 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast. The newsroom for tech, telecom, and data center professionals. I'm Buffy Herakitas, coming to you from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada for Channel Partners 2022. And joining me today for this very special episode is my dear friend Lawrence Lee LL, Vice President of Global Alliances and Partnerships for ZenLayer. LL, what a pleasure. Welcome to JSA TV. Thank you, Buffy. Great to see you again. I'm excited to be part of this. Thank you. So LL, you've been in the channel for decades now. You're an industry veteran, a pioneer here. Tell us a little bit about ZenLayer and what they've been up to. Well, ZenLayer, as a company, we see this whole shift to the edge market. And our main goal as a company is to be a leading edge cloud service provider in the hard to reach countries around the world. We see countries like India, China, Southeast Asia countries, Latin markets like Brazil, Africa, as a growth engine of where a lot of the broadband technology is going to be coming from. And so that's where we see what we want to grow in those country countries. Yeah. Yeah, and ZenLayer has over 250 pops now around the world. You want to talk a little bit more about that? You know what's crazy is the company's been around for a little over six and a half years. And I remember, you know, like, let's just say right before the pandemic, we were in about 140 locations around the world, 140 data centers. By the end of last year, we ended up at over 250 data centers. And after the end of this year, we'll probably be over 300 data centers globally. So we see this rapid growth of continuing growth into a lot of the hard to reach countries like that I mentioned earlier. And so we're going to keep growing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, congratulations to you and the ZenLayer team on such rapid, you know, acceleration into some of these markets that are needing, you know, digital experience and growth there. Tell us a little bit more about some of your solutions, like the bare metal solutions. Yeah. So what we do at a lot of these edge markets is we provide bare metal cloud and we provide on-demand interconnection. You know, we have a lot of customers that, you know, are providing live video streaming, media entertainment gaming customers where a lot of their users are in countries like Brazil, Middle East, you know, you know, mainland China, you know, Asia, Asia pack countries. And a lot of that content needs to be processed, stored and archived locally. And so what we provide is on-demand infrastructure where a customer can go into our portal and provision dedicated servers in a matter of minutes. So if you're a gaming customer and you want to deploy, you know, your gaming applications, let's just say in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, you can go into a ZenLayer portal and provision servers, whether you need one servers or a hundred servers, and you need a connectivity from, you know, a hundred gigs up to a gig. You can provision all that through a portal leveraging ZenLayer's infrastructure. That's what we do. That's amazing. And so critical in today's landscape for sure. LL, I mean, as such a channel veteran and industry leader, what are some of your predictions for the future? So, you know, we're betting on, and we're gaming, we're betting on that the whole shift to the edge market is where things are gonna move. You know, when you look at a lot of the current providers, a lot of them are in these major tier one markets. But like I mentioned, we see the growth engine in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Middle East, Africa, you know, a lot of these areas, you know, the mobile broadband user base are just gonna grow. When you look at, you know, a lot of the data that's being collected through IoT, autonomous cars, even smart cities, a lot of that content needs to be processed locally. And so what we're doing is allowing these providers to provide, you know, that digital user experience with lowest latency and high performance leveraging our infrastructure in those edge markets. So we feel the whole shift to the edge market is inevitable, yeah. Definitely heading to the edge here. And then channel partners, are you finding that that's one of the hottest topics here this year, edge? Yes, and what's exciting is that, you know, I had up the global partnership and alliances and a lot of our partners who are selling our services are making a lot of money. They're closing some very large deals and I see, you know, a lot of the commission that are going out and a lot of them paid very handsomely out there. And so the market's hot right now. And I think this whole shift to the edge is really exciting right now. It is exciting and the market is hotter than ever. Where can channel partners and viewers at home go to find out more about ZendLayer? Number one, they can go to our website, ZendLayer.com. I have a whole channel team as well. My right-hand man, gentleman named Dan Baldorama is my point of contact to, you know, kind of provide any additional information, resources and just kind of explain how our channel program works. But our organization is very much focused in the channel. We're very channel-friendly. We work with a lot of our suppliers and vendors to co-sell out on the market together. So, you know, if you're free to reach out to us, our website has all the information where you can reach out to the key people within our organization. But I'm really excited to be part of this and really growing together with the channel community. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Lawrence Lee LL and ZendLayer for joining us today on another fabulous episode of JSA TV here from Channel Partners 2022. And thank you, viewers, for tuning in. Happy channel networking.