 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. Alec Gilner. Alec is the SVP of cloud and strategic sales for Light River Alec welcome to JSA TV Thanks for having me Dean You bet you bet so we're gonna just jump right in here now I know that you recently joined the Light River team as their SVP of cloud and strategic sales But why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about Your past experience and ultimately what brought you to Light River Yeah, sure first very happy to be at Light River. I think we're And if you look at the optical space and then what we do, I think a we've been around the longest be We have probably more expertise than anybody else In the industry But a little bit about me been in telecom all my life I started my career as an outside plant engineer at Bell South While it was a college a co-op student at Georgia Tech You can also count my time bagging groceries at the local supermarket in high school if you like Just having a little fun Anyway, I continued with Bell South and various engineering and planning degrees or planning functions for about 10 years After that, I thought it'd be pretty good to branch out into the hardware side of the business My first stop was Nortel. I was responsible for selling transport and access product And then I decided to try a couple of startup first one being read that network might remember them Keep focus there was how to efficiently connect consumers to the internet. They were also a very early packet optical believer after that I went to Couple other optical startups one being MoVas Networks. We were acquired by Adva optical Second to that once BTI systems the kind of the first to target the data center interconnect market for transport And we were ultimately acquired by Juniper Networks where I stayed for a few a few years and ran an optical overlay sales team for North America focused on optical solutions and business transformation All of these companies, you know, gave me a broad range of exposure Important thing even though some of it was 20 years ago the technologies, you know, that I was exposed to or really all required You know for today's customers that includes tier one to service providers and that's those she lacked the hyperscalers or the smaller DC plays Of course federal government and Unis. I've pretty much sold You know to everybody out there with exception of enterprise You know, I think, you know, the value that I bring the light river is this broad exposure To customers large and small and having sold products all the way from layer zero through layer three brings Pretty good value the light river. That's what excites me. I think I think I can do good things here And on the other end, I think Mike and Glenn will kind of get tired of competing against me. So I had to take me out That's that's hilarious Alec and honestly I mean your name dropping kind of the the who's who in the optical space and beyond that obviously so Bringing you to the river team was probably a no-brainer for for the execs there But let's talk a little bit about light river now You guys have a you know factory built network solution and it offers a great deal of Value to the industry. Why don't you talk to our viewers a little bit about that network and about the value that it brings? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a truly unique service In the industry. I haven't seen anything like it before You know if you go back in history one of the greatest inventions during the industrial revolution was the creation of the assembly line We've taken the same approach here at light river might sound silly, but factory built Is just what the name implies This is where we take dedicated experts and They complete a single task or one or two tasks on the assembly line Throughout the factory built network process the point being that You know, they're experts in their field for what they do So a they do the job well and B. They do it efficiently All right, it has the added the added benefit You know, if you're in a controlled environment the factory with standby resources and extra material on hand in the event something goes wrong You know, you can't you can't account for this if you're in the field All right, so if you compare this to the traditional model of having a couple of field techs Working in the field until three o'clock in the morning trying to meet an SLA And then they run into a failed part. They don't have the right test equipment They've got bad or dirty fiber jumpers Unexpected fiber quality, you know, and you've got the guys a thousand You know a thousand miles away from the home office and from all their support resources You can see that they might not exactly be set up for success. Okay, so, you know, if you go with the factory built Network process, I don't think, you know, there's any comparison in the end You know and a factory built network cuts the installation time and half Reduces, you know, the time on site so the customer has fewer maintenance windows and escorts required to manage You know, so overall, you know, it's a more timely installation and results in a higher quality installation as well And, you know, the additional benefits to the customer go beyond that You know first, you know If we can turn the network up more quickly and they're tying the revenue generation is accelerated And, you know, and ultimately with the network like this, the customer probably spends half of its own internal Management time to manage that project to manage that project, you know, that's cut in half as in wet as well Right and so since, you know, since the live network is up and running in the factory, you know We have the added benefit of being able to pre provision the network And the customer can actually come in and be trained live on the actual network that they're going to be operating in the future Well, thank you very much for that, Alex So why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about any recent projects or any new developments that you're working on there at light river? Yeah, certainly Dean, you know first and foremost We must provide real value to our customers to remain relevant to them Their requirements are constantly changing Due to both changes a in their business model And b just in the accelerating technology introduction the choices put forth in front of them You know, it seems like there's there's something new, you know every three to six months and then it has to be evaluated You know the hardware and software platforms required to support these changing demands are changing too Think what they're doing at the cell site now They're deploying cell site routers in the optical space. You've got flex grid You've got white box solutions with open software SDN and NFD and of course orchestration You know, these really are not just buzzwords successful companies are finding ways to implement these You know in their business model and as a result they're driving down costs and they're being more responsive to customers But you know, it's it's it's not easy It's complicated and what makes light river different in my opinion is our is our broad range of multivendor You know engineering expertise We do business with you know, most major major hardware providers with several white box providers And you know, we have over 50 Plus-degreed engineers on staff. All right, so my goal at right river at light river is to become a trusted partner To each of our customers and you know, the customers that I want to target are the ones that are running lean Either in operations or engineering and you know, if you look at the financials of these companies the cfo's And you know the the business community and the stockholders Are are demanding that they shrink, you know as a percentage dollar of revenue that they shrink that operations and that capex cost Okay, so, you know, if the teams are running leaner, I'd like to establish light river as that trusted partner That can allow the companies to focus on what you know, their core business model is and what they do best And then let light river take the rest So, you know, it's really migrating to you know, it's a solution than a consultancy And that's where I'd like to take light river moving forward I love it. Alec and I can't thank you enough for your time this afternoon. I feel like we could probably have Taking the entire afternoon But thanks for being with us today. I appreciate it Certainly thanks for inviting me and have a good day You got it. You got it and thank you viewers for watching jsa tv. We'll see you soon