 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Noland coming to you from VirtualPTC 21. Joining me today is Mizu, Chief Marketing Officer at Colt Technology Services, the industry leading network and voice services provider. Mizu, welcome to JSA TV. Hi, Laura, thanks for having me. Let's get started just recently back in November. Colt unveiled a new organizational structure and three-year strategy. So what does that mean for the company and your customers? Sure, before I dive into the actual strategy itself, let me explain a little bit about how we came up with the strategy because I thought it was quite unique in a way. So our CEO, Kerry Gilda, she was appointed as a CEO in May last year. Last year. The first question that she asked us was very different. It was a very simple question, but very powerful. So that was a question. She asked, what kind of company do you want Colt to become in three to five years? And she actually asked us what sort of company we want Colt to be. And that's how the strategy discussion actually started. And we came up with 10 work streams to think through our strategy. And I was fortunate enough to call on one of our strategy work streams, which was about network expansion and network optimization. So if you think from a very traditional marketing role, it was usually involved when we identify market dynamics or go-to-market strategy for specific services or products that we are launching in a market, et cetera. But it was more to do with, where do we want to expand our network as a next step? And where do we want actually, how can we optimize our connectivity to serve the bigger needs and demands from our customers? And that actually made us think through what we want to achieve as a company. And I think it was very different approach to, I've been in this industry for almost about 20 years now, but it was very different approach to any other sort of approach I've seen. So we started to look into it and it was completely cross-functional. So we had to break the silo and speak to, for example, technology department and operation department to understand what we can do to expand our business to specific areas and talk to sales team and to come up with our strategy in that specific work stream. And Kerry consolidated this view and basically came up with our strategy which addresses four areas that we think is the right way to go. So it's really built by all of us and we have special attachment to this strategy because it's not something that are given from top end or it's not really given by consulting firm that usually comes in when we come up with a strategy as well. So that's what I wanted to share because I thought it was completely unique. And when it comes to the actual strategy I mentioned about four areas but one of them is really about becoming enterprise enabler. A lot of companies go through digital transformation because the environment that they in has changed quite a bit from last year due to the pandemic as well. According to Gartner there are about 60% of entire workforce actually working from home. And it was actually expected to reduce by the end of last year but I think due to the second and third wave of COVID I don't think that has actually reduced across the world as well. So we had to really think through our strategy to see through how we can actually help enterprise organization to basically adapt to this new world and hence we decided to actually look into for example services like SD1 which allows those enterprise firms to design the network infrastructure to be able to accommodate different type of demands from the home employees who are working from home or people that need to use for example corporate telephone number in order to communicate with their customers as well. We've taken that into consideration and focusing on for example services like SD1 or cloud-based solutions. A lot of thoughtfulness and strategy and planning that went into the brand. So hot off the presses, fast forward. The new brand just live a few days ago. So as the CMO what does the updated branding really say then about the company's trajectory? Sure. Our brand actually had changed a couple of times previously. We started our business in 1992 and Colt actually stands for City of London Telecom. So when we started our business from our headquarters in London and then we refreshed our brand to be called Colt Technology Services in 2015, oh sorry, 2010. So basically that was the time we realized it's more than telco service that we are providing. So we renamed ourselves as a technology service provider and also we've stayed away from mentioning about London one single location because we expanded our business into Europe at that time. And then we actually expanded our business to globally about 2015. So it was about six years ago when we started to use the previous brand. And we basically developed ourselves as a telco service provider who each covers 20 different countries and also 52 metro cities locations. And we wanted to actually embrace the facts of us supporting enterprise companies going through all the digital transformation that they are going through as well. And we wanted to actually embrace the sustainability as well as the diversity of the company as well. As you can probably see, our CEO is a female and more than 50% of our senior executives are actually female as well. And maybe as you can see, I'm not originally from UK, I'm from Asia and that represents really nice coverage of many different regions as well. And we wanted to actually come up with a brand that can represent that diversity and sustainability that we are building to give back to the society and care about the environment that we are in while we emphasis on supporting our customers as a technology service provider. Wonderful. Well, you did touch on Mizzou just a few moments ago, SD WAN. So last month, your team launched SD WAN 2.0. Why is this one better at better SD WAN experience? Right, SD WAN previously or originally was really about optimizing all the routes on the MPLS network or IP based network. But with the fact that employees are now connecting from home and the flexibility required for network connectivity has shifted completely. So we wanted to make sure that we invest on the services that support our customers to go through this journey. And so SD WAN 2.0, we can actually support those requirements of connecting to the employees working from home and also addressing some security concerns and needs out of this platform as well. And that's how it evolved from the previous state 2.0. You mentioned Colt CEO, Kerry Gilder, she just spoke on the writing the title wave of new realities panel about the changes 2020 broad and then what's in store for 2021. And by the way, PTC attendees who couldn't do the session, you might wanna go back and check out the recording for sure. So Mizzou, what would you say then, just building onto that, what would you say about what's ahead for the industry this year? Absolutely, one of the key factors that we are looking at is the shift to cloud. We have been focusing in this area, but I think the movement will continue to grow. And especially with all the digital transformation that all the companies are going through now, they will actually move more applications to the cloud and hence a lot of enterprise firms will actually want to have end to end true experience by use of cloud services and also connectivity to support that as well. Wonderful, we want to learn more all about Colt and what you're working on and the new brand and so much more new products. So where can our viewers go for more information to get an update? That's a very good question. Usually we say come and visit our website, but in this occasion, I actually recommend everyone to actually subscribe to our page on LinkedIn because if it's website, you're going to have to keep coming back in. But if you're subscribed to our channel, you actually get automated notification based on your preferences as well. So I would actually recommend you to take a look at our LinkedIn channel. There you have it, go check them out on LinkedIn. Well, thank you so much for your time Mizzou. It's been a pleasure and come back anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. It was really good pleasure. Thank you. Thank you viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.