[Music] welcome to T geography explains the internet the show that explores the business behind all the ways humans stay connected around the world I'm your host Greg Bryan and my guest today is Dennis thankachan who is the co-founder and CEO of Lightyear we had Lightyear on once before about a year and a half ago explaining their approach to creating a digital Telecom life cycle automation platform for Enterprise networks this time Dennis has joined me mostly to talk about their state of connectivity report that dubs nicely with many of the issues we think about here at T geography we first get into how Lightyear has seen Network prices react to Global inflation in some cases bucking the very long-term Trend that telecom prices always go down we talk about point-to-point service in the Enterprise Network and how dwdm is actually emerging as a more common product for Enterprise customers we get into the impact of AI and other drivers on bandwidth demand and then cover a topic we hit often at T geography namely where the market is with decline of MLS and the corresponding rise of sdwan we close out the state of the connectivity section by talking about where Dennis sees the nas Market from the perspective of what their customers are actually looking at and buying finally we get an update on Lightyear's platform and Dennis's take on the state of automating network inventory and sourcing in the current market there's a lot to cover here this is definitely an information dense episode uh so I will let you get to it quickly but first I'll just say please do like the show rate it on whatever platform you're listening to share it with a friend anything that you can do to help us we much appreciate and as always really do feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or wherever you can find me and um offer up thoughts about the show suggestions for future episodes and things like that okay on to the interview with Dennis [Music] [Music] okay welcome back to the show Dennis thank you for having me back on Greg yeah absolutely so it's been uh about a year and a half I think since you were on so for anyone who might not have heard that episode could you just start out with um just a little reminder of kind of your background especially because it's not maybe uh sort of typical to my guests that uh work their way through the Telecom World necessarily right but a little bit on your background and and how you came to start the company light here absolutely uh yeah it is quite random how I ended up in Telecom but I've grown to love it um so I have been passionate about software and Technology throughout my life and I've sort of made attempts you know starting from middle school high school at creating various technology Ventures um in college I studied computer science and finance and after that I worked at Goldman Sachs doing Investment Banking not with the goal of pursuing a career in finance but really with the goal of saving up some money and doing something entrepreneurial really probably in the software space that was sort of where my passion arose uh I worked at a large hedge fund after that investing in public stocks um it was like A10 billion fund run by a famous investor named Stan drucken Miller and uh while there uh I ended up leading their investment activities in Telecom and became a huge nerd on the Telecom space and I sort of Came Upon A Unique thesis around fivr build outs and quit that job to start an ISP actually and in the context of build building that ISP I will say my initial thesis was not really a great one to pursue the ISP Market is tough believe me IB ISP Market is tough and without getting into it you know my specific spin on it wasn't particularly attractive but what I did discover uh was that the business Telecom space in aggregate was a lot larger than I thought uh as an investor originally and a lot less uh a lot less digitized than I would have thought as an outsider I was actually quite amazed with the lack of digitization in the space for things like uh procurement installs even things like billing that seem simple can you f me in order for that circuit please yeah and uh you know from from there uh completely changed my thesis to basically uh determining that you know if if I could digitize many components of the space uh there would be a really really valuable Enterprise product to be built out in the software space and that's what led to the start of Lightyear and since then uh that was called it like late 2019 I haven't looked back yeah yeah well and that's I mean that's great timing I think for having fallen into Telecom which I I've I've traveled many paths in the Telecom world and I think most people who are in Telecom found themselves in Telecom rather than looked to be in it that kind of seems to be the way it is it's not even even within it's common frustration I hear even within sort of um computer science and electrical engineering programs uh they're much more focused on the sort of software world or maybe even Cloud but not uh you know connectivity as as we're going to be talking about right today so so we'll we'll get Dennis I think a lot more uh towards the end of the show about what exactly you're doing at Lightyear but just give us maybe the the elevator pitch to start so that we can frame uh the start of our conversation on on sort of the state of connectivity so Lightyear is what we call the Telecom operating system that's sort of our marketing term for the product but it really does encompass what it is it's effectively a software platform targeted at any Enterprise uh that digitizes and automates the life cycle for your Telecom services so that'll include services like internet connections Wan circuits Data Center space phone systems Etc um aiming to automate the life cycle for those services from procurement through renewal and setting up for continuous and systematic cost optimization and within it we have three core products we have procurement which effectively is software that allows you to digitally