 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan coming to you from virtual PTC 21. Joining me today is Phillip Marangela, Chief Marketing Officer at Edge Connects, the industry leading network and voice services provider. Phillip, welcome back to JSA TV. Thank you. Thank you. I wish it wasn't virtual. I wish we had our annual pilgrimage to Waikiki. It's definitely missed this year, but I'm trying to look the part at least, right? So get in the spirit of things. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. We'll follow your lead, Phillip, you look fantastic. Well, let's get started talking about Edge Connects and you of course, 2020 was an interesting year to say the least. And while there were numerous uncertainties as the industry pivoted as a whole, Edge Connects weathered those uncertainties and seemingly came out of the year with a renewed sense of purpose and affirmation that your business strategy was indeed a good one. So if you could sum up your 2020 for us. Yeah, look, you know, I think it's true for all of us in the data center space like ourselves, 2020 is certainly a challenging year personally for so many people around the world and so forth. But from a data center perspective, I think it was certainly one of the best years ever, right? Because now that we're doing these calls we're studying from home, exercising from home, obviously working from home and so forth, our homes have become the new Edge, right? And so there's a greater need more than ever to build out the infrastructure needed to allow us to, you know, Netflix all the time and Fortnite all the time and all these kinds of things are putting a huge demand on the network and data center infrastructure. And so for us and our customers, right? There's been a tremendous demand to build further out to the Edge, build out more capacity and compute to enable all these services that we're now doing from home. And then, you know, you layer on top of some of the trends that were already happening, like AI and machine learning and 5G, right, autonomous vehicles, these were already putting the need and the demand for greater network infrastructure and obviously data center infrastructure in a more distributed fashion around the world. So just compounding all these things really resulted obviously for a great year for us to support our customers and, you know, going into this year, you know, starting the year strong and continue that trend. Could you tell us more about the EQT deal? How does that change or impact the trajectory of your business strategy? Sure, sure. Yeah, you know, as part of the good news for us last year, we were acquired by EQT, one of the world's largest infrastructure funds based out of Sweden. And for us, I mean, it really allows us to continue our strategy, right? Same company, same name, same team, but now just kind of accelerate our strategy, build out further where we are today and extend to more markets where we're not today and, you know, further field in Europe and South America and Asia is a big gap in our portfolio. So, you know, you'll see us to continue to expand at the end of the day to support our customers, where they want to go, when they want to go, and, you know, kind of the capabilities that they need to better support their customers. Building on that global market expansion, you literally just announced some big news for Santiago, Chile. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, we just announced this week our kind of newest dot on the map in Santiago, Chile. That's been in the works for a while. You know, Oracle was one of our anchor tenants down there, but you're seeing broad-based demand from a lot of hyperscalers wanting to kind of go beyond just Brazil, right, to support all of South America. And so last year or the year prior, we announced Buenos Aires and Argentina, next up was Santiago, Chile, which we announced this week and we'll continue to expand to support our customers throughout South America. So it's just emblematic of what I was just saying in terms of the need to demand to expand and have a much more distributed architecture for all these major service providers. Let's come back to how we started talking about the lessons learned and what we experienced and what Edge Connects experienced in 2020 with now 2020 in the rearview mirror, hopefully, now. Tell us what that means for the edge and the future of the edge. You were talking about the home is the new edge with Netflix and Fortnite, which I know is at my house. So I can attest to that, but talk about maybe what it means now looking even farther into the future of Edge and how that's gonna impact everything. Sure, I mean, we're actually just coming out with kind of a thought leadership piece on how the cloud is better at the edge. And the whole point of that, it was the same for content, of bringing the content, the games and so forth closer to the end user eyeballs, closer to the people who are streaming that content or playing those games. For cloud, it's the same thing. Bring your cloud, don't make the customer come to you, bring your cloud closer to where the enterprises are around the world. And that's something that our platform enables. It starts with the edge data centers and these kind of distributed markets, bring in the networks that then connect in those markets to the local enterprise and then overlay that with a lot of these cloud on ramps and cloud nodes and cloud deployments that in the rest of the ecosystem that goes around that storage and security and obviously the compute. And then everybody wins. It's like this integrated supply chain of cloud that is local in the neighborhoods where these enterprises operate and where their customers are located and where their employees are now working from home. All right, so we talked a lot about the momentum and success for Edge Connects in 2020, even already in 2021, starting off with a bang. What can our viewers expect from Edge Connects the rest of 2021? Yeah, I mean, it's really pedal to the metal, right? And we wanna continue to focus and execute delivering on the requirements for our customers that are in flight. We will continue to expand, right? So expect to see more dots on the map, more expansions to new regions. And it's just making sure we can continue to support our customers wherever they need to go. So it's not rocket science, it's really simple. It's just focus on the customer and deliver the data center solutions that they need. And where can our viewers go to learn more and follow the latest news from Edge Connects? Obviously follow JSA, they're a great media partner of ours. And then you can go to edgeconnects.com and you can see our blog there and we're also on social media and LinkedIn and the usual Twitter and what have you. All right, go check them out. Thank you, Phillip, so much for your time. We appreciate it, always a pleasure. Yes, and hopefully next year we'll be back to our routine in Waikiki on the balcony, overlooking the ocean. Excellent, and you are the trendsetter for this year's virtual PTC fashion requirements. So thank you for that. I try. Thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast, happy networking.