Not Your Father’s Data Center - A Look at Schneider Electric’s Approach to Innovation and Data Centers

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Host Raymond Hawkins found time to pull himself away from watching The Masters to chat with Schneider Electric’s Vice President of Innovation and Data Centers, Steven Carlini, for an insider’s peek at Schneider’s approach to data centers and innovation.

Welcome to Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, brought to you by Compass Data Centers. We build for what's next. Now here's your host, Raymond Hawkins. Welcome to another episode of Not Your Father's Data Center. I'm your host, Raymond Hawkins. Today we are joined by Schneider Electric's Vice President of Innovation and Data Centers, Stephen Carlini. Stephen, welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here. Stephen and I are recording today on April 8th, the opening day of the Masters. So if I sound a bit distracted, it is not because the TV is on in my office at all. No, that couldn't be it. No, we are recording.

The world is coming out of a pandemic and lots of vaccinations and things are changing. And all right. Well, a couple of reminders as we get going with the show. Reminder number one is we will do four trivia questions.

We're going to do three trivia questions right at the beginning and we'll do one at the end. And remember, all the people who email me the correct answers will be entered in a drawing to win a $500 Amazon gift card. Unfortunately neither Stephen or I are eligible to win, but you can tweet your answers at CompassDCS or you can email me at rhawkins at compassdatacenters.com.

In honor of Stephen's background, all of today's trivia questions will be focused on Oklahoma football. Great. Well, you don't get to answer, unfortunately, Stephen, but the trivia questions, one, two, three, and then we'll get rolling. Question number one, who has the most rushing yards in the history of Oklahoma football? Who has the most passing yards in the history of Oklahoma football? And who has the most receiving yards? Two of them, I think, you know, I'm not surprised by any of the three answers, but two of them, I can make the argument that I would

have guessed someone else. So those are your first three trivia questions for all of our data center listeners. And we'll get trivia question number four at the end, email your answers again to me at rhawkins at compassdatacenters.com. All right, Stephen, let's get rolling. Love it if you would just give us a little bit of your background, you know, all the way back to where's home? How'd you get in the technology and power management business? And we'll talk through, I think the best way when you and I spoke before you handle everything from the medium voltage switchgear all the way out to outlets in the data center and how Schneider Electric thinks about innovation in those spaces. Tell us a little bit about you as we get rolling. I was born in Youngstown, Ohio. Grew up in Cleveland initially. Then I moved out to Connecticut. My father was actually in the

technology industry. He was with IBM. So we moved around quite a bit. We moved every four years, like clockwork. And IBM used to be called, I've been moved back in those days because of how often you would relocate. And I had the opportunity when I was 10 years old to actually visit one of the first ever data centers in existence in New York with my father. He took me to the data center, which was really kind of an underground bunker. Data centers in those days were just, just getting started. And a lot of the data was a lot of personal information about people, and they wanted

to keep it very safe. So there was a lot of emphasis put on security back in those days. And then I went to Atlanta for high schools. So I partly claimed to be a Georgian. And after that, I went to University of Oklahoma and got an electrical engineering degree from there, emphasized in power systems, which is kind of an odd way to go. Most of the electrical engineers were mainly interested in electronics at the time. And Oklahoma had, you know, one of the few power system degrees for electrical engineering. After that, I went to Texas, actually in Houston. And I had my first job at Toshiba and I started as an engineer.

And after nine years, I ended up running their UPS power systems group for Toshiba International out of Houston. And I also went to University of Houston where I got my MBA in international business. So this is amazing, Stephen, to me, a little bit fascinating to me. I went to high school in Dayton, Ohio, so also in Ohio. I lived in Atlanta for 16 years, and now I live in Dallas, so not Houston, but Texas. So very similar routes around the country, although I've not ended up in the Northeast as you have now. But all right, so Toshiba, talk me through Toshiba to what was next after that, and then ultimately to Schneider. So Toshiba was interesting.

And in those days, the whole UPS market was really these industrial companies. You had companies like Teledyne, CyberX, and you had the big focus on industrial systems for UPSs. So it was all bid spec market. It was all very, very much in the realm of industrial systems, how they were produced, who sold them. You know, they were sold direct. There was manufacturers, reps involved. At the time, you know, back in the 80s, there was a little upstart company called American Power Conversion. And American Power Conversion kind of took a different view on the whole market. And, you know, their idea was that the IT systems were going to evolve. And if you look at the history of IT, it very much goes from centralizing, doing mainframes. And this was the start of what we called distributed IT, or back then it was called local area networks, distributed computing, basically servers.

The old client server architecture started back then. And APC kind of jumped on that. They saw that that's where the market was going. And they formed relationships with a lot of the IT vendors and the IT channel. And it kind of caught everybody by surprise that the market kind of shifted. And APC did a great job. And the reason I'm bringing up APC is because I had a staff of people working for me. I ran sales. I ran operations. I ran field service.

I ran marketing and engineering as well. So I was the general manager of the Toshiba UPS group. And person by person, they started moving over to American Power Conversion, APC. And they started trickling over there. And then a massive wave of people went over to American Power Conversion. And then the software company that we were using for management of the systems, it was System Enhancement out of St. Louis, APC ended up purchasing them. So I had a great relationship with them. So when I went over to APC, you know, nine years later, after starting with Toshiba, it was basically a homecoming for me because I knew, you know, a lot

of the people over there were my ex-employees and the software group that I used to work with was all over there too. So it was a transition for me. And I went over there and I was in charge of the, what they call the core product. And at that time, APC only had smaller UPS systems, which were, smart ups. They had the Matrix, was the first modular UPS ever made, and then the Symmetra. So there were no data center sized UPSs at the time. And they hired me to initially run the core product group. And I ran that. And then a few years later, we really ran out of market potential. I mean, we did a tremendous job of expanding our sales globally to the point where we had, depending on the geo, 30 to 70% market share. So it was an incredible market share. So we ran out of runway for expansion. So that's when we decided to move into the larger UPS. And I was involved with one of the first acquisitions

of a company in Denmark that actually manufactured a three-phase UPS. And the technology of the three-phase UPS that they had was called a delta conversion UPS. So that was kind of new and innovative in the market. And, you know, it was my job to kind of, you know, build out that group and build out the expansion. That was kind of the start of our, you of our venture into the data center world, larger data center world. So that got you into the big systems and then along comes Schneider. Didn't Schneider end up buying APC? And I apologize for my memory. Isn't that how that went down? It was actually right on day or two before or after Valentine's Day. I don't remember the exact date, but it was 15 years ago now. So it's been quite a

while since that acquisition. It was a $6 billion acquisition. And it was a little bit of a surprise to the people at APC because the company had done very, very well. The other thing that APC did is they kind of changed the game. You know, when there's a game, there's a big spec market, there's entrenched competitors. What you want to do is look at the game and how it's being played. And if possible, you know, go ahead and change it. You know, the things that we did, which were unheard of at the time, is we started packaging together data center systems. So the power, the UPS, the power distribution, the rack systems, the cooling systems, all of the environmental systems,

like the access control and the environmental sensors for humidity and temperature, the door locks. And we started packaging those all together and offering them as systems. And when you offer them as systems, there's a lot of value added resellers and integrators that weren't exactly very happy with us because we were taking a lot of the work they were charging for and providing it for free. And then the other thing that we did is we made the system so they were user serviceable. So we made a modular. So instead of having to dispatch a service technician, you could keep power modules,

battery modules on site. And whenever you had an issue, you could easily replace them yourself. So that was a really changing the game of the design, the plan design and deploy model, which was, you know, very, very disruptive, you know, at the time, but you know, we had nothing to lose, because we didn't really have, you know, a presence in those markets, we were huge in the, you know, distributed, you know, single server, you know, in an office environment, but in the bigger data centers, we really had nothing.

So what years are we talking about when you guys started offering those integrated pieces in the data center? That was originally, it was called Power Structure, and that was roughly 20 years ago. And then we've changed the name to Infrastructure where we added more and more components to it. We added, you know, software management was also a big feature of that. So everything was, you know, packaged together. And one of the advantages of packaging together, when you're building a data center, a lot of times, you know, it's not like you could build 90% of it and have it function. It has to be 100% complete for it to work. And a lot of times there were pieces left off, pieces forgot, or pieces are backordered. So taking a system,

you know, approach to that really, you know, eliminated a lot of the risk for deployment and operation. We still do today, by the way, we still do that. You could have your pre-configured systems. And then we looked at even pre-fabricating, which is something where you take the concept and instead of assembling on site with all the pieces, you actually put it together in a factory and ship it on site. So it really is very favorable from a supply chain perspective. Stephen, I got to say, I had not thought about part of APC's success was really the timing around as we left, you know, monolithic, you know, centralized compute, as we left mainframes and service bureaus and started