rather than manually conduct Telecom rfps and manage your installs and it's powered by uh what we call the best Enterprise Centric proprietary dat data set in the space that continuously gets better over time um maying to get you sort of the right vendors at the right price we have a network inventory manager that's effectively like a digital system of record for your Telecom Services think of like what a CRM does for your prospects doing that for your Telecom Services eliminating the need for spreadsheets and it'll automate things like ticketing and renewal res shopping and finally we have a bill consolidation service that handles Telecom bill payment for for you so you just pay one monthly bill to us and we'll audit all of your invoices and get them paid to you and you add it all up and for an Enterprise that uses Lightyear you'll see a lot of time and cost Savings in your Telecom line item right yeah you know it's it's interesting that you mentioned that that this all came about in 2019 you know when I think back to that time I I was running this conference series about ws and it was right at that time where the the vision of the future started to kind of emerge of hey I'm a I'm a mid to large Enterprise mostly throughout my career I've picked up the phone to my my EC representative sales rep right and and said you know here's here's uh my my RFI or RFP and and what's the price going to be right and when sdw comes along and when the move to Cloud comes along and then after that sassy and all these things that really shook up the way that as an Enterprise I can think about how to Source procure pay for all of these things my network so I think um uh we it's it's been a really interesting few years to see some of these things that I was hearing as ideas of the future now sort of come into reality so that's where I want to start Dennis is um looking at uh Lightyear has what you call the state of connectivity right of looking at your customers I take it and understanding what they're doing with their networks um so so first just um you know tell us uh how how you developed uh this this report that you guys have been working on uh via your customers uh data that is right so we have today over 350 Enterprise customers um you know a good number of them are Fortune 500 companies a good number of them are midmarket Enterprises and some of them are also smbs as well and we run thousands and thousands and thousands and thousand thousands of circuit rfps and the quantity we're running grows month over month the the Quantum of quote data the Quantum of install data the Quantum of vendor data Geographic data and the like um we get a really good on the ground feel for what the average Enterprise is seeing and or doing and a thing that we're trying to do which is kind of in the vein of the uh what I call the emo of T geography which is making some of this data more transparent this data that's particularly hard to access where you guys have also a really interesting angle that's a bit different than ours um we want to aggregate this data and expose insights for buyers so they can make better decisions and this state of connectivity report is one of our flavors of attempt of doing that where we'll talk about a number of Trends we'll also talk about some average pricing data for the most commodity services that would be purchased think like a 100 Meg DIA or a gig Dia right right yeah I have to say I really like that you guys are doing this uh because you know it's it's not your core business it's not um what you're but it's really useful as an industry for all of us to be able to collectively understand that's this idea of being able to sort of pull back and and say you know what's really happening and understand the Enterprise mindset better so um yeah I was really excited when you guys uh kind of brought this topic up to me because again this is one of the things that I think about as you mention all the time at T geography in fact right now I'm working on our Market size report where we sort of look at what uh you know sort of global revenues for all these products are around the world so uh this dub tells really nicely with that so the first thing I want to talk about I I've been looking at Telecom pricing at tele geography for uh it's scary but almost 20 years so this one I I and it's it's really it was really fun to me when I when I saw you presenting this uh on a webinar that you guys did um to see kind of uh what your take on on what happened on the ground with your customers so we got the question a lot I'm sure that I'm sure that you guys heard it come up as well of with the past few years of postco global inflation um everyone who's been playing in the Telecom Market long enough has known that typically prices are going down there's there's you know sort of like the the Moors law of data transmission and all that sort of thing Supply is always going up even though demand is rising we've just seen Telecom prices uh tend to fall pretty regularly right what did you see happen over this Global inflationary period that did that bleed into your customers uh circuit prices as well yeah so as as an investor I would read that bandwidth costs deflate at something like 5 to 10% annually kind of like clockwork I would agree with that so and it was fun to sort of enter the space and observe that sort of cost deflation play out in the data um we would see something like five to to 10% annual declines in cost per megabit for dedicated connectivity again sort of like clockwork 2024 was the first year where we began to see that Trend bucked to some degree and depending on geography from 2023 to 2024 we actually saw cost inflation relative to Trend in select markets in the US we saw costs generally unchanged year-over-year um with some minor fluctuations but certainly not a 5 to 10% decline so although that is not outright cost inflation that is inflation that is somewhat significant relative to Trend yeah it may as well be especially when you're thinking about like