Hello, everybody, and welcome to the total economic impact webinar. My name is Dr. Carlson and I'm with Equinix. And today I'm joined by Abajeel Sunil, a senior analyst from Forrester, Alex Parsons, consultant from Forrester and Eric Norman, the head of infrastructure, Architecture and Innovation for Intercontinental Hotel Group. There's a whole lot of talk these days about digital transformation. Whether those are the words people use, maybe it's the digital first mindset or being digitally ready. Regardless of what the term is, it's it's happening and we're seeing it transform industries and verticals. We're also seeing that the individuals and organizations that lean into it most, the digital leaders are taking part in transforming those industries and verticals. Before I hand it over to Alex. I'd highly encourage anyone who has any questions today to put your questions into the chat and if we have time at the end, we'll come back and answer them. So with that, let me hand it over to Alex from Forrester. Alex, thank you very much. Dr. We're pleased to be guests here today and present the findings of the study. I was the lead consultant that helped to develop the total economic impact of Equinix Digital Services study, which was commissioned by Equinix. As part of today's agenda, we'll briefly give an introduction to what ATEI is. We'll cover the customer journey that we heard from the interviewees before we dive into the results of the study. As a note, this is an abridged version of the Equinex total economic impact study, which is downloadable from the resource section of this webinar as well as Equinex's website and includes additional customer insights as well as all the financial tables. And methodologies used in the study, I'd encourage those on the on the call to check it out if you haven't already. And with that, I'm now going to hand it over to Abhijit who's going to be sharing an update on current industry trends before we dive deeper into the TEI study. Thank you, Alex, and thank you everyone for joining us. I'm Abhijit, Sunil, I'm a senior analyst with Forrester Research. I particularly look at the data center market and the trends that are shaping the industry at this time. So we'll look at some of the trends that are shaping the market at this time. The reason why enterprises customers are taking a closer look at hybrid models and why they might consider moving some of their applications. So we see here on this slide evidence that customers, enterprises are moving their core business applications out of their enterprise data centers. Cloud now powers the most significant parts of their business. Core applications including core record keeping applications like finance and accounting software, Salesforce automation, marketing automation, and then core operations applications including collaboration software, ERP, commerce software, Contact Center software, many of which. Enabled the workforce distribution that we experienced during the pandemic years as well. Customer facing applications including connected products using IoT. These are mostly moving out of enterprise data centers now and customers are increasingly looking for efficient ways to host them. But while they do this, what are some of the challenges that it groups face as they consolidate their data centers? We asked this question in a worldwide Forester survey and we found that compliance regulatory concerns over commingled data is a top concern, but also along with that, the lack of in House experience and cultural resistance to centralized IT data centers. These are all challenges that we know tech leaders are trying to solve and very interestingly, we wanted to dig deeper into some of these challenges and try to understand what. Are various leaders thinking in these in the current landscape when we did our study that we'll talk old in detail very soon. So yet given these challenges as well, what are the top reasons that organizations adopted cloud services, improving security, improving customer experience, employee experience? Faster than in fact waiting for it. We found all of these reasons that was reflected earlier in the site that we saw why core applications that enabled an organization is actually moving out of enterprise data centers. This is reflective of why organizations consider a Co location strategy, look for data centers that are much more efficient and in fact in the Co location world. Where a lot of cloud applications too are hosted, while leaders consider data centers in collocation in a collocation model much more advantageous. Another important trend that's emerging now is around sustainability. Data centers enable sustainability and is a very. Big factor for organisations whose technology backbone relies heavily on datacentres. This data that we are looking at now is from the International Energy Agency, who said that over the past one decade, from 2010 to 2020, datacentre workloads and Internet traffic increased exponentially, while datacentre energy use remained more or less a plateau. And this is because of the combined sustainability efforts that has taken place within the data center. Efficiency measures such as aiml based technologies that monitor energy usage in data halls to physically locating data centers at places where it may be. Advantages to use ambient air, better, more efficient cooling systems, better monitoring systems. All of which has made data centers much more efficient. In fact, data centers consume more than 1% of total global energy demand as of 2021, and it may increase. And given the way we are seeing much more specialized workloads overall