having the client server model and distributing compute. I hadn't thought about that going hand in hand with APC's growth and acceleration and capturing of the market. But it is a great point to think about that those two events coinciding were just really, really beneficial to APC, right? As we got away from everybody running terminals. I know that's a term that a lot of people that listen to our podcast won't remember, but everybody running dumb terminals wired back to a mainframe. As we got away from that and put personal computers in everybody's desk and then connected those to servers, that all happened right as APC took off. I hadn't even thought about that being a big catalyst for APC. Yeah, and it's something that Novell at the time, Novell Networking, was starting up and partnering up, Novell at the time, you know, Novell Networking was starting up and partnering

up with Novell. And Novell was one of the first companies to actually certify, you know, UPS as compatible and built in UPS management into their systems. I mean, later Microsoft did as well, but Novell was way ahead then. It was kind of funny because, you know, the technology of the UPSs, you know, wasn't, you know, the other thing in the industry was it had to be a double conversion online for it to work. And computer power supplies had advanced, you know, a lot during those days and they could actually, you know, they actually had capacitors so they could ride through

a certain amount of outage uh but nobody believed it so our sales guys used to carry around these suitcases they were called these blackout boxes and they would hook them up to computers and light bulbs and they actually have a little you know a little um voltage regulator and they turn the voltage down the ups would switch the light bulb would switch, the light bulb would stay on, or the computer would stay on. Oh, wow. You literally had to demonstrate it for people. Wow. Absolutely had to demonstrate it.

They didn't believe it. It is amazing to think how much things have changed, that the concept of, hey, we can keep you running on that battery long enough for you to get your backup power source online. I mean, that wasn't even a thing. No one even understood it at the time. It's fascinating. Blackout boxes. That's great. Let me prove it to you here. So did you just have a little model built into this case that had a little UPS in it and enough to run a light bulb? Yes. Awesome. How great. Boy, I look today and I see some of the original Mac leases and the Apple, you know, two C's. And so some of those early compute devices. I bet if you could find one of those blackout boxes, that'd be a cool technology history compete component today.

In the APC, you know, headquarters, they actually had a showcase and they had like the first UPS APC ever built. And they had one of the blackout boxes too. Yeah, yeah. That'd be awesome to see. We literally had to turn a light bulb off for people. That's pretty cool. Good. Okay, so that's APC. The Schneider acquisition comes in.

And now it's not just UPSs and managing people's downtime. It's all things Schneider from medium voltage all the way out to the outlet. So in the world of innovation, what things are interesting, fascinating, what's going on at Schneider and what are you and your team who are always thinking about the future?

What's got y'all's mind share today? Yeah, that's a good question because what I do is kind of look at what are the trends that are going to take place, not necessarily what's, you know, what's happening now. The acquisition of APC was an interesting one from a cultural perspective because, you know, Schneider at that time, and still is, it's more of a global company now. But when they bought us, the headquarters are still in, you know, right outside of Paris, France. But a lot of the executive committee now works in, you know, Hong Kong and then some in the US. So it's spread across the world. But at that time, you know, primarily a very, very industrial company that liked to have markets, you know,

proven out before they jumped into everything. So much more conservative than APC. APC was out to show that there was a better way to do things. So there was a lot of cultural learning between the companies. And Schneider actually had a big power protection group already through the acquisition of Merland Geron or MGE. We had to merge those two groups together. So we went through that process. And Schneider, the way they think of data centers is kind of more of a larger standalone system because all the data center work that had been done at Schneider was focused on the larger systems. So there was also a merging of the whole solution, like we talked about,

from medium voltage to lower voltage switchgear, the big mechanical cooling systems like chiller plants that are outside, then going into the IT room. So the way we look at data centers is kind of three domains. You have the power domain, which also has, you know, big bus bars, you know, as well. So you have the switchgear, you have the bus bars, then you have the power panels, you know, feeding, you know, the data centers. And then the IT room, you know, where you have the, you know, power distribution that sits on, you know, what used to be still is the white space, you know, fewer and fewer raised floors anymore, but still is the white space. And then we have the cooling or what we call the building systems. And then Schneider's approach, you know, we want to look at the entire data centers as an individual systems. There has been this, you know, we want to look at the entire data centers as an individual systems.