owning circuits for for many years right it was always baked in uh the idea that there would be this 5 to 10% kind of decline over the life of that contract right so that is right and in certain International Goos uh we saw cost inflation of between five and 15% uh particularly like latam Europe and Asia Pacific latam and Asia Pacific we saw called 5 to 8% inflation and in Europe we saw quite significant inflation uh north of 15% and I would keep in mind this is what was observed in what you'd call like onet or near net Enterprise building situations I'm not talking about internet exchanges or data centers where um costs generally continue to follow somewhat deflationary Trends so but but that actually doesn't make up the majority of what the average Enterprise is buying typically they're buying a connection to a warehouse and office or something of that sort and and that's where we saw this cost inflation and I am it is difficult to point to an exact cause of inflation in particular because inflation in and of itself is pretty multivariant but right over the past several years we had inflated cost for supply of a variety of Hardware Goods intermediate Goods things of that nature and also significant cost inflation and specialized labor and these dedicated circuits require specialized Hardware specialized labor both of which that had inflated you know we may be seeing that come through to Enterprise cost with a time lag the other thing to note is the US saw inflation dissipate earlier than some of these other Geographic markets where you know Europe parts of Asia parts of Latin America had inflation persist um at sometimes higher rates and also for longer so um although I am not 100% certain that is the explanation that is what I would most likely hang my hat on as the explanation for that and whether or not this will persist for another year I'm not sure we will see yeah no that's that's really interesting because I I have heard from from and first I'd say definitely you know someone who thinks about this a lot as well I I agree with the ideas you know there there were you know chip Chips fiber all those physical durable goods um were subject to inflation for all the same Global forcings that that we don't need to go into right but specific to the Telecom industry I I've I've heard conversations from the breadth of the industry for for uh looking for skilled Telecom Engineers all the way from splicing fiber uh you know to get fiber to the curb to to a Greenfield building or replace something all the way up to you know Network management at the complex kind of software level that that there really does seem to be a skills Gap now you know potentially there are some tools that might emerge from from the AI world that might help with part of that but in the end as I often like to say in the show it's like you have to dig holes and pull wires through ducks and all that and and someone has to know how to do that right so um I I could see that uh sort of skills Gap um uh being a problem that might persist even beyond our kind of um couple years of of postco uh inflation it'll See it'll be interesting to see how that panss out over the years over time because uh you know on the one hand I think Telecom experience what all Industries experience which is just specialized labor went up in cost relative to recent years the unique thing that hits Telecom that also hits a few other sectors like some forms of uh anywhere where you need specialized construction it looks like there is uh quite a bit of a uh Supply shortage of that and in Telecom that appears to be pronounced and toally so you know to your point maybe inflation here persists or the cost deflation Trend begins to um dissipate a bit but who knows we'll see that's that's the thing is that um uh there there's a lot of of potential disrupting factors out here right some of which we're we're going to maybe even talk about a little bit later right so um but so next next uh part of your report that I I personally found really interesting again because this is something that that I think of uh talking to a lot of Enterprises and I'll set this up by going back again to that idea of like hey like you know late teens uh if if I can find a word that works for that decade right um You have sdwan coming along uh Enterprises uh rethinking their networks in that sense rethinking their networks in the sense of connecting much more to Cloud uh than to their on premises data centers things like that um and One Direction that we saw some Enterprise go is much heavier on the sort of pointto point so in in the the way before time it was a point-to-point private Network Hubb and spoke often and that's what MLS replaced it's kind of ironic that in some cases MLS is being replaced by pointto point but uh but your your report mentioned the sort of move uh you know one towards that and and then specifically ethernet private lines towards really what we would often think of as more of a wholesale ISP kind of Market of of dwdm uh what have you been seeing there yeah that you know what you outlined is accurate so um post the shift away from MLS most Enterprise connectivity needs are met by commodity internet circuits either dedicated internet or Broadband connections however um although in most cases enterpris don't need to privately transmit data from an a location to a z location without traversing over the Internet um which is what MLS did but uh in most cases you don't need to do that in some cases you do need to send data from one location to another location without traversing the internet where things like reliability and security and privacy are important so um to fill that Gap and Enterprises primarily went to the ethernet pointto point or ethernet private line where you're utilizing an Ethernet protocol to privately transmit the data between those two locations across a route and that has worked well you know you can think of it as kind of like an internet circuit except between a and z and that is on our product uh the Lightyear platform in particular what we saw is the gold standard RFP choice for Enterprises needing uh dedicated connectivity between two points however um to your point uh wave circuits which are effectively utilizing over fiber dwdm technology uh to transmit data um have become a lot more popular and you know because you're utilizing dwdm stands for dense wavelength division multiplexing you're able to get over the same fiber um higher bandwidth and more efficiency so a cheaper cost per megabit in delivery and sometimes also more predictable latency so it's kind of a more effective means than an Ethernet pointto point you could kind of see why that would become popular um the primary gating factor from Enterprises utilizing waves were twofold um one the bandwidth needs just weren't that high some number of years ago between two points uh to take advantage of the scale benefits of the wave but more importantly waves just weren't available um the the isps need to set up electronics that can support dwdm between two points to be able to offer the wave service to the Enterprise and they were just uh fewer points of presence where you could get a wave um five seven years ago now you can get waves a in in a lot more places and also Enterprise bandwidth needs have just continue to creep up like clockwork and over the past year um what we've seen in our platform um we've seen wave circuit requests growing at a double digit rate year-over-year where we've actually seen Ethernet point-to-point or ethernet private line requests declining by double digits year-over-year and it does look like waves are probably headed to overtake ethernet pointto points like for example if you need a 100 gigs or more of bandwidth you probably can't even get that within point to point yeah yeah that's really interesting I I I'd like to think about it from that that bandwidth demand standpoint um that uh you know there b there bandwidth demand maybe comes in sort of Step changes right where there's there's new technologies and new tools that come along once you had you know streaming video everywhere um you might have thought oh well you know how much more bandwidth can you need but I think we're coming up with with uh constantly in in the software world right reasons for for Enterprise bandwidth demand to go up it just what what's your take there on on you know particular of course as as I often have to say in the show it's it's 2025 so we have to talk about AI but um you know uh when people ask me what's the impact of AI on on telecoms if I'm not thinking about uh AI being utilized to run networks then the main thing I'm thinking about is Ban with Demand right so um yeah how do you see that that's probably not something that gets into the data from your customers but just how do you see um a band with demand drivers developing over the next few years you know the interesting thing is that although AI is the technology flavor of the day the bandwidth demand growth compounding is relatively unchanged AI is not dissimilar from you know for example what streaming did to bandwidth demand which was compounding it some number of years ago and prior to that just like utilization of the public internet and applications and software and all of these things have contributed multivar the bandwidth demand compounds and right now for example we do see a lot of AI native or AI adjacent companies driving demand for the highest bandwidth Services we also see Enterprises embracing AI tooling that is resulting in Need for more bandwidth um bandwidth demands are multivariate but um I believe that bandwidth needs will compound and over time will uh go up for different reasons so right now it is AI we will see what uh you know how long that continues to drive bandwidth demand compounding you probably have a few years of that and maybe it's something else in the future in particular so we we do see that growth coming from what you'd call AI native companies we also see companies that have kind of nothing to do with AI getting 100 Gig wave circuits all of a sudden whereas previously they were not getting those um and there are a whole variety of factors that go into that yeah yeah absolutely I mean just just at the most basically just as compute gets uh you know faster and and more efficacious and as applications get more complicated then that's good for bandwidth right so and uh no no reason for that to to slow down anytime soon let let alone some future world where we have uh you know uh AGI and Quantum Computing and all of that the bandwidth demand there again I something I like to remind the world of right but all of that stuff can only work if there is the underlying uh you know transport networks to to handle it right so yeah yeah yeah so so you know kind of going back now to to how I set up you know uh talking about pointto point and and dwm um it all sort of ties back to that big change that we saw in the Enterprise Network space when MLS sort of became less necessary in in a lot of cases so so what you seen there Visa the the decline of of Enterprise MLS use so over the past several years we have seen kind of a troughing out of the decline of MLS meaning I think we sort of Hit the point of what I'd call at least a short-term trough of MLS utilization over the past called two to three years and you know that's at least what we've seen in our uh Enterprise platform users in particular there was a period of time early on in starting Lightyear where um most it almost felt like a majority of the Enterprises we were talking to were going through a shift away from mls in some form or at least contemplating it call like 2019 2020 2021 um today we don't see that anymore we see the a vast vast majority of Enterprises that are using primarily public internet connectivity and we see a very small extremely small number um sub 10% of platform users that are utilizing MLS for service reasons that are likely to persist for years from here and that's sort of validated by survey data um yeah in particular um that