hearing. And you're actually segwaying into the event better than I could actually myself. But all events kind of are built from kind of a speaker base. Who's going to be there? What are they gonna talk about? Why should someone attend? You have been quoted as saying that the speakers at DCAC are thought leaders with quote, big fat brains and even bigger ideas. Number one, I love that. But they come from outside the echo chamber of kind of the data center community. Why don't you tell us a little bit about those speakers and what our viewers or attendees might expect from them at the event? No, you got it. It's been a crawl, walk, run evolution of how this conference evolved from speakers because that really is the quote unquote content and the value. So like, you know, you have to be the same as some of these other conferences before you can be different. So in our early years, we created panels and we put all the most prevalent data center owners and operators up there, people that were deploying the largest volume of capital into this space. And then when we were lucky, we'd pick up a couple of enterprise end users and we'd bring them in as well. And we kind of evolved from that where it's more like a South by Southwest meets TED Talks theme, high energy standalone speakers. And instead of, I mean, we discovered with this compute demand stuff, you can't get ahead when you're trying to get even. So I felt that the narrative in the first year was really focused on what are we doing with today's State of the Union? And really what I discovered is we needed to be talking about future compute demands. And that was technology that was still evolving. That was five years, seven years, 10 years away from being adopted by the mainstream. So we completely shifted and we pivoted pretty hard to future compute demands. And that's the only focus. You're gonna see a lot of people that are technologists and thought leaders that are gonna hit the edge. We're gonna have a huge focus on VR and AR. Artificial intelligence will be covered but the edge in artificial intelligence will definitely be a distant second to personal reality, augmented reality and the impact that consumer wearable devices will have on the internet demand as it grows. So there's other things that are there, the hyper scale, the cloud, but the things that are really emerging that are gonna have the next big spike for us in our vertical, those are the things that we're gonna be talking about. We have companies that you have not heard of before and we'll bring in keynote speakers like IBM and Intel and PayPal and EIEIO, but we wanna introduce some groups that you've never heard of before but they're gonna be disruptive and they're gonna be talking about things that are gonna be pretty prevalent in about two years from now. Yeah, I love it, I love it. So the content clearly is there but the networking atmosphere is there too and a bit unconventional. I'm hearing that the DCAC has become known for as you mentioned music and the South by Southwest has become a very big cultural event and it sounds to me like DCAC is kind of working its way or has become somewhat of a cultural event as well with music, food, vibe and some truly out of the box amenities. To name a few, intervenious vitamin therapy, hand rolled Cuban cigars, straight razor shapes for men and salon style blowouts for women and for men. They all contribute to that networking atmosphere. So why all the unconvention? I don't even know if that's a word but tell our viewers a little bit about that merger of content and technology and kind of cultural and these unconventional ways of putting together an event. How does that ultimately lend to a more positive or fruitful networking event? Sure, now another really great question. So I like many people in this industry have attended many conferences in which we've never even walked through the front door but we do see the IP extreme networking that takes place outside of those events. I've discovered that when you put someone in an environment where they feel more relaxed and more comfortable there's a greater exchange of ideas that take place and I didn't wanna create a conference that had two different things typically there's the conference that's structured and then there's all the things that happen outside of the conference that some people didn't get a chance to be a part of. What we thought we'd do is try to create such an amazing environment where a greater of exchange of ideas could take place and no one would wanna leave. So everything was merged into one. You're gonna have the opportunity to meet with people you otherwise would have never met with had you not been there and because there's so many great things with high energy taking place around that conference there's nowhere else to go. So all the energy, all the action, all the traction of two conferences merged together into one at DCAC. So we think that the networking elements of this conference are just as important as what you're gonna learn or what you're gonna hear from the speakers. The networking is just as important we don't try to trivialize that at all. Yeah, no, it sounds like some of these kind of ancillary pieces of the event ultimately blend to a more conducive networking event. So I mean, the audience then becomes captive. So I absolutely love that. So the theme of DCAC 2019 is the next evolution of technology growing tomorrow's workloads. So as we enter this, I guess you could say the fourth industrial revolution and begin to see technology such as those that you mentioned earlier, AI, autonomous vehicles, IoT augmented and virtual reality, wearables, et cetera. What do you see as the role of data centers in this significant transformation? Sure, yeah. I mean, the data center's capability and limitations will define what we as the consumer get to enjoy in the luxuries of technology. So I think that when you see high adoption rates for consumer wearable devices in the years to come, I'd say in the next eight quarters you're gonna see a lot of that is more technologies being rolled out to the market that's more economically efficient. I think that the aggregate volume of demand of technology requirements that go with that are gonna demand that there's more data centers, more powerful data centers in more places. So the secondary, not just NFL cities but the secondary markets, the third tier markets that are considered edge, all those markets where all the eyeball content video cash is gonna be, it's gonna determine the quality of life in that market if there's not a strong enough data center that are support e-commerce and uploading videos and sharing tweets and all those things. So the data center will be the fourth and fifth utility of life in the days to come and the years to come. Excellent, okay, I'm gonna go off script. I know that we're getting short on time here but we've talked a little bit about what you might see as some of your predictions with regard to the industry. Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about your predictions with regard to the DCAC event. What is it gonna look like in the next five years? No, man, I wish I had a crystal ball, but I did. You're welcome, Kirk. What I would think is we're gonna continue to introduce, we're gonna always have data center operators and those that are in the ecosystem of a data center, those are the architects and the engineers that design it. The contractors and the builders of all the trades that bring it to life, as well as all the manufacturers of equipment, gear, software that put the technology together to create this huge void for servers and storage and networking software. I think that we're gonna be up to stack about five different degrees in a couple years from now where the only thing we'll be talking about will be these growing compute demands and how to get a linear trend on them to understand how flexible data center operators need to be designing for their space and how scalable it has to be because the just-in-time requirement for this technologies, it's only gonna speak up, it's never gonna go down. So I think that what you'll see is a shift from the void, the people that create the void to what's demand, what's drawing, what's dictating what the size and the volume and capability of that void looks like. So again, we'll always have owners and operators as a part of our summit, but really those technologists are gonna be the ones that are gonna give us a peek around the green curtain and understand what are these big fat brains thinking of that we're gonna have to deal with ripple effects for in the next five years. So DCAC's focus is to try to get ahead of that stuff. We're not talking about what's going on now and how people are doing things now. We're talking about why people are doing things now and what the impact that's gonna be in five years from now. That's what the conference is for. Yeah, I dig it. And frankly, I'm sold. Hopefully the powers that be here at JSA will let me out of the cage and I will actually attend that event. I know that some of the others here are excited about it as well. For our viewers that wanna know more about the event, where should they go? You got it. www.dcac-live.com. They could just also Google data center conference Austin and they'll come up. It's the only data center conference in Austin, Texas. And I think that they'll with breadcrumbs be able to find us relatively easy. Outstanding. Kirk, thank you for being here and thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon.