Podcasts about azure iot

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Best podcasts about azure iot

Latest podcast episodes about azure iot

Ultimate Guide to Partnering™
225 - Empowering Partners for FY25 Success: Exclusive Interview with Microsoft's Nicole Dezen

Ultimate Guide to Partnering™

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2024 25:57


In the latest episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering, host Vince Menzione sits down with Nicole Dezen, General Manager of Global Channel Sales for IoT at Microsoft, to explore the transformative potential of IoT and how Azure IoT solutions are driving innovation across industries.

The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie
Miguel Morales | SoftwareAG and Ty Roberts | Itron

The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2024 23:57 Transcription Available


Industrial Talk is onsite at DistribuTECH and talking to Miguel Morales, Commercial IoT Lead with Software AG and Ty Roberts, Vice President of Marketing with Itron, Inc. about "Grid Edge - How utilities will manager their distributed energy assets.".  Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation: The conversation centered around the importance of collaboration and innovation in the utility industry, particularly in managing distributed assets and leveraging software platforms like Cumulocity. Speakers emphasized the complexity of grid edge technology and the need for leaders to guide the charge towards a more sustainable and efficient future. They also discussed the importance of utilities managing energy demand and infrastructure with smart devices, reducing investments in poles and wires, and changing their relationship with consumers from energy providers to partners in the energy transition. Action Items [ ] Itron and Software AG will continue collaborating to more quickly connect diverse devices and bring data together [ ] Interested parties can contact Miguel at miguel.morales@softwareag.com or Ty at ty.roberts@itron.com for more information Outline Grid edge technology and its impact on utilities. Miguel Morales is the commercial lead at cumulocity, IoT part of software. AG. Morales has experience in IoT, including Azure IoT and industrial IoT practice at a fortune 250 industrial startup. Miguel shares their admiration for Itron and experiences working with them. Ty discusses the focus on grid edge technology and utilities managing distributed assets. Utilizing data to manage energy consumption and infrastructure. Miguel: Consumers want more control over energy consumption, but may lack awareness of available solutions. Scott MacKenzie: Utilities face challenge of providing visibility into diverse range of devices for efficient energy management. Ty: Utilities need to reduce investments in poles and wires by leveraging smart devices and control. Miguel: Cities also need capex for visibility and load management to deliver reliability. Miguel: Utilities can leverage standard cellular network for data collection without additional investment. Ty: Targeted approaches with utilities to mitigate local problems, starting with specific areas of concern. Utilities' role in energy transition, collaboration, and consumer education. Collaboration necessary for secure, reliable power distribution. Utilities must change relationship with customers by providing proactive insights and value. Incentivizing consumers to contribute to solving energy problems through positive reinforcement and collaboration between software companies and utilities. Miguel suggests utilities need to incentivize users with positive reinforcement, such as celebrating small wins or saving turtles. Scott MacKenzie agrees, noting that leaders in the utility industry must take the first step towards incentivizing users in a more engaging way. Scott MacKenzie: Collaboration with Software AG for faster data connection and insights. Utilities are being matched with partners for end-to-end solutions, including Itron and Software AG. Utilizing software to streamline grid edge operations. Miguel compares software development to cooking, using meal kits as an analogy. Ty is optimistic about the show's impact, citing...

IoT For All Podcast
Cellular IoT Best Practices | Teal's Robert Hamblet & Red Bison's Rob Tiffany | Internet of Things Podcast

IoT For All Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2024 42:58


In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Robert Hamblet, CEO of Teal, and Rob Tiffany, Chief Product Officer at Red Bison, join Ryan Chacon to discuss cellular IoT adoption best practices from a buyer's perspective. Robert talks about eSIM technology and emphasizes that flexibility and preserving options are crucial for utilizing eSIM technology effectively. They also refer to the possibilities with iSIM and touch upon the importance of making informed decisions about choosing the right IoT components. The podcast provides an insightful conversation about eSIM, iSIM, and the future direction of cellular IoT solutions. Robert Hamblet is the Founder, CEO, & President of TEAL, a global networking company headquartered in Seattle, WA. Teal is the first US-based eSIM platform to be certified by the GSMA providing a cloud-native, Credentialing-as-a-Service platform that provides intelligent connectivity and networking solutions for IoT device and network operators. Prior to founding Teal, Robert developed some of the industry's earliest eSIM platforms for several multinational connected car manufacturers. A Top Voice in IoT, 5G, and Digital Twin AI, Rob Tiffany is the Founder and CEO at Digital Insights, an organization providing strategic advisory services on emerging technologies to leaders in industry and the military. Rob has held global leadership roles at Ericsson, Hitachi, and Microsoft. As Vice President and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson, he drove 5G connection management with the IoT Accelerator and participated in global M&A activities. As Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi, he received the Presidential “Product of the Year” award for designing the Lumada Industrial IoT platform which landed in Gartner's “Leaders” Magic Quadrant. Spending most of his career at Microsoft, Rob was Director and Global Technology Lead for the Azure IoT cloud platform. Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded NetPerceptor developing one of the industry's earliest Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) platforms for smartphones. As an author and speaker, Rob is a frequently sought-after source globally. He's been featured in Wired, Forbes, Fierce Wireless, Inc. Magazine, Dataconomy, Thinkers360, Onalytica, Mobile World Live, Techonomy, and SXSW. TEAL's patented, GSMA-certified eSIM technology connects any compatible device to any data network worldwide. With more network operator agreements than any other connectivity provider, TEAL gives businesses everywhere the flexibility and control to remotely switch between networks, ensuring the highest level of reliability and performance for any internet of things (IoT) deployment. TEAL supports applications across many industries including mobility, robotics, drones, industrial IoT, railways, and healthcare. Discover more about cellular IoT at https://www.iotforall.com More about TEAL: https://tealcom.io More about Red Bison: https://www.redbison.com Connect with Robert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-hamblet-970582a1/ Connect with Rob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robtiffany/ (00:00) Intro (00:18) Guest introduction (00:50) Understanding cellular IoT solutions (02:07) Choosing the right connectivity (04:27) The role of developers in IoT solutions (05:05) The impact of network congestion (09:38) The evolution of cellular connectivity (15:20) The promise of eSIM and iSIM (20:00) Scaling cellular IoT solutions (36:34) The future of cellular IoT (42:31) Learn more and follow up SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/2NlcEwm​ Join Our Newsletter: https://www.iotforall.com/iot-newsletter Follow Us on Social: https://linktr.ee/iot4all Check out the IoT For All Media Network: https://www.iotforall.com/podcast-overview

The IoT Podcast
What Does It Take to Succeed as a Developer Today? | Olivier Bloch - IoT Developer Relations Expert

The IoT Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 5, 2023 46:29


In season 4 episode 11, we're joined by IoT Advisor and Developer Relations Expert & former Principal PM Manager at Microsoft - Olivier Bloch to explore the evolving role of developers in the age of IoT. We'll explore the key skills, challenges, the influence of open-source software, and the implications of Gen AI on the developer landscape, as well as dive into the industrial metaverse and debating whether this is where the real value of the metaverse will be realised. Sit back, relax, tune in and discover... (01:47) About Olivier (03:04) What is an IoT developer? (07:30) Key developer skills (11:10) Challenges for Developer today (14:40) What matters about Matter (17:26) The Open source software movement (24:18) The Industrial Metaverse (30:40) Is there one or many metaverses? (37:32) What the future means for developers? (41:50) Trends in IoT this year 2023 (44:06) Quick fire questions And much more! Thank you to today's episode sponsors... 5V Tech! Discover how 5V Tech can help you unlock your scaling potential in cutting-edge tech and IoT, here: https://www.weare5vtech.com/ ABOUT THE GUEST Olivier Bloch is a IoT and Developer Relations expert with over 20 years of experience, specialising in simplifying complex tech for developers. Olivier has led developer relations for Azure IoT at Microsoft and possess a diverse technical background spanning Edge to Cloud. Olivier has a strong history of collaboration with open-source and developer communities. Connect with Olivier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivierbloch/ Read Olivier's blogs, IoT show and podcasts: olivierbloch.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE IOT PODCAST ON YOUR FAVOURITE LISTENING PLATFORM: https://linktr.ee/theiotpodcast Sign Up for exclusive email updates: https://theiotpodcast.com/ Contact us to become a guest/partner: https://theiotpodcast.com/contact/ Connect with host Tom White: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom5values/  

The Digestible Dynamics Podcast
Copilot for D365 Field Service

The Digestible Dynamics Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2023 19:37


According to some statistics published by Financesonline.com, field service management software can increase technician utilization by 47%, first-time fix rate by 22%, and customer retention by 11%. With the addition of Copilot to Field service, end users like dispatchers, field service managers and field technicians are empowered with an even greater boost in productivity, work quality and work satisfaction. There are many benefits to Copilot for Field Service, which is why we wanted to bring on a Dynamics 365 Field Service expert, Hector Garcia Tellado, Partner Director of Product Management for D365 Field Service at Microsoft, to discuss what Copilot for Field Service is and how it will benefit its users. Episode TopicsWhat is Copilot for D365 Field Service?How do you see it benefiting our FS customers today?Which LOBs do you see benefiting from Copilot for D365 Field Service? Useful Resources:Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service supports exceptional frontline service - Microsoft Dynamics 365 BlogDynamics 365 Field Service - Copilot in Field Service | Microsoft LearnWork order recap with Copilot in Field Service (preview) - Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft LearnField Service Outlook add-in with Copilot for the Frontline Manager (preview) - Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn About Hector Garcia TelladoHector Garcia Tellado is a Partner Director of Product Management for D365 Field Service at Microsoft, overseeing product vision, roadmap and strategy. Prior to this role, he was the head of Product Management of D365 Remote Assist, a mixed reality application that allows better frontline worker communication; before that he held various PM roles in the Azure IoT organization. He also spent several years in IBM Software in their Lab Service teams serving the EMEA region. Hector holds an BS in Physics from University of Vigo (Spain) and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge, MA). Connect with Hector - Hector Garcia Tellado | LinkedIn We'd love to hear from you!Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments, suggestions or feedback! We'd love to hear from you. Send your hosts an email at digestibledynamics@microsoft.com Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

IoT For All Podcast
Digital Twins and Simulation in IoT | Cosmo Tech's Sam George | Internet of Things Podcast

IoT For All Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2023 18:09


Sam George is a board member of Cosmo Tech, a digital simulation solutions company. Before Cosmo Tech, Sam was Corporate Vice President of Azure IoT at Microsoft, responsible for Azure IoT Central, Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service, Azure Maps, Azure Time Series Insights, Industrial IoT & Manufacturing, Automotive / Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Smart Buildings, Smart Energy. Additional responsibilities included IoT business strategy and results for IoT in Azure, IoT product offerings and roadmap, developer facing features, integration with other Azure services, partner and field enablement and more.Sam spent over 20 years with Microsoft and has spent time in all three engineering disciplines (development, test, and program management). He spent most of his career as a dev manager, dev lead, or developer and in 2011, he switched to a product leadership position.Cosmo Tech is a French company based in digital twin simulation solutions for international and complex enterprises.

IIoT Use Case Podcast | Industrie
#089 | Familienunternehmen managt Produktionsprozesse via Microsoft Azure IoT | ACP Digital - daenet & FRÄNKISCHE Rohrwerke

IIoT Use Case Podcast | Industrie

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2023 52:49


#SMARTFACTORY #CLOUD #PLATTFORMwww.iotusecase.comOb Hersteller oder Zulieferer – immer mehr Unternehmen aus der Automobilbranche und der herstellenden Industrie fordern einen direkten Zugriff auf Telemetriedaten von den Maschinen, die an der Produktion beteiligt sind. Selbst einzelne Prozesse sollen dabei mit eigenen Tools analysiert werden können. Was damit einhergeht: Anforderungen an digitale Lösungen bzw. entsprechende Fähigkeiten der Geschäftspartner und Maschinenbauer. Welche Anforderungen das sind und welche Use Cases hier heute schon umgesetzt werden, zeigen in Podcastfolge 89 des IoT Use Case Podcasts Fränkische Rohrwerke und daenet. Folge 89 auf einen Blick (und Klick):[11:56] Herausforderungen, Potenziale und Status quo – So sieht der Use Case in der Praxis aus[24:00] Lösungen, Angebote und Services – Ein Blick auf die eingesetzten Technologien[41:15] Ergebnisse, Geschäftsmodelle und Best Practices – So wird der Erfolg gemessenZusammenfassung der PodcastfolgeDie daenet GmbH gehört wie ACP Digital zur ACP Gruppe und besteht aus ca. 160 Mitarbeitenden, die sich ausschließlich den Themen Digitalisierung und digitalen Technologien widmen. Sie entwickeln Lösungen in Richtung Emerging Technologies. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit Microsoft arbeitet daenet an neuesten Technologien, die auf dem Weg sind, sich am Markt zu etablieren. Anschließend helfen sie ihren (und auch Microsofts) Kunden, diese Technologien erfolgreich in die Produkte umzusetzen. So auch bei dem Projekt mit Fränkische Rohrwerke um das es in dieser Podcastfolge geht. Das Geschäft von FRÄNKISCHE dreht sich um die Entwicklung und Produktion unterschiedlichster Rohre, Zubehörteile und Systemkomponenten aus Kunststoff und Metall. Die Kunden kommen aus den Bereichen Hoch- und Tiefbau, Automotive und Industrie. Der Wunsch nach direktem Zugriff auf Telemetriedaten spielt bei ihnen eine immer größer werdende Rolle. Jede einzelne produzierte Komponente soll exakt nachverfolgt werden. In dieser Folge erfahrt ihr, wie bei FRÄNKISCHE eine moderne IoT-Plattform für die Planung, Überwachung und die Erfassung von Produktionsprozessen aufgebaut wurde. Es berichten: Stefan Endorff (Teamleiter Digital Transformation Office bei Fränkische Industrial Pipes) und Damir Dobric (CEO and Lead Software Architect bei ACP Digital - daenet GmbH). -----Relevante Folgenlinks:Damir Dobric (https://www.linkedin.com/in/damirdobric/)Stefan Endorff (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-endorff-27583317b/)Madeleine Mickeleit (https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleine-mickeleit/)https://iotusecase.com/de/unternehmen/acp-digital/ https://winfuture.de/news,134276.htmlJetzt IoT Use Case auf LinkedIn folgen

The Azure Podcast
Episode 428 - Java and Spring Apps

The Azure Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2022


Our resident expert on all things Java on Azure, Asir Vedamuthu Selvasingh, gives us all the latest updates on running your Java workloads on various Azure services. He also dives into the newly renamed Azure Spring Apps service which now has more SKUs to address various use-cases.   Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode428.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/PaMaWij21N0 Resources: Start Enterprise - https://aka.ms/spring-apps-EnterpriseDevelop your first Spring Boot app - https://aka.ms/Start-SpringLearn using a self-paced workshop - https://aka.ms/Learn-SpringWatch bite-size demos - https://aka.ms/Spring-PlaylistLeverage best practices - https://aka.ms/Spring-BootBuild and deploy Java apps on Azure - https://aka.ms/LearnJavaInteract with Azure services using Spring - https://aka.ms/Spring-Cloud-Azure   Technical Case StoriesFedEx - https://aka.ms/FedExNational Life Group - https://aka.ms/National-LifeDigital Realty Trust - https://aka.ms/DLRSwiss Re - https://aka.ms/Swiss-ReRaley's - https://aka.ms/Raley'Liantis - https://aka.ms/LiantisKroger - https://aka.ms/Kroger-on-AzureMorgan Stanley - https://aka.ms/Morgan-StanleyBosch - https://aka.ms/Bosch.IO   Other Updates: See how 3 industry-leading companies are driving innovation in a new episode of Inside Azure for IT https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/see-how-3-industryleading-companies-are-driving-innovation-in-a-new-episode-of-inside-azure-for-it/   Responsible AI investments and safeguards for facial recognition https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/responsible-ai-investments-and-safeguards-for-facial-recognition/   Azure IoT increases enterprise-level intelligent edge and cloud capabilities https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-iot-increases-enterpriselevel-intelligent-edge-and-cloud-capabilities/   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-databricks-available-in-new-regions/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-sdk-for-go/   Various Load Testing updates: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-testing-supports-splitting-input-data-across-test-engines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-testing-support-for-user-specified-jmeter-properties/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-testing-support-for-customermanaged-keys/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-testing-support-for-userassigned-managed-identities/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/public-preview-azure-load-testing-supports-quick-start-tests-with-web-url/   General availability: Azure Data Explorer connector for Power Automate, Logic Apps, and Power Apps   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/power-platform-connector-ga/

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities
Alistair Fulton - Connecting & Enabling A Smarter Planet - VP, Wireless & Sensing Products, Semtech

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2022 48:30


Alistair Fulton (https://www.semtech.com/company/executive-leadership/alistair-fulton) is the Vice President and General Manager of Semtech's Wireless and Sensing Products Group. Semtech Corporation is a supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms for consumer, enterprise computing, communications and industrial end-markets. It has 32 locations in 15 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. Semtech is the developer of LoRa, a long-range networking initiative for the Internet of Things. As of March 2021, over 178 million devices use LoRa worldwide. LoRa has been used in satellites, tracking of animals, and natural disaster prediction. Mr. Fulton joined Semtech in 2018 with over 25 years of experience in the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices, machine to machine (M2M)/embedded, and analytics spaces. Before joining Semtech, Mr. Fulton led the development of Hitachi's Lumada Industrial IoT Platform, the leading "visionary" IIoT platform in Gartner's 2018 magic quadrant. Prior to Hitachi, he led Microsoft's early IoT initiatives, including the development and incubation of Microsoft's v1.0 IoT platform (the precursor to the v3.0 Azure IoT platform). Mr. Fulton also served as a Leader within Deloitte Consulting's Strategy & Operations / Telecommunications Media and Technology practice, focused on new product development, innovation and strategic transformation engagements in the wireless & Internet of Things (IoT) sectors. He started his career at Telefónica UK.

Beyond The Now IoT Security Podcast | PSA Certified
Digital Transformation, Digital Twins, and the Metaverse with Microsoft

Beyond The Now IoT Security Podcast | PSA Certified

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2022 32:24


In the first of two #beyondthenow podcast episodes with Microsoft Azure, we explore the wider impact of the IoT and digital transformation on businesses, setting the scene for the importance of security. Tony Shakib (General Manager, Azure IoT, Microsoft) sits down with David to discuss why digital transformation is becoming a necessity, how the IoT is helping fuel a more proactive business model and why security should be part of the core fabric of your solutions. Introduction to Tony Shakib (General Manager, Microsoft Azure IoT). [01:18] What are the main industries that Microsoft are working with on their digital transformation journey? Industrial IoT, Smart Cities, and Connected Healthcare. [03:01] The three phases of digital transformation: connectivity, context, connected ecosystems. [05:29] Digital transformation results in operational efficiency but also allows you to grow your business in new ways. [09:09] What are digital twins? [11:43] The IoT is fueling a more proactive business model. [14:17] The IoT is helping build the industrial metaverse. [15:47] Businesses are realizing that digital transformation is no longer optional. [17:25] Microsoft take a zero-trust approach to IoT security and their IoT security solutions. [20:30] Legacy devices are one of the biggest challenges for those starting their digital transformation journey. [23:21] Tony's predictions for the IoT landscape in 5 years' time. [26:01] Edge compute and cloud compute are equally important. [28:51] Tony's advice for the listeners: Utilize the existing guidance on IoT security to better understand the nuances of IoT security your industry. [30:07]

Beyond The Now IoT Security Podcast | PSA Certified
Secure by Default with Microsoft: “Without IoT security people will be reluctant to innovate.”

Beyond The Now IoT Security Podcast | PSA Certified

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2022 53:52


In our second #beyondthenow podcast episode with Microsoft, we take a deep dive into IoT security with Eustace Asanghanwa (Principal Program Manager for Security, Azure IoT, Microsoft). Eustace and David explore IoT security challenges, what we mean by a secure by default approach, and the benefits of protection profiles. They also discuss Microsoft Azure's PSA Certified Level 1 certification, how it is helping to facilitate better collaboration with the ecosystem, and why we need to see more cohesion between different security certification schemes. Introductions to Eustace and Microsoft. [01:24] The Azure RTOS is PSA Certified Level 1 and how this addresses the ‘trilemma' of IoT security. [03:56] PSA Certified is also helping to facilitate collaboration between the AzureRTOS and the ecosystem. [06:56] People value IoT security but they don't always know what it means. [09:41] Securing the IoT will encourage new innovations [10:44] The autonomy of IoT devices is removing the ‘human companion' and the IoT security protection that provides. [12:01] What is a ‘secure by default' approach to security? [16:11] A Secure by default approach enables a threat modeling mindset. [17:08] When you design-in security you need to consider the product's entire lifecycle. [18:52] People are willing to invest in IoT security because they understand the value of the IoT and digital transformation. [22:10] Securely deploying the IoT requires an ecosystem approach. [23:00] It's unrealistic to expect system integrators to become experts in all areas of IoT development and deployment. [24:53] As an ecosystem, we need to work together on the solutions to reduce the burden on system integrators. [26:29] Microsoft Azure's Blueprint approach to IoT security. [27:39] Confidential Compute and the edge. [31:47] Protection profiles help us to answer the question ‘Is this device secured?' [33:21] Protection profiles create a baseline of requirements for specific devices to be secured. [36:20] Multiple certifications help us target security at different levels of granularity. [39:36] We expect to see a more cohesive composition between IoT security certification schemes that target different functionalities and markets. [41:27] Eustace's predictions for the IoT in 5 years' time. [46:02] Blockchains might lower the cost of security infrastructure. [49:01] Eustace's top piece of IoT security advice. [50:26]