there's the aryaka survey Enterprise survey that's released annually that denoted that um there are 9% of Enterprises that'll utilize MLS as well as alternatives on a continued basis and some like 5% of Enterprises that are going to actually invest in more mpls over time and um what what we observe as a commonality amongst the Enterprises that are continuing to use MLS um MLS is truly the best technology under very specific circumstances um that rarely are coming into play for the average Enterprise but come to play for a small number of Enterprises particularly if you have a mesh Network topology with significant needs for predictability privacy and security um and sort of perfect quality of service but you don't really care much about cost or network flexibility um MLS can be very valuable and also if making Network change is extremely risky for your profile of business that can even further compound your desire to stay on Ms um the most frequent circumstance we see that come into plays with large financial instit institutions so Banks payment networks sometimes in healthcare and also sometimes for large Enterprise operations in parts of the globe where sourcing dedicated connectivity is particularly difficult that that's really where we see it today you can you can just say China I think yeah yeah no I you know 100% uh agree with with that assessment um and and you know for what it's worth like I mentioned before I'm working on this uh Market size model that we do now and I forecast ahead several years and you know we we had mpls declining for a while but it it flattens out and it kind of stays at at that point in our model because like you said there there's a certain group of Enterprises that for the foreseeable future aren't going to be able to jump into the public internet sdw kind of world entirely depending on those situations there are still not it's not just China of course there's other places where reliable public internet is still an issue certainly I think that that becomes uh one of the the big forcings there um all of that is tied of course to sdwan uptake right so the curves are are in opposite uh directions right the uls curve going down and flattening out the sdwan curve has been going up but I think maybe also flattening out now is is that how you would see it that is about how we see it with an asterisk so a thing that we do now see more of which is interesting is rather than MLS to sdw Transitions sdw to sdw Transitions so um Enterprises are effectively hit Peak on roll out of some form of s and Technology um I think this is actually a t geography data point but by 2022 in your Enterprise survey one of the state of the way reports had noted that like over 90% of surveys Enterprises were in fully installed or roll out phases of yeah an sdw and not really much higher to go than that potentially so yeah there's some that that have no use for it in fact going back to kind of I alluded to this before we didn't really get into it but we we do see some Enterprises who uh act like mini Telos basically and just kind of build their own backbones and then connect to their their Cloud instances through Dia or whatever and in that kind of situation you're not really replicating the when so you don't need sdw but that's the those they're unusual right so they're you know that that's not going to spread that far throughout the market I don't think yeah that's exactly right and um that first iteration of SD was good for the networks as they looked when you were tearing away MLS which is basically oh you may have a headquarters and a number of Branch offices and that's basically what you're you're facilitating connectivity between and the SD setup to basically facilitate that effectively over the public internet with the SD overlay in the new school of the market you may have Branch offices you probably also have employees at all sorts of different endpoints with remote work you have much much more in the cloud and middle M ining matter you care a lot more about security so the new sdwan products of today are either evolved versions of the old products from call it the status quo providers they're also a ton of new sdw startups effectively creating new when overlay technology products and we're seeing Enterprises move from call it an SD win 1.0 product re-evaluate effectively the use cases of their win overlay as they see it and how their underlay when has changed and seek a new version of some form of a software defined way product and those are transitions that we help Enterprises with today so when we're sort of seeing Enterprises buying SD Services typically they are augmenting or moving off of an SD that they previously were on rather than an MS Network right yeah that's really interesting that you say that there's startup activity in in the sdwan space because again there's been this Big E and flow to that that like you know big uh ramp up of starduck activity in the late teens say then tons of consolidation in fact some of those some of those early sdw providers are are no longer supported you know they're sunsetting uh some sdwan platforms but then because the idea of sdwan has moved on so much then you get another wave of startups looking to to fill new niches and that sort of thing so that's something that I I would like to look into more myself to be honest so yeah yeah there are some exciting companies to look at and the interesting thing is a number of them are founded by the people that founded the original SD as always happens I get frustrated with with you know whoever bought my startup and I can't move uh you know quickly enough or or agile to to address these new issues so I go to do a new startup right so that is how it goes yeah all right so so wrapping up our our state of connectivity I want to get to um you know what may be the most difficult part to talk about right because uh the industry cannot agree on what this means kind of like sdw was uh you know several years ago when we're talking about this right but of course I'm talking about uh Network as a service Nas right um so I want to start with from your perspective of being involved in the market for selling this to Enterprises um how are you guys specifically defining Nas what does it Encompass in 2025 so today I'm actually kind of unable to Define Nas in AO broad sense because we're laid into what Enterprises want and today the the nas format that enterprises are most interested in and desire is unclear to me that may be because of issues with the current iterations of the service it could be because of confusion it could be because of a lack of do it could also just be immaturity of the service overall so you know the way I would Define Nas is uh service that can deliver you with scalable on demand Network infrastructure that can be provisioned and consumed kind of like your Cloud software or public cloud services are kind of as a service and that can mean a variety of different things depending depending on the vantage point of which vendors you're looking at um initially we had Data Center and public Cloud providers that were offering Nas products called like you know for example Google Cloud offers an interconnect Cloud router and Cloud firewall products equinex has their fabric product these are effectively Network as a service and meet the definition of what I was talking about um more recently and I think this is mod is most frequently referenced when you're talking about NZ you have calos offering Nas Solutions and you also have focused startups offering Nas solutions kind of like MEAP port or packet Fabric and these are quite different um so for example Verizon and Lumen have Nas services today and you know with Lumen you can sign up and digitally purchase Network Services with usage based pricing and quote unquote on demand flexibility which feels like how you would purchase a SAS solution online and same sort of thing with megaport you can sort of sign up get set up pick a point of presence and then almost click and get bandwidth and click to upgrade your bandwidth which can feel magical however with all of these Services um you still need to install and provision a physical circuit in most cases which faces the same challenges and complexities you find um in the real world deploying a physical circuit when you purchase a DIA from one of these vendors um these Services can actually work well in our observation and almost be a little magical in areas where um connectivity is the data center to Data Center model always made the most sense here because there's enough over provisioning there that there is uh slack that can be utilized immediately right exactly right and the connectivity is cheap and um this works less well in areas where that isn't the case where these products effectively don't work or don't support much and that is the majority of where Enterprises fish face issues buying connectivity not to say that there are no issues buying connectivity in a data center it's just a lot less of a problem in our experience and installs are easy pricing is lower um most of where buying connectivity is hard as in the you know onet or near net building or physical facility space so um the other thing we've observed is that when you're buying services for from these Nas providers um they'll they'll come at a cost premium at least today relative to you just buying that circuit in the real world so you know you may get some flexibility and you may get some ease of use and a UI that's nice but you'll pay a premium for that if that's okay for you um that's sort of one iteration of Nas and that's what I think is most commonly referred to um and then third there are Nas startups that are focused on kind of turning the land into an Opex rather than a capex and they will offer you Hardware software and manage services to basically set up your local area network manage your local area network and also some security services and um smart hands type support to help you with a variety of things um with some slas on certain types of uh support and basically you can Outsource Your Land Management which is kind of like a managed Wi-Fi plus type experience that's quite different than the Telco Nas offerings but that is another offering we're seeing out there um and the commonality amongst all of these Nas offerings is um we're not seeing a ton of Enterprise demand today for them we are seeing interest in questions so perhaps the demand does come we'll see yeah and it's really interesting that you say that because we agree right so so you know I've I've um asked Enterprises this kind of question over the years and I think a lot of Enterprises have struggled to to really see the use case outside of those who have an obvious one like uh you know something that's very seasonal you know retail that kind of thing or or event companies that that might uh you know run a stadium that has no one at it 5 days a week and then there's 30,000 people there and that you know those kinds of situations where there's an obvious EB and flow to traffic I think for most Enterprises um they they've you know been largely kind of like ah what is this you know really get me provisioning time is a is a pain yes um but that's not you can't you still can't do this end to end except in very limited circumstances right and the other thing that that you mentioned with with the the land Services of of moving L away from being an Opex to to being a or sorry being a capex to being an Opex is I think Enterprises struggle with that for the whole network kind of idea right of of looking at network is infrastructure right um where whereas software and and the move to cloud and and everything as a service um that's that's not quite the same thing as as uh this sort of physical IAL infrastructure that that belongs to you for years and I think above all else there there may even have to be a change uh on the finance side the way that that sourcing teams think about networks for a lot of what the carriers are really talking about in the nas space to ever come to fruition