emerge, including blockchain and emerging technologies. We are going to see data centers play a much more central part in in the data center world. I mean the data centers play a much more central part in enabling technology advancements. We saw some of the trends around why cloud, cloud powers core applications in the business. We saw some of the challenges that. That technology leaders told us around the space and also how sustainability plays a critical role in the decision making. We found that all of this was reflected in the study that we undertook. Thank you, abhijet. Now that we know a little bit more about what's happening from a trend standpoint, I do want to reground us on the TEI methodology. So why is it tei important? Business and I T leaders need to make business use justifications for every decision that they're making, every investment. There's a few ways that we can go about doing that from total cost of ownerships or ROI analysis, other methodologies. But force your prides itself on going one step beyond these concepts with the total economic impact study by considering the customer experience beginning from what brought them to consider the investment. All the way through to the strategic impact that the investment may have on their organization. We also consider the non quantifiable benefits as well as potential risks and future flexibility that the organization can gain based on their investment. Alice, quick question for you. I'm pretty sure that everyone on this call right now would admit that there's no shortage of a report. Question for how long have you been doing this report and what makes this unique? Or different from all the other reports. So First off, the TEI methodology allows us to develop a business case in a consistent repeatable way by considering the benefits, costs, flexibility and risks for an organization with their technology investment. Forrester's been doing this for over 20 years and TE I's are proven business case methodology to help quantify the value of the technology investment. Also we're risk adjusting metrics to help provide a more credible approach and we consider the longer term options beyond the the initial investment and analysis period. Great question. Next I just want to walk through what the process we took is. So it's a five step process based on the interviews with real customers and organizations like yours. The process starts with due diligence. We work with clients like Equinix. To understand the impact of the customer might experience with the investment, next we interview the clients customers to independently to use the insights and data that we collect to create a representative composite organization and financial model. Next Forrester writes the case study with all of the associated assumptions and calculations clearly spelled out so it can be useful to you in developing your own business case. Equinix and the interviewed customers are then invited to review the study. While Forrester maintains editorial control, as we get into the study results, we'll also be sharing qualitative insights and quotes gathered during the interview process like the one that you see here. Now, before we dive into the details, I do want to share a quick snapshot of the results of the study. We calculated 3 year impact on the business and after conducting the analysis of all the customer feedback and data that we gathered from them, we've calculated the composite organization has a return on investment of 142% with present value benefits of 26.5 million, yielding a net present value of close to 15.6 million. We developed the composite based on the interviewee responses that we heard during the interviews. This composite is a North American company operating globally with a distributed workforce of 25,000 employees spread across 100 locations internationally. It generates an annual revenue of $1 billion and manages its data through five on premise data centers in the United States. The company utilizes a private MPLS network managed through a third party telecommunications company. The composite intends to deploy Equinix digital services to gradually transition to a virtual infrastructure. This requires a team of 6 individuals over the period of six months to do the implementation, utilizing half of their time. Alice, quick question for you. This sounds like a pretty large organization. If there's someone in our audience right now who either works for a much smaller one or a much larger one, would would these results still apply to them? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So you know, use cases are going to be different at every company that you're at, but we believe that the benefits and costs represented within the full case study for equinex are scalable, the companies of most sizes and industries. Based on what we heard during the interview process, the composite is a representative of a full mix of the customers that were interviewed. Also, our approach spells out exactly all of the calculations and the assumptions in the case study so that you can create your own personalized business case. These should be scalable from up and coming smaller companies all the way up to some of the largest companies in the world. So again we we interviewed a diverse group of Equinix customers including eight representatives from 6 different organizations representing 6 very unique industries. We spoke with some very senior level individuals as well as those who were more hands on with the products. Organizations range from growth companies under $100 million in sales all the way to well established companies with revenues over 10 