Ctrl+Alt+Azure
119 - Using Azure IoT Central to control your coffee maker

Ctrl+Alt+Azure

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2022 35:46


(00:00) - Intro and catching up.(09:06) - Show content starts.Show links- Azure IoT Central and the virtual coffee maker lab (MS Learn) SPONSORThis episode is sponsored by ScriptRunner.ScriptRunner is a great solution to centrally manage PowerShell Scripts and standardize and automate IT tasks via a Graphical User Interface for helpdesk or end-users. Check it out on scriptrunner.com

Microsoft Azure for Industry : Podcast
Executive Leadership During Digital Transformation with Merrie Williamson

Microsoft Azure for Industry : Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2021 29:02


We are discussing what it means for technology executives to lead their companies through true digital transformations, both from technology and cultural change perspectives. We've mentioned digital transformation several times over various episodes. Today, we'll be making digital transformation very tangible and providing guidance for leaders looking to revamp their organizations with technically driven initiatives with our guest Merrie Williamson, the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.Episode Links:Episode TranscriptDigital Transformation with MicrosoftMicrosoft Learn course - Enabling Digital Transformation Microsoft Industry digital transformation blogSatya Nadella on Digital Transformation for Microsoft (Video)Guest:Merrie Williamson is the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.She is responsible for global commercial sales, strategy, and execution for the core multi-billion-dollar Azure business. She has a strong background in leading engineering and product teams and in marrying sales to engineering.Follow her on LinkedIn.Hosts:Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

dotNETpodcast
Azure IoT con Marco Parenzan

dotNETpodcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2021 39:23


Con Marco Parenzan parliamo di IoT e delle tecnologie utilizzate per l'implementazione sul campo.

Channel 9
Behind the scenes of Keurig's SMART coffee brewers powered by Azure IoT Central | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2021 29:09


Connected coffee brewers are a thing and Keurig's new solution goes way beyond the mobile app companion, leveraging Azure IoT Central to monitor and manage brewers like it's never been done before.Read the blog post to learn more at https://aka.ms/iotshow/IoTCentralAndKeurig

Channel 9
WSL: Mount USB devices | Tabs vs Spaces

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2021 10:08


WSL now supports connecting USB devices on Windows 11 thanks to contributions to a 3rd party open-source project.Learn more about what scenarios this enables, how to set things up, see some demos, and hear from Nelson, the intern that made it happen!This episode will cover:[00:00] Ben McMorran, Software Engineer for WSL, introduces us to recent contributions to a 3rd party open-source project that enables USB devices to be connected to WSL[00:25] Why would I want to use USB devices with WSL? [01:02] Demo: Set up WSL 2 on Windows 11 to support attaching USB devices and using the usbid wsl command[05:54] How does this work? Meet our intern, Nelson! [09:37] Where can I learn more? Learn more:Get Windows 11: https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11Get started with attaching USB devices to WSL in the USBIPD-WIN repo on GitHub: https://aka.ms/wsl-usbipWSL documentation: Mount a Linux disk in WSL 2 Azure IoT documentation: IoT Device DevelopmentWSL product repo on GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/wslWindows Command Line BlogMore Tabs vs Spaces episodes

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Your toolbox for Azure IoT Edge development

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2021 27:15


Learn what's new with Azure IoT Edge developer tools. If you are building edge devices powered by Azure IoT Edge, you will learn about the latest addition to your toolbox that will make your day-to-day simpler and more productive.Learn more at https://aka.ms/IoTShow/GettingStartedWithIoTEdgeDev

Ultimate Guide to Partnering™
123 – Push Through Boundaries – As a Growth Mindset and Empathy Unlock Potential – Part Two with Merrie Williamson