that is correct so I think when you saw the shift to or the as a service resolution re Revolution for software there was a true technical innovation in addition to a business model innovation in the sense you no longer had to host software you could get constant updates to your software without having to administer or pay for those updates yourself um that was a true benefit to the Enterprise and also you didn't have to pay Hefty Hefty Hefty licenses when You' buy software you could sort of um push that out on the other hand there was a business model innovation in this case it it looks more at least today like there is more of a business model change rather than a true technical Innovation being had and for many Enterprises I think losing control over your land or um you know using a nice UI to buy a circuit when in reality the actual circuit delivery isn't necessarily fixed or you can't get it where you need it or you may pay a significant premium may not be particularly attractive however um I don't like to be a doubter on new technologies as as a person that administers a new technology and Lighty year myself so we will see and if there's real demand for these products somewhere um we'll figure it out because I'm I'm sure that the people running these companies are very smart and will augment their products to meet the Enterprise need that's most Salient yeah yeah no doubt I think some of it has to just come from honestly education uh to you know Network managers are busy it's a hard job right they like like we mentioned before they're they're lacking uh skills to hire people often and it's a matter of um getting to a point where what you're presenting to the customer they can so easily understand and see the benefits of and I I I certainly think that may come I just don't um see us being quite there yet right so yeah agreed yeah all right so uh Dennis let's let's wrap things up here um last time uh that you were on the show we we talked a lot about kind of what uh Lightyear was doing in the marketplace you described a bit at the top of the show here but I want to just get into maybe what has uh happened in the last year and a half kind of what deel developments you've had at Lightyear and um and how you're pushing you know kind of related to to to NAS in in in a sense right pushing that sort of digital environment um for for sourcing this Telecom infrastructure forward yeah so at the time that we last spoke which was about a year and a half ago we were the only real software product out there to manage your Telecom life cycle and particularly digitize the procurement experience for Telecom and today we are very much still the only software company that is doing that which is cool and we we've gone from more of a call it SMB and midmarket type offering to a true Enterprise offering which represents the majority of our customers from a revenue perspective today so some of the changes we've made to our product additions and and growth is uh first we launched the bill consolidation product more formally that is the product where um you know previously we had procurement and network Inventory management but now we can handle bill payment for you we can digitize your bills we can audit your Telecom bills and make sure you're paying the right amounts we can dispute vendors on your behalf to save you money and ensure that you're billing properly and basically um reconcile and track your circuit inventory from a configuration and contract perspective against what you're actually paying and using month-to month um second we we offered new dashboards for our Network inventory and bill consolidation services to where now we have this these dashboards in This Global search function where you can effectively um see all of these aggregated insights on your network like spend spend over time changes in network changes in bandwidth changes in configuration and also opportunities to save money across you your contracts and your spend over time um we launched an API so now you can tie Lightyear um across all of your Enterprise systems and make sure the data is up to date in your service now your Splunk instance you know another Erp tool a homegrown system and keep things up to date you can also even push requests to let your from those those sources um we've also added a lot of llm powered backend Improvement for support um where these are not yet features that are fully exposed to our customers but a lot of our backend is getting improved via llms to improve your support experience your installation experience your Q&A answers and we're also going to expose some features to the customer here so a variety of changes and it's also worth noting on the business end since we've chatted um we now work with over 350 Enterprise customers and 5,000 Enterprise users that's a lot growth since we last chatted where we never published those numbers including a number of the Fortune 500 we also raised a $31 million series B financing round nice yeah well I mean and and that particularly like there's so much rapid development I think in this space um that that we have to have this the the space in the budget right to to figure out the next steps um uh you you mention an API that's that's a customer facing API ticket where the customer can employ that to to utilize your tool better to integrate it into I don't know if you guys are calling it this but it sounds like you're talking about kind of some T tools and things like that what about on the other end how how do you see the industry developing there and by the other end I mean on the carrier to carrier side so a lot of what you're trying to do and and getting funding for for moving this forward all of that ultimately does I think depend on to some degree how well the carriers can provide you with this information can can look across each other's networks and and sort of be able to get your end customer what they need what's what's your take on on how um rapidly and effectively the industry is moving into this digitized uh uh