There has been this, you know, tendency of the industry to have these silos between the power, you know, the cooling and the IT room. So there's the power domain, the IT room and the cooling systems and building systems. Those are the three way Schneider thinks about it. Okay, I just want to make sure I got it right. Okay. Yeah, those are the three systems. So from a technology perspective, we've been on a mission to make a very, very large amount of solutions to support those systems. But then we're on a mission to connect those solutions as well. So connect them to a management system and not just monitor the solutions, but provide more, you know, more useful information. So taking all the systems, you know, looking at the performance of the system, number one,

also looking at issues that, you know, you know, alerts and alarming, but also look at analytics. So make sure, you know, the systems are, you know, operating as intended, but also are not at risk of failing. So running analytics on the system, you know, you have the ability to do, you know, advanced warning when systems are about to fail. So for example, if you have a transformer that's, you know, the heat is starting to rise, and it's in the, you know, starting to get into a danger zone, you know, we can generate not only an alert, but also a recommendation, either take some load off the transformer, depending on, you know, your situation, of course, but it could be that

that transformer is failing and breakers are nearing capacity, you know, recommend taking some load off those or some batteries, you know, on the UPS side are the big one, because having any kind of advanced warning of battery failures is huge. If you're going to, you know, on the UPS side are the big one because having any kind of advanced warning of battery failures is huge. If you get a notification that, you know, 70% chance the batteries are going to fail in the next three months, then you can make a decision of what you want to do. But, you know, we also would provide recommendations. And the way that the system works is we advanced it to the point where you do receive the recommendations. And depending on your relationship with Schneider, you know, you can have the ability to talk

live to, you know, a service representative, you know, through text or phone or however you want. And then integrating the, you know, repairs or the service dispatch, you know, with the monitoring system is kind of, it know, with the monitoring system. It's kind of, it's what we're doing now. And we're doing that across, you know, all three domains of the data center. Stephen, as I think about power to the IT room, where's that demarcation? Is it the bus bar? Is it the rack? At what point do I think, okay, I'm now IT room from a domain perspective and I'm no longer power?

You know, it varies from a technology perspective. We are trying to blend all these silos together. So we are giving companies the ability to look at the different power systems in the IT room and the power systems, you know, in the electrical room together through the same systems. You know, there's obviously a lot of organizational constructs that exist. Companies like Compass that are in the data center business, they may benefit from not having these organizational silos, but other companies do. So we are giving people the ability to merge the systems and the management of those systems together and integrate them all. But I would say, you know, looking at it, you know, where it breaks from a building system or a power system to the IT room is, you know, whatever's sitting, you know,

on the IT floor. If you have your PDUs like sitting on the white space or the IT room floor, you know, that's part of the IT room. If it's a panel kind of feeding the IT room, then that's, you know, still considered part of the power system in the building, usually by a lot of companies. But like I said, we're trying to, you know, we're trying to, you know, eliminate those walls and make it, you know, one happy. Yeah, well-coordinated, monitored system. No, I like the integration of the three domains, but also thinking about how they're unique is fascinating. Yeah, panel and PDU seems to be the right demarcation point. I just wanted to talk that out with you a little. All right. So the things that keep you and your team up at night, not what's like, I like the way you

said it, not what's happening today, but what might happen in the future. What are the things that might happen in the future that would interest us and that you think are fascinating and exciting and things you got to figure out? Well, from a data center perspective, I would say the whole hybrid architecture of data centers. You know, it used to be that, you know, companies had a single data center. And then cloud came into existence and there started to be a hybrid environment. There was the whole movement to the cloud, which happened relatively quickly. There was a lot of movement, but there was a lot of discussions. I remember being on panels with people 15 years ago and talking about cloud. And, you know, we were trying to explain, you know, what exactly is a cloud? You know, how does it work? You have this platform

of service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service. And it really confused a lot of people. I think now people really understand. But at the time, it was kind of a mystery on what this cloud was and how it worked. You know, a lot of companies, you know, they offloaded all of, you know, their email, you know, their emailloaded all of their email, their email systems, their HR systems, everything that was kind of easy. And then they got to the point where they just couldn't offload anymore. So we end up in, it's usually some kind of operation or CRM systems that you can't offload to clouds or you have these hybrid architectures. So hybrid architectures, you know, are a little bit more difficult to manage. So, you know, we've invested a lot in building our data center

infrastructure management solutions to be able to, you know, work across the different domains. And the one thing that's, you know, we were looking at that's really starting to gain momentum is, you know, the move to edge and everyone's talking about move to edge. But I remember talking five years ago at some data center conferences about this move to the edge. And there were so many skeptics and people were telling me I was crazy. And there was just really a negative kind of backlash. Oh, it doesn't make any sense. You had John Chambers saying that the world only needed one data center and the network would take care of everything else. But as I said earlier, you go through all these cycles.

