Data Center POST had the opportunity to engage with Alan Gibbemeyer, VP of Business Development and Sales for Telescent, a company revolutionizing automated connectivity solutions. With a rich background in technology and telecommunications, Alan brings over two decades of experience to the industry, consistently embodying values of innovation, collaboration, and sustainable design wins. As we explore Telescent’s focus on automating the optical fiber layer of the network to improve telecom service delivery, Alan shares his vision for the industry’s future. Join us in learning about Alan’s illuminating views by reading the interview below ahead of the upcoming annual PTC’24 Conference.
Data Center Post (DCP) Question: PTC’s Annual Conference is a strategic springboard for the global communications industry, and this year is no different. How is your business addressing AI needs, keeping in mind the upcoming rules and risks associated with AI?
Alan Gibbemeyer (AG) Answer: While everyone is fascinated with new capabilities, such as ChatGPT, that have been launched over the last year, what isn’t talked about as much is the significant power demands and cost of AI computing. Telescent’s robotic cross-connect system has demonstrated that by optimizing communication links between GPUs, the training time can be reduced significantly – greatly reducing power demand and improving usage of the expensive GPUs. Also, as data centers are rushing to deploy additional capacity to meet demand, the Telescent system can be used to easily and rapidly re-stripe data center networks to expand capacity while minimizing human error.
DCP Q: At PTC’24 there will be a few sessions focusing on the status and opportunities in the telecom market. From telecom equipment, services, and wireless communication, which area of the industry does your company focus on, and where do you see the industry heading in the next 5-10 years?
AG A: Telescent is focused on bringing automation to the optical fiber layer of the network to reduce OpEx and improve telecom service delivery. As demonstrated by some recent announcements by service providers offering 24-hour turn-up of services, telecom customers want to get services faster and not have to wait weeks or months to get increased bandwidth. I think in the next five to 10 years customers will be able to control their own telecom services – from having dynamic bandwidth control on routes as needed to having access to diagnose issues across the network when they occur rather than submitting tickets and waiting for technicians to get on-site.
DCP Q: At PTC’24, on January 23, 2024, the Infrastructure Builders panel will discuss how the world will look in 2033 (10 years), when we are one-third of the way through the digital century. How are you approaching projects and planning for future growth with the shifting utilization of digital infrastructure?
AG A: From a vantage point of ten years ago (2013), I don’t think many of us would have predicted the advances we’ve seen in AI or the rise of ChatGPT. But it is possible to predict the future by focusing on things that never change such as the growing demand for bandwidth, that consumers want greater control of what they use, and people don’t like waiting for things.
Based on these obvious predictions, Telescent will continue to increase the fiber count in our robotic cross-connect system. Increasing the radix of our already very large port count system will allow data center operators to more efficiently scale out data centers while allowing optimization of the network to improve efficiency.
DCP Q: What core markets do you operate in and what are the key opportunities / challenges in these markets and how are you adapting to address them?
AG A: Telescent’s robotic patch panel serves the broad telecom and data center market – anywhere there are manual patch panels today that can benefit from automation. The growth of AI/ML today is creating opportunities as data centers explore new ideas to more efficiently manage the compute cluster connectivity since bandwidth can be a limiting factor in Machine Learning (ML) training. The increasing size of these ML clusters is also creating challenges to efficiently manage the interconnection between thousands to tens of thousands of GPUs.
DCP Q: PTC’24 is the 46th annual PTC Conference. During this four-day event, how can people meet or learn more about you (or after PTC’24)?
AG A: I encourage anyone to reach out to me via Telescent’s website here: https://www.telescent.com/contact or find me on LinkedIn here.
DCP Q: What else would you like for our readers to know that you haven’t already shared about your company?
AG A: Telescent is a young company using robotics to automate the physical fiber layer in networks. Automation of the fiber layer has been a vision for many years but only a small fraction of fiber connectivity has been automated to date. Google started production scale fiber layer automation with the use of an in-house developed OCS and we believe that software control of fiber connections will be an area of rapid development in the coming years.
If you want to learn more about PTC’24, please visit: www.ptc.org/ptc24. The event takes place January 21-24, 2024 in Honolulu, HI – registration is still open for those interested in attending.
To request a meeting with Telescent at PTC’24, click here.
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