Network Information Network sourcing provisioning all of that uh kind of uh ecosystem that um will enable you to to offer this service to the Enterprise carriers today do have apis available some of them some of the major ones do however in practice the apis are not particularly useful you know to give you an example there are a few major carriers that we've worked on API Integrations with and what we find is that the apis will return you sort of instant pricing or instant serviceability responses and then we'll crosscheck those against actual manual quote processes and manual infrastructure validation with their team and the pricing is wrong and the serviceability is wrong so there is an API available but in practice you know what the Enterprise wants is a circuit delivered right and they want an accurate and good price they for the price they were quoted exactly right and so whether or not it's instant whether or not it's via API the Enterprise doesn't care if they don't get to their end so there are apis available in in the way they are intended to be used we are often unable to use them unfortunately and we are able to part of the reason why uh a year and a half ago we were the only one and today we're also still the only one is because building out the infrastructure to provide the service that we want to deliver is quite difficult and we are Further Along on our end and our journey to deliver the service to the Enterprise via our custombuilt Integrations with vendors and How We Gather this data how we quote um but I I wish I could sit and tell you oh yeah there's 50 apis we plug into them we get the answers and that's it and you just click and you get an instant quote uh that that's unfortunately not how it works on our end but maybe that's a blessing in disguise for me because makes it difficult to build Lighty year I guess so right yeah exactly when when when it's truly digital the the uh barrier to entry will be much lower than it is now yeah it's I mean I'm sure some of your your series B funding there is is going to uh you know Personnel development to get more people to to you know manage inventory and rather than necessarily just a technological software development right that is right yeah yeah so I I mean I I wonder then what you think about you know sort of the industry working on this so U you know I'm sure you're familiar with with MEF who's kind trying to bring carriers together for this problem do you see uh this problem and and by this problem in this case I means fairly specifically what you mentioned like like even if we have an API where the we we've gotten our our apis to agree on field names and all this kind of thing that the information isn't stored in a way that that can be utilized across platforms and whatnot do you do you see the industry kind of getting through this uh in the next few years do you see quite a long time before we get to that kind of vaunted uh sort of digital seamless world I believe it will take quite a long time I'm not optimistic on the carriers getting there I think the mission of MEF is Noble in the sense they want to standardize and add transparency to the industry which I think would absolutely benefit the buyus I like the MEF documentation however in practice the vendors that need to adhere to what MEF asks for have no incentive in fact they have a disincentive to do so because a more transparent easier to access where you can compare like for like Commodities against one another result in carrier price disclosure and carrier price reduction which is bad for them so I I'm just skeptical that that is where they would invest time even though for the customer it's what is desired and that's part of why you know what I view our role at Lightyear uh in doing is to add that layer of transparency as a vendor neutral vendor agnostic third party and be a market forcing mechanism toward um more par and experience for the customer as a market participant rather than sort of like a think tank if that makes sense right yeah yeah absolutely so I mean so being paid to to lower the friction in in this opaque market right you know so excellent all right well um Dennis has been really really interesting like I said I I think our our the way that we're viewing the world uh sort of overlaps and I think that's been particularly fun for me to do that rather than you know very often here I'm talking about things that I have to do a little homework on in this in this case uh what you're looking at is is what I'm doing all the time so that's really fun thanks for for uh coming along and suggesting this topic um I just want to make sure before we wrap it up Dennis that if if folks want to look at the state of connectivity report um uh that that H how can they find you and and what you guys are doing at uh Lightyear yep so you you can visit us at lie. um so Lightyear spell like Buzz Lightyear l i g ye a r. a and if you go to our ebooks section under resources at the top you'll be able to find the state of connectivity report and we'll be putting out more content like that in the future and also Greg thank you so much for having me on I view us at Lightyear as peers in Mission with t geography so I love your content as well and uh thought this was a fun discussion yeah AB absolutely thanks for that and and definitely we need to to revisit this from time to time and and see how things are developing because I I just think there's there are so many things to watch there's so many uh areas where folks are really excited and it's going to be really interesting to see um whether that's the direction the industry goes or someplace that that uh you know we haven't quite even uh thought of yet so yeah thanks [Music] thanks for listening T geography explains the internet comes from the experts here at T geography it's edited and produced by Jane Miller and it's hosted by me Greg briyan and I also wrote that theme song you're listening to right now to learn more about our data jump over to T geography.com and we'll see you on the internet