We seem to be at the beginning of the movement to the edge cycle. You have a lot of the cloud providers that are moving closer to the edge. They've been doing that for four or five years into urban areas or what we call a regional edge. Now we're talking local edge. We're moving things really, really close to where the users are and where the data is being generated. So it doesn't make a lot of sense. You have these new communication technologies that are coming up like 5G and Wi-Fi 6, and you're going to have the ability to leverage a lot more technology that's going to leverage high-definition cameras, which're going to have the ability to leverage a lot more technology that's going to leverage

high-definition cameras, which are going to generate a tremendous amount of data. And you don't want to be sending any of that hundreds of miles, thousands of miles to larger data centers. You want these edge data centers to be able to process the data and then, you know, discard, you know, what's used. Just take the results. It was interesting, you know, an example is agriculture. A couple of years ago, you know, when IoT was kind of the buzzword, people were, you know, metering or putting all these IoT sensors, thousands of them in their, you know, in their, you know, agriculture site, whether it was a vineyard or any kind of produce. And today, what they do is they use these high definition cameras, and they could be stationary, or they could be through

drones that are communicating high definition video. So if you're looking at, you know, moisture content, fertilizer content, you content, how much sun the crops are getting, you don't need to have these thousands of sensors. You could actually do it with high definition video. You could actually look at the plant and see what kind of condition it's in and what kind of attention it needs. If it needs more water, it needs more fertilizer, needs more sun, needs less sun, things like that are all going to move to video. It's all going to move to video, which is really going to drive more and more edge computing. The other thing that's going to drive more and more edge computing is the contactless,

touch-free society that's kind of emerging. So we have this contact society. I mean, it was kind of emerging. So we have this, you know, this contact society. I mean, it was kind of innovative to go to restaurants and, you know, they have the touchscreens. Now the touchscreens are kind of taboo. You know, no one wants to touch anything. So it's going to be gestures and voice and facial recognition. So there's going to be a tremendous amount of facial recognition that's going to be popping up and a lot more. The hospitality industry, the food service industry, the transportation industry, especially, are all going to be leveraging this facial recognition. And facial recognition, there's kind of, you know, been a little bit of a, you know, hesitancy because of, you know, privacy

issues and people are, you know a little bit worried about it but you know i think for you know society to be able to to go through this digital transformation to a contactless touch free we're gonna we're gonna have to use more facial recognition to to enable that steven i'm gonna go back to something you said just a little bit ago you were talking about um we're gonna have more and more video with 5G and Wi-Fi 6. We're going to be able to handle much richer content. I liked your agricultural example. Instead of me asking a sensor to tell me what the humidity is, why don't I just look at the plant?

I mean, that's an easy one for me to get my arms around. As I think about edge computing, I hear lots of people talk about that the edge is about pushing the compute function as close to the user as possible from a latency perspective. And I thought your answer, I tend to think that it's less about that and it's more about the cost of backhaul. and push it all the way back to a centralized data center, especially as the richness and the size, the quantity of the content gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it's backhaul avoidance is what I think makes the edge make sense, because all of that backhaul costs

would be through the roof. Even if it's a short video clip, having to send that to your point hundreds or thousands of miles away, and then decide what to do with it and then send it back is just cost prohibitive. I think it's just what you described. The ability to decide, analyze, evaluate, decide as close as possible so that we can avoid backhaul is as big a driver, if not more, for the edge.

What's your thoughts on that? I don't think it's transparent to a lot of people that there's costs involved with this backhaul. And I've tried to explain it and it kind of just does default to the latency that people can kind of get their arms around. But even though I think people are using latency wrong, because latency is really not speed,

it's the amount of jitter and freezing that's caused by the latency. But you're absolutely right. There's a tremendous amount of cost if you're going to spend that much data over these lines. And there's also the issue of network congestion. Just simple capacity will cause a problem. That's right. Exactly.