Ultimate Guide to Partnering™

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2021 26:21


Many Technology Organizations struggle to navigate Microsoft's complexity to achieve their most significant results. It is why I first started this podcast to help organizations navigate to achieve their highest performance results with Microsoft. I also believe that we in the tech sector have an opportunity and perhaps an obligation to lead during this time like no other. I discuss both areas in this far-reaching conversation, Merrie Williamson, Microsoft CVP of Azure Infrastructure, Azure IOT, and Digital & Application Innovation. Merrie is a future-pacing leader who describes for our listeners how she and her organization push through boundaries as a growth mindset and empathy unlock potential. Merrie Williamson is the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Azure IoT, and the newly launched Digital and Application Innovation solution area in the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions business group. She is responsible for Microsoft's global commercial sales, strategy, and execution for the core multi-billion dollar Azure business. As Microsoft and their customers continue to transform with digital solutions, the requirements for ever more agile sales models with deeper investments in technical breath and customer compassion are required. Merrie joined Microsoft in 2019 as an executive leader with deep roots in building cloud technologies and driving global cultural transformation. It was critical to finally have Merrie visit this platform to share her organization's important work and her rich experiences with our listeners. This interview was just so rich and far-reaching, we split it into two segments for your listening. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming Merrie Williamson as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®. What you'll learn in this episode: Her view on the Microsoft organization and mission.What it was like to join Microsoft just before the start of the pandemic.Her team's work to align engineering, marketing, and sales for Microsoft's most complex offers.Her view on Microsoft, Satya, Growth Mindset and how Empathy Unlock's Potential.How this leader learned to blend in, while pushing through boundaries to achieve incredible business success. Listen to other recent episodes featuring Microsoft Leaders. 115 – CREATING VALUE TO INNOVATIVE ROUTES-TO-MARKET WITH PRECISE INDUSTRY AND CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS – US Scale Solution Partners with Oguo Atuanya.65 – AN AUTHENTIC CONVERSATION, FROM CO-SELLING TO THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE – Enterprise Partner Sales with Lani Phillips.94 – WHERE CAN I HELP? A SERVANT LEADER'S MINDSET FOR PARTNER GROWTH – Global Independant Software Vendors (ISV) with Carlos DeTorres. Links & Resources Connect with Merrie Williamson https://www.linkedin.com/in/merriewilliamson/ Rate & Review – please, this helps more listeners find us!Learn more how Ultimate Partnerships helps technology organizations optimize partner results.Ultimate Guide to Partnering Linked In – Stay tuned as I'll share details around our new offering for you.Subscribe to Ultimate Guide to Partnering on Apple, Spotify,  Google,  Audible,  SoundCloud, Stitcher, Player FM, almost anywhere you get your podcasts!About Vince Menzione.Follow or reach Vince – Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Ultimate Guide to Partnering Facebook.Drop me a line – vincem@ultimate-partnerships.com. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by Ultimate Partnerships. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.

Channel 9
Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2021 15:29


Today, customers who are leveraging FreeRTOS on their devices and wish to connect to Azure IoT services need to resort to home-grown solutions or venture to adapt existing SDKs to work with FreeRTOS. With the Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS they'll get a proper SDK that exposes the APIs these developers expect to see when getting their devices connected to Azure. In contrast with home-grown solutions, the Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS is maintained and supported by Microsoft, and it is an open-source project that allows customers to adapt it to a number of different hardware combinations to support their business and technical requirements.Learn more reading the blog post at https://aka.ms/AzureIoTMiddlewareForFreeRTOS/Blog

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2021 15:29


Today, customers who are leveraging FreeRTOS on their devices and wish to connect to Azure IoT services need to resort to home-grown solutions or venture to adapt existing SDKs to work with FreeRTOS. With the Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS they'll get a proper SDK that exposes the APIs these developers expect to see when getting their devices connected to Azure. In contrast with home-grown solutions, the Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS is maintained and supported by Microsoft, and it is an open-source project that allows customers to adapt it to a number of different hardware combinations to support their business and technical requirements.Learn more reading the blog post at https://aka.ms/AzureIoTMiddlewareForFreeRTOS/Blog

The Azure Podcast
Episode 396 - How Vattenfall uses Azure

The Azure Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2021


The team meets Vattenfall's Marcus Melin and Mikael Söderström to learn how they are leveraging Azure to help enable the use of renewable energy 24x7 by their customers Also, be sure to go back and listen to the Sustainability solutions in Azure episode where the team first heard about Vattenfall from Conor Kelly. Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode396.mp3 YouTube: https://youtu.be/SgULg_YJT4k Resources: https://vattenfall.se/24-7   Other updates: Govern your data wherever it resides with Azure Purview https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/govern-your-data-wherever-it-resides-with-azure-purview/ Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – September 2021 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cost-management-and-billing-updates-september-2021/ Building a digital guide dog for railway passengers with impaired vision https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-customer-engineering-team/building-a-digital-guide-dog-for-railway-passengers-with/ba-p/2749612   Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS in general availability | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure General availability: Azure Sphere OS version 21.09 | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
How to connect .NET nanoFramework to the Cloud

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2021 19:48


Like to use .NET for your coding and want to code for microcontroller powered devices to connect them to Azure IoT? The new .NET nanoFramework SDK now supports Device Provisioning Service for SAS, Certificate, individual and group device! Learm more at https://aka.ms/IoTShow/nanoFrameworkAzureIoT

The .NET MAUI Podcast
Episode 99: Azure IoT

The .NET MAUI Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2021 38:59


We have a special show today where we're going to learn all about Azure IoT and a Xamarin app that helps you explore it. Stefan Wick, Rido Minguez Pablos, and Ben Buttigieg join us to tell us about the app and Azure IoT. Show Notes Azure IoT (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-fundamentals/iot-introduction?WT.mc_id=dotnet-43778-masoucou) Azure IoT Central (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/iot-central/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-43778-masoucou) Azure IoT Hub (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/about-iot-hub/?WT.mc_id=dotnet-43778-masoucou) Follow Us: * James: Twitter (https://twitter.com/jamesmontemagno), Blog (https://montemagno.com), GitHub (http://github.com/jamesmontemagno), Merge Conflict Podcast (http://mergeconflict.fm) * Matt: Twitter (https://twitter.com/codemillmatt), Blog (https://codemilltech.com), GitHub (https://github.com/codemillmatt)

IoT For All Podcast
How LoRa Enables Life Post-Pandemic | Semtech's Alistair Fulton

IoT For All Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2021 39:31


In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Semtech Vice President and General Manager of Wireless and Sensing Products Group Alistair Fulton joins us to talk about LoRa. Alistair shares the history of LoRa, how it was developed to support automation in the utilities industry, and how both the technology and needs have evolved over the years, with LoRa becoming a key connectivity technology for a myriad of use cases and applications across a number of industries. He also speaks to the history of the LoRa Alliance, how the group was created and how it benefits the IoT space at large. Alistair shares some insight as to where he sees IoT going, speaking to some of the use cases that have become more prominent during the pandemic, including hospital and disaster relief initiatives, and what obstacles still exist in those spaces. He also shares how LoRa might play a role in future sustainability initiatives and what might cause companies to turn to IoT to support greener initiatives. Alistair Fulton is the Vice President and General Manager of Semtech's Wireless and Sensing Products Group. He joined Semtech in 2018 with over 25 years of experience in the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices, machine to machine (M2M)/embedded, and analytics spaces. Before joining Semtech, Mr. Fulton led the development of Hitachi's Lumada Industrial IoT Platform, the leading "visionary" IIoT platform in Gartner's 2018 magic quadrant. Prior to Hitachi, he led Microsoft's early IoT initiatives, including the development and incubation of Microsoft's v1.0 IoT platform (the precursor to the v3.0 Azure IoT platform).Interested in connecting with Alistair? Reach out to him on Linkedin!About Semtech: Semtech's LoRa devices and the open LoRaWAN® standard offers an efficient, flexible and economical solution to real-world problems in rural and indoor use cases, where cellular and Wi-Fi/BLE based networks are ineffective. Learn why LoRaWAN is becoming a leading standard of low power wide area networks (LPWAN)Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:(00:54) Intro to Alistair Fulton(01:39) Intro to Semtech(03:29) Use Cases for LoRa and Semtech's Offerings(11:45) How has the pandemic changed the smart hospital landscape? Where is it going?(14:55) When referring to LoRa versus LoRaWAN, what's the difference there?(20:15) How can companies use IoT to promote sustainability?(23:29) How can IoT technologies help us prepare and recover from natural disasters?(26:33) How can LoRa work alongside satellites to provide connectivity?(29:07) What does the future of LoRa look like?

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Building multi-tenant solutions with Azure IoT Central

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2021 23:03


Join us to learn more about an upcoming feature in Azure IoT Central that will enable you to build your IoT solution once and onboard multiple tenants into it - we're calling this feature Organizations. During this session we'll provide an overview of the feature, its use cases and roadmap, and we'll wrap it up with a live demo. Learn more at https://aka.ms/iotshow/iotc-organizations

Channel 9
Building multi-tenant solutions with Azure IoT Central | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2021 23:03


Join us to learn more about an upcoming feature in Azure IoT Central that will enable you to build your IoT solution once and onboard multiple tenants into it - we're calling this feature Organizations. During this session we'll provide an overview of the feature, its use cases and roadmap, and we'll wrap it up with a live demo. Learn more at https://aka.ms/iotshow/iotc-organizations

Mission Control Center
Being an active member of the Azure community – John Lunn, aka Jonnychipz

Mission Control Center

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2021 17:30


John Lunn, also known as Jonnychipz, is a Welsh Azure MVP and MCT working as a technical architect at BT Enterprise. An organiser of the Welsh Azure User Group and an avid vlogger, John discusses the benefits of being an active member of the Azure community and how he learned Azure IoT.  -- Mission Control Center is your one-stop shop for career advice and tech trends analysis. Weekly tips and news digests, career guides and even short sci-fi stories. Everything you need, in one place. Every Thursday, in your inbox and ears. This podcast is brought to you by Mindquest, Europe's new IT recruiting agency. Mindquest accompanies you throughout your entire professional journey with high-quality offers that meet all your needs and aspirations. 

AigoraCast
Benjamin Cabé - On the Edge

AigoraCast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 2, 2021 33:43


Benjamin is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. A long-time open source advocate, he co-founded the Eclipse IoT Working Group in 2011 and grew, from scratch, a vibrant open-source community of hundreds of developers and dozens of deeply engaged companies. He is currently working at Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager for Azure IoT, where he is leading developer engagement initiatives with some of the top communities and companies in the embedded, AI, and open hardware space.   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamincabe/ GitHub link: https://github.com/kartben/artificial-nose IoT for beginners curriculum: https://github.com/microsoft/IoT-For-Beginners Twitter: https://twitter.com/kartben Blog : https://blog.benjamin-cabe.com/   To learn more about Aigora, please visit www.aigora.com

Cloud with Chris
IoT Simulation, Azure IoT and Real World Learnings

Cloud with Chris

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2021 51:22


In this episode, Chris is joined by Peter Gallagher, Freelance Programmer for PJG Creations, Microsoft Azure MVP, Pluralsight Author... IoT Expert, proud dad, gadget addict and Meetup organiser. Peter talks about the various IoT simulators available, Azure IoT and his experiences IoT across his career. If you're a maker or interested in IoT, then this is one not to be missed!

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Azure IoT Edge monitoring and troubleshooting

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2021 27:51


In this episode, Venkat Yalla, Principal Program Manager in the Azure IoT Ege tells us about the new, first-class IoT Edge remote monitoring solution built around IoT Edge's built-in diagnostics and Azure Monitor in the cloud. Venkat explores powerful patterns to monitor your IoT Edge fleet that will enable you to detect and mitigate production issues rapidly and at-scale.Learn more reading Venkat's blog post at https://aka.ms/iotshow/edgemon

Channel 9
Azure IoT Edge monitoring and troubleshooting | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2021 27:51


In this episode, Venkat Yalla, Principal Program Manager in the Azure IoT Ege tells us about the new, first-class IoT Edge remote monitoring solution built around IoT Edge's built-in diagnostics and Azure Monitor in the cloud. Venkat explores powerful patterns to monitor your IoT Edge fleet that will enable you to detect and mitigate production issues rapidly and at-scale.Learn more reading Venkat's blog post at https://aka.ms/iotshow/edgemon

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Time to prepare for TLS Root CA migration on Azure IoT

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2021 16:19


As we are preparing for the upcoming expiration of the Baltimore Root CA for Azure services, Ramit Malhotra joins Olivier to go through the extent of the changes as well as what developers will have to do to ensure their devices connected to Azure IoT don't get impacted by the migration. You can learn more reading Ramit's blog post at https://aka.ms/iot-ca-updates

Channel 9
Time to prepare for TLS Root CA migration on Azure IoT | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2021 16:19


As we are preparing for the upcoming expiration of the Baltimore Root CA for Azure services, Ramit Malhotra joins Olivier to go through the extent of the changes as well as what developers will have to do to ensure their devices connected to Azure IoT don't get impacted by the migration. You can learn more reading Ramit's blog post at https://aka.ms/iot-ca-updates

Developer Weekly
Career and Azure IoT with Jurgen Kevelaers

Developer Weekly

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2021 29:33


Are you stressed? Burnt out? Or on your way to burnout? Or do you just want to become healthier?My new course will teach you what stress is. How to recognize a burnout. And how to prevent it and recover from it, by working on the pillars of health (sleep, food, exercise, clean living, active relaxation) and by changing your life (work, relationships, environment). Even if you are not burnt out or stressed, you can use these tactics to become healthier and live a longer and happier life.Check it out at https://www.azurebarry.com/burnout/ About Jurgen:Jurgen Kevelaers is an independent software architect and developer working on scalable solutions that run in the cloud. His main focus is the Microsoft Azure and .NET ecosystem. Jurgen was involved in projects in small and large companies, in various sectors, such as education, health, maritime, meteorology, energy and security. Through his years of experience, he has developed a pragmatic approach and a thorough understanding of designing and implementing maintainable applications.Resources:Jurgen's BlogFollow Jurgen on Twitter Connect with Jurgen on LinkedInCheck out Jurgen's Pluralsight courses 

Channel 9
Applied Nested Edge in an industrial environment | Internet of Things Show

Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 20:14


Learn how to apply a hierarchy of nested Edge devices at scale to an ISA-95 industrial network using best practices and Azure IoT services. Watch a short demo using a physical 3-tier gateway setup showcasing how to address, control and manage the different layers of the Nested Edge environment through the cloud, how to deploy a configuration to deployed devices and what happens if a device loses network connection.Learn more reading the blog post at https://aka.ms/iotshow/NestedEdgeInIIoT

Internet of Things Show  - Channel 9
Applied Nested Edge in an industrial environment

Internet of Things Show - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2021 20:14


Learn how to apply a hierarchy of nested Edge devices at scale to an ISA-95 industrial network using best practices and Azure IoT services. Watch a short demo using a physical 3-tier gateway setup showcasing how to address, control and manage the different layers of the Nested Edge environment through the cloud, how to deploy a configuration to deployed devices and what happens if a device loses network connection.Learn more reading the blog post at https://aka.ms/iotshow/NestedEdgeInIIoT

Intellic Podcast
AWS vs Azure IoT [For Industry]

Intellic Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 12, 2021 22:59


In this video, Walker Reynolds shares insights into the similarities and differences between Amazon Web Services AWS and Microsoft Azure IoT Cloud Offering. Read to start the Assessment Process? Complete this form

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard
Going Carbon Neutral Using Azure IoT with Remco Ploeg of Altius

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2020 27:30


In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Remco Ploeg of Altius discusses the challenges and opportunities of creating carbon neutral homes powered by Azure. Download Transcript Here Episode: 00:00 Pete:  Welcome to the IoT unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started. Thank you, Remco, I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us here. So you're actually based in the Netherlands, and I'm here in Bellevue, Washington, and through the magic of... I'm actually using the Squadcast platform right now to connect and record this, but... Welcome to the IoT Unicorn.   00:16 Remco: Thank you, Pete, for having me.   00:18 Pete: Great, so you're based in the Netherlands, and I've been there a bunch of times. I used to go there actually, when I would go to Barcelona for NWC, there was always like a flight at the crack of dawn from Barcelona, and I would transfer in the Netherlands to get back to Seattle. And then one year, I kinda got smart and I said, you know, I'm gonna go to Amsterdam the night before, get a good night's sleep, and then I'll take the 