billion. That's a pretty big range when it comes to size of companies. Are there any unique themes that people listening should take out of this? Yeah, I'd say when you're thinking about this, I I would think through your organization's current situation. What are the business needs that you're trying to address and what are the unique needs of your company? Use the results of the TEI by considering how the representative case study companies. You know, compared to your current situation and then later in the case in in this presentation as well as if you look at the case study online, we'll talk more about you know, how to quantify that, base the business case for yourselves. That's good. Now, before we can understand why Equinex had the impact that it did for its customers, it's important to understand the challenges that these organizations faced in their previous environments. Interviewees shared how their organizations were dealing with high costs for physical infrastructure and connectivity. These companies were managing multiple data centers to service their globally distributed offices and point of sales locations with a mix of expensive hardware and facilities. Representatives discussed how long lead times and inconsistent delivery for hardware and infrastructure limited their business agility and flexibility to ultimately lead to inefficiencies and loss revenues. Each of these organizations ultimately selected EQUINEX as they felt digital services offered their organization the speed and flexibility to scale their business more efficiently while making regional compliance standards. And leveraging their strong ecosystem easier with access to multi cloud and vendor partners, you might have some of your own issues that you can think about or you may relate to some of these pains and opportunities when thinking about your own company situation. And I'll add a note here that it's very interesting to note the consistency in the challenges that the interviewees for this study told us about what they faced. And the data that we have from surveys across Forester, all of the challenges that the leaders told us about where, where about the compliance issues, the experience and lack of in our skills, the cost benefits, the flexibility and agility that data centers and especially working with large collocation. Experienced vendors brought to them in terms of an advantage if they, if they considered such a model and we found this consistent across the globe including in the compliance aspect. An interesting thing is around sustainability as well, which is adding another layer of compliance to many of these leaders real, real quick because I think that I think that's super interesting what the point that you make right there. Across the globe and across different size of organizations, you have been able to see a consistency of the challenges that all of them face on this journey to digital transformation. That's right. And it spawns from some of the overall global trends that we've experienced over the past few years as well, for example, the need for better customer experience. The trend that we saw earlier about how core applications of an organization are moving out of enterprise on premises, a data enterprise on premises data centers and also some of the workforce distribution changes that we saw over the pandemic, which infused digital transformation into a variety of industries. Thank you. Here's one more example I wanted to just bring forward. So this is an example from the VP of IT OPS and an IT services consulting company and how they describe the value proposition for equinex. And this really is is focused on that ability to be up and and and have have speed that that a lot of people associate with being on the cloud within equinex and that the the model that that equinex has for digital services. Based on the characteristics of the composite organization, here's the major quantifiable benefit categories from the TEI study showing the composite organizations 3 year financial totals for each benefit. Before we dig into these benefits, based on the characteristics of our $1 billion composite organization, I did want to cover some equally important unquantified benefits based on the interviewees responses. The composite organization is able to deliver and deploy end to end services for their customers 10 times faster through equinex digital services. Based on the responses from the interviews with Equinex locations located globally, representatives shared how their companies were able to make decisions in near real time rather than going through the process of ordering, receiving and setting up physical infrastructure. A process that took companies weeks previously based on interview responses, leveraging business to business connections through Equinex's internal ecosystem of vendor partners and cloud providers. Representatives shared how their companies were able to respond quickly to business needs and secure connections to speed up interconnections between companies. The value of speed to market for customers could alternately be measured by this positive impact. And customer and partner satisfaction based on the consistency of delivery of services beyond speed to market representatives shared how digital services were impacting their business agility and their company's ability to scale their infrastructure quickly. Organizations were able to scale up or scale down their infrastructure without the previous limitations of physical equipment as business needs evolved. Representatives discussed how they were able to move their data out to new regions to improve access to the information and localize the data while transitioning off of high cost MPLS connections. The next benefit I want to walk through is the reduction in internally managed infrastructure. Interviewees shared how digital services enabled their companies to decrease their investments in physical hardware. And infrastructure. While realizing savings for real estate and support maintenance costs, companies were able to decrease electricity, cooling, water and other utilities costs in addition to building maintenance and rent. Overall, the composite organization is able to decommission three data centers in the first three years of their investment, decrease in their internally managed infrastructure costs by 60% or risk adjusted benefit of 19.3 million. While not measured within the savings for the the composite organization, the benefit for internally managed infrastructure could alternately be measured in terms of the savings for incremental infrastructure as business needs expand. Interviewees shared that virtual infrastructure cost 25% less compared with adding physical infrastructure. As you're thinking about this, it's important to think about. How your organization currently manages its internal infrastructure as well as the size and location of your infrastructure. When considering the potential impact on your company. This provided special benefits in in in the past few years when we were looking for cost benefits during the pandemic especially, we've worked at Forrester closely with some of our clients who were. Especially looking for advantages like this to find ways in which they can they can optimize where and what types of infrastructure they manage internally, not only to optimize for cost but also for operational efficiencies, the number of number of people that they needed to have to manage such large infrastructure, the associated services that they may need to avail. And this was a particular advantage for customers, for clients who would be in areas where maintaining in internal infrastructure would be a very costly affair. Yeah. And just one other thing I'll mention is kind of another thing that isn't modeled specifically in the benefit, but companies could also see further flexibility benefits related to decreased risk of critical business failures. And avoiding potential revenue impacts such as what's shown in the quote that you see here, the next benefit I'd like to highlight is the reduced cost of connections through equinex. Digital services companies are able to decrease the connectivity cost compared to cloud providers and telecommunications companies, in addition to decreasing investment in physical equipment including circuits, routers and network power switches. Companies were also able to leverage Equinex's network of global locations to localize data and avoid inefficient and costly connections. These factors contributed to realizing a 90% decrease in data egress costs and an overall benefit of $1.6 million / 3 years based on reduced cost of connections. Another way to think about this would be the value of localization of data through digital services as the ability to be able to meet. Data and compliance standards internationally will help to avoid compliance and audit fees for companies. The final benefit that I'll highlight in detail relates to the potential impact on productivity and operational downtime for companies deploying EQUINEX. Representatives discussed how transitioning to a virtual infrastructure with digital services across multiple data centers worldwide. Help their companies to build distributed redundancies to prevent outages for end users while improving the operational productivity for their IT professionals. Overall, company saw a decrease in system outages with one interviewee sharing the digital services. Help their company go from 12 major incidents per year for their call center to less than one per year since investing in Equinex. Additionally, companies were able to redeploy their IT staff away from remedial tasks. And focus on higher value tasks internally. Overall, this equates to annual savings of 2.7 million and a three-year risk adjusted present value benefit of $5.7 million. I'd also like to briefly highlight a few benefits for consideration, which were not modeled within the composite organization. Some customers may actually be able to get a bigger benefit from these items than the ones that we did quantify. For the people that we interviewed, these were just items which were very important, but we didn't necessarily have a great way to quantify them. Representatives shared how their organizations were able to decrease security threats with having their data closer to the security edge and improving control. Companies discussed how Equinex's single pane of glass experience and access to vendor and cloud partners help them to streamline processes. And improve response time to security threats. Interviewees also saw improved employee satisfaction at their companies based on the simplification of processes, ease of use of the tools, and eliminating menial work for IT teams. Companies appreciated the end to end support and consistent partnership they got from the Equinex team. I'd encourage people on the phone to think about what other benefits your company might get based on the capabilities of equinex's solutions. These benefits are only representative of what we've heard during the interview process and should not be considered fully inclusive of the potential benefits or impacts. There are additional flexibility opportunities where companies could implement equinex digital services and realize additional uses and business opportunities. First, organizations can realize value beyond the three-year period modeled in the study for the investment in internally managed infrastructure. Interviewees shared that their companies were not expecting to realize the full benefits of their investment until five years or longer after transitioning to digital services. For the composite organization, this equates to an incremental $5 million of annual savings after their fourth data center is decommissioned. Companies also have the potential to better understand and measure their energy usage to improve overall sustainability and prevent potential fines. We're not measuring these factors properly. Equinix is 100% renewable energy in U.S. data centers and 95% worldwide can help companies reduce their carbon footprint and emissions. Now I'm going to hand it back over to Abbajet. Abbajet, could you just expand on what you're seeing in the broader industry related to sustainability? Sustainability like we discussed earlier is top of mind for leaders at this time. And the data on this slide is from a survey that we did with technology leaders who had oversight and decision making authority in sustainability. And we asked them about what impact they have seen from a list of technology initiatives on improving sustainability for their organization and amongst the top five. Across the various industries that we surveyed and across various regions was the impact of optimizing the data center and also along with that digitizing operations. Now data centers form a low hanging fruit for a variety of industries to look into to be more sustainable. And that's because like we discussed earlier, data centers consume a lot of energy. So that forms part of the direct emissions that an organization is responsible for. And there are also a lot of advancements currently in how to make a data center much more sustainable to explore a lot of opportunities within the data center, for example, the. Reducing the puv of a data center, managing water within the data center more efficiently and including other initiatives such as the temperatures at which data centers are maintained for running servers in the most efficient way. What types of active measures can you put into place within data center like the AI, ML based technology examples that we talked about earlier and therefore. Data center optimization across the board for industries form a big part of their sustainability activity. So therefore sustainability is right in the thick of the data center trends that we're observing across the board. Now the trends that we have observed from our interviews with technology leaders of are around supply chain exploring edge models. Sustainability, like we discussed the advantages that interconnection brings from being in a collocation facility and then the need to host specialized workloads and services in the right environment. These are the various trends that we are seeing now in the ways in which Rfp's are designed and when we talk about sustainability in RFP. Questions two now. The role of sustainability is is increasing significantly. Not only are the number of questions around sustainability increasing, but also the weightage those questions carry in the final decisions that customers eventually took. Thank you, abhijit. Getting back to the TEI, I want to talk a little bit about costs, a TEI study in order to be able to really talk about the. ROI and the net benefits also needs to consider the costs for the organization for this TEI. The investment in EQUINEX includes license fees, planning, implementation and change management costs which add up to a present value of $10.9 million for the composite organization. The implementation process lasts six months for the composite organization, but this is really dependent on resources deployed. The complexity of the organization's existing infrastructure as well as the scope of services transitioning to equinex. Interviewees shared that the actual setup process with Equinex was quick and straightforward and help them deliver on business requests significantly faster than legacy solutions while utilizing less technical and more business oriented individuals within their companies. I'll now bring this back. We had looked at this earlier, but I want to show again the financial impacts. In summary, overall benefits added up to a present value of $26.5 million for the composite organization with the difference in the present value of benefits and costs adding up to the net present value or NPV A3 year risk adjusted present value of $15.6 million for the composite organization. Adds up to a return on investment of 142%. Each of the people on the call can set up a similar set of results for your own organization. Use the benefit examples that I ran through or perhaps other opportunities that you see. Then I would identify key factors for your organization such as what infrastructure and solutions your company utilizes today. What's your company's strategy to build connections with vendor partners and cloud providers in the future? As well as what your opportunity is to localize data and bring it closer to your customers. So last, I just want to do a little bit of house cleaning with some disclosures. I won't cover this in detail, but I did want to make the audience aware of a couple of things. One important thing is to note that this webinar was based on the full TEI study. Which I'd encourage each of those on the call to check out through the resources section of this webinar or through Equinex's website. Also, both this webinar and the TEI study were both commissioned by Equinex and completed independently by Forrester, which maintains editorial control. Thank you guys so much for your time. I'm going to go ahead and hand it back to Dr. now. Alex and Avijette, thank you so much, not only for the time that you gave us today, but also all of those valuable insights. So thank you very much. And from that, we'll now transition to our digital discussion. Our guest today is Eric Norman. He is the head of infrastructure and innovation for the Intercontinental Hotel Group. Welcome, Eric. Dr. Thank you and my pleasure to be here. And you know I HG is a a global company with over 6000 hotels and 18 different brands with some, you know, key brands like Intercontinental Hotels and Holiday Inn and Holiday Express. So it's a pleasure to be here. Eric, while you are the head of infrastructure and innovation for IHG today, I'm going to guess that that wasn't your first job out of college. Can you give us an overview? Can you give us an overview of your career and some of the larger challenges you've faced along the way? Yeah, I mean, I started out of after college working for NASA and. You know so I work for you know I had I had a war propeller head you know as a scientist. But I ended up moving into the banking industry and then fell into the hospitality world which was a you know very you know you know world that you know deals with the guests around the world. And you know some of the challenges that we found as we started our digital journey was around you know the. The world had changed in the last three years where it moved to more of a hybrid worker and workers started moving towards you know taking doing business but also taking vacation at the same time. And yeah, we also saw that our loyalty members, we had about 100 million at the time and they were contributing you know well over 50% of room nights. In our business. So a great opportunity for us to look at our digital journey and how we can maximize opportunity for that. That's good. It's interesting that you that you mentioned that and that some of the challenges were the same across all of those different industries that you mentioned, which goes back to what Abbott shared with us earlier that there were these consistencies that are seen across industry across. Verticals that organizations are facing. And so when you think about some of those challenges that you face and those challenges that you overcame, what were some of the things that helped you the most overcome your biggest challenges, especially in the last three years? Yeah, I mean we set out a strategy to rewrite our mobile loyalty app, we also decided on. You know modernizing our technology stack in Equinix was a a huge player in that decision. We had to rebuild our network because you know some of the challenges that we were fighting against was you know regulatory and compliance. Kind of similar to what Forrester was mentioning as part of the study is that you know, you know we're a global company, we've got to be able to be compliant and meet the regulatory in every country around the world. And to be able to do that we got to, we had to change our network and how we distributed not only the public cloud, but our our SAS partners and our B to B partners and be able to connect them in the closest region around the world, get access to data and resources, you know again in country for to make it performant. That's good, that's good and and and we hear that a lot again when we work with organizations just like you and when we were working with you, I think one of the best things that we hear is, is what you said is it started with the strategy. I think for so long we saw IT organizations making one off IT decisions as they had always done and now organizations are realizing it has to be tied to a much larger strategy. Not surprising, the first thing that you mentioned was transforming your network. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Yeah, I mean as we saw you know I kind of call it the the Cambian explosion, you know, back to 6600 million years ago, you know, organisms were popping up all over the place and you know today, you know we're having our own explosion not only in our business but you know globally for every company is. You know, data and applications are being spread out all over the place and to be able to connect and provide a performance, move data around from one side to another to get to your analytics, to your, you know, enterprise data warehouse, you had to, we had to come up with a new network, the old network that was hub and spoke into a single data center or you know two data centers. It's not scalable or tenable to be able to, you know, meet the demand of data growth and where data and application sit around the globe. And so we implemented a Multiregional Equinix performance hubs around the globe including in China and across the Europe and Asia and in the Americas that allows us to. Bring our hotels together, brings our guests together, brings all our public cloud and applications that we have together in a very optimal way so we can be successful as a business. We hear that, we hear that a lot of companies, one of the first things that they do is realize that they need to update the network just as you laid out moving from that hub and spoke more to a distributed hub, performance hub as you had mentioned. To set that foundation, we say all the time we believe the network is the foundation of digital transformation because it will be everything else or that is where everything else will sit and will ride upon the network. One of the things you also mentioned where that we're seeing companies do that for is to be able to. You, as you said modernize the tech stack, the ability to connect to cloud providers and SAS providers. This digital ecosystem that we're seeing just explode and become more and more important. Can you share a little bit more about that with us? Yeah, we, we set out over the last three years and started moving a lot of our apps, but you know, it's not moving the apps. We've rearchitect them to be more. Agile and part of a new DevOps pipeline. So that way we can have a greater agility in delivering functionality to our guests and our hotel owners around the globe in a very easy manner. So you know, we partnered with different partners from you know, our global reservation system to you know, players like Salesforce, AWS, GCP. We also implemented using a overlay network that overlays all our networking construct using a company called Aviatrix. That allows us to see and process our data globally in a single view, right? And because it is a hybrid network I've got. You know every, pretty much every cloud provider being used and and you got to be able to visually from a day two operations being able to support it and maintain it. So you mentioned about getting all of this information. You know we've set the foundation, you now are getting all of this information with the desire to get that to the end user which you know everyone is talking now about this digital edge. Can you help us understand where do you define the edge? I define or we define the edge as the the customer cell phone. I mean if you really think about it, you know the cell phone has you know under the pandemic and everything. You know people have moved gravitated to leveraging that cell phone globally to do, you know their purchases their that they're living there. You know they're on the phones all the time doing transactions. And you know, so that edge in the hospitality industry is critical, critical to us to be able to deliver something at that edge to the end user guest. We have a lot of conversations around the edge, everyone wanting to define where it is. You know, there's a whole lot of agreement on where it is or that there is a digital edge, not probably a whole lot of agreement of where it is. And I think that's because as you just summed up, that edge will be determined by the consumer, not by the provider. It'll be determined, determined by us on our phones, whatever industry that we're in. But when thinking about your industry and getting that information to your guests on their phones or whatever device that they're using, what are some of the challenges and concerns that you have about moving this data to the edge? Again it gets back to having that global network so that way you can distribute data or cash data at the edge because again you want the experience to be very performant. And you know if you're not, you know back in the old days if you had a data center sitting in the US and and you're delivering service to someone sitting in China, you know the performance is not going to be there and you know so you've got to be able to be in country localized. Being able to deliver all the way out to that edge at the best way you can so that the experience if the experience is not acceptable by the guests, you know they'll move on, they'll, they'll move quickly to somewhere else that is performing. So you know, so we, we, we cherish the need to make sure that you know, we are you know delivering our applications as close as we can to the guests experience. And that experience is expected, probably even demanded now by end users who are again expecting or demanding a seamless end to end experience regardless of what it is that you're doing. So that's a lot. I mean, yeah, I mean, I I do want to just say that, you know, it also it's an opportunity for you to, you know, push, you know? Vouchers or ability to in real time, why the you know the guest is actually experiencing their hotel stay to be able to deliver their promises or their preferences in in real time as opposed to you know a delayed reaction to it, seamless and consistent experience. So that's a lot in in sharing with us this, this strategy that you've been rolling out or been part of been leading, looking back over your shoulder. Now what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned during this entire process? I think what you gotta, you know do is start early and build a strong foundation, you know, not having that strong foundation. It's hard to leverage or you, you, you deal with a lot of technical debt and you know you got to clean the slate and build a foundation of you know the the, the technology stack, this hybrid cloud environment, the the network that's in place you know you've got to be you know situated in a place where you can deliver and you know we recently last year we launched our new mobile app and with that new. Mobile app, we actually increased 15 million guest members into our one rewards club. So now we've got you know more members that are contributing to that 50% room nights in our in our hotel brand. Well Eric, we we definitely appreciate all those insights you shared with us and really appreciate. Your business being a partner of Equinix and and really want to thank you for, for being here today. So thank you for. Thank you, Dr. thank you. Appreciate it. Well, again I want to thank all of my guests today and thank all of you for attending this webinar. I hope that you found this beneficial. I'd hope that you would go out and download the TEI study and if you want any additional information on us, please go to deploy.equinix.com. Again, thank you very much. Have a good day. _1714049527828