You take this incredibly rich, high-definition video and fly it over every farm in the country and then try to analyze it, the network's just going to shut down. It's just too much content. It's just too heavy. Exactly. and then try to analyze it, the network's just gonna shut down. It's just too much content. It's just too heavy. Yeah. And the network infrastructure is so established in our country, we can't, and this is when I go back to my early days in the compute business, we used to talk about that we would move the bottleneck

in the computer around, right? At one point, the processors weren't fast enough, so we'd focus on the processor. And once the processor got faster, then the busway would be not fast enough. So you'd focus on the busway, and then the memory wasn't fast enough, so you'd focus on the processor. And once the processor got faster, then the busway would be not fast enough. So you'd focus on the busway and then the memory wasn't fast enough. So you'd focus on the memory. And that's how, so we were just moving the electronic bottleneck around the computer and addressing it wherever we found the resistance. Well, that's kind of what,

on a macro scale, that's a bit of what I think about when I think about edge and 5G and Wi-Fi 6, we're going to run into an electronic inhibitor by just sheer volume in the network. Right. Which is going to force us to do things at the edge. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, when we talk about 5G, it's another area that's not well understood.

And, you know, there's a lot of talk about 5G and how it's already been rolled out and there's nationwide coverage of 5G. But that's low band 5G, that's 600, 700 megahertz 5G. It's not the ultra reliable, low latency millimeter wave 5G that's going to enable these new technologies, because to process video and move video, the low band 5G and 4G are pretty much the same. There's no advantage of using low band 5G over 4G for that application. The ultra reliable low latency millimeter wave or high band 5G, people were calling it 5G plus. It's a different technology because of the frequencies that it operates at.

The millimeter waves are, you know, much, much faster frequency, but they don't travel well. So you need the RAN or the antenna array to be very, very close to the application. And it has to be line of sight. You can't have any obstruction in the application. And it has to be line of sight. You can't have any obstruction in the way. You can't even have some of the testing, trees with leaves. And so it's not really suitable for anything like inside of a building because you have to have this line of sight and you have to have from the data center side. And the reason I was involved for the World Economic Forum program was because you need many more of these, what they call MEC data centers, which are mobile edge compute, mobile edge cloud, multi-access edge. People call them different things, but they're

MEC data centers. And for high band 5G to operate, right now you have the 4G base station, and you see them, they're a mile and a half, two miles apart, but you're going to need for 5G to operate, you're going to need for the cluster, you're going to need three to five times more of those, depending on how much activity you have in your network. You're going to have to have

the additional incremental data centers to be able to operate the high-band 5G. In the city, they're going to be able to operate the high-band 5G. And in a city, they're going to be on building tops, parking garages, basements. They're going to be deployed everywhere. And because of this little pandemic that we had, the governments were focused on different issues. So it kind of stalled a lot of the testing and the initial rollouts of the higher band 5G for urban applications. So, it's going to be a long journey to deploy 5G at scale. And there's also the business case issue that has to be addressed when deploying all these

data centers. There's the business issue, and it's the issue of who's going to do it and who's going to manage all of these data centers. Yeah, Stephen, I think we get a little bit wrapped up in the consumer concept of 5G. Oh, my phone says it's 5G. The ultimate high performance and the things that we're going to really be able to do with enhanced 5G or 5G Plus at its absolute highest performance, the infrastructure to support it is astronomical. I heard an estimate somewhere that globally to convert everything,

the whole network to 5G would be a $12 trillion 10-year project. And that was just somebody's estimate, but I think the spirit of that is correct. It's big. It's big, expensive, and going to take a long time. Yeah, that's if you have anybody working on it too so you know right right they have to be like that's an estimate with with everybody completely focused on it and what happened during the pandemic was there was a big push to to just increase the capacity of the current technologies the other technology of 5g that's you know that's that makes it interesting is that it's really software defined where, you know, the IT is, you know, disaggregated from the software, which is great.

And the IT will run on standard IT systems that are more AC where 4G is, you know, specialized like DC systems. But what happened during the pandemic was there was a huge buildout of, you know, 4G LTE and Advanced Pro and Advanced Pro Plus. So there was a lot more capacity added to, you know, the traditional type of telco infrastructure. Well, Stephen, this has been super awesome. We're going to get our fourth trivia question in our ode to Oklahoma, and we'll wrap up. So first three questions were in Oklahoma football history, number one rushing yards, number one passing yards, number one in receiving yards. So those three, I'm certain Stephen could guess all of those on his own.

And then who is the winningest coach in Oklahoma history? So no answers. Email us your answers. Those four, we'll do a drawing for anyone who gets the four correct, and you'll get a $500 Amazon gift card. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you talking about Schneider's view of the world and what's going on and also what's coming. And we appreciate hearing your background and your history. This has been great. And we look forward to doing more business together

with you guys in the future. You guys handle the vast majority of our power systems and we really appreciate it. Thank you for that. Yeah, thanks, Randy. It was great to be here talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining us, Stephen. I appreciate it.

It was a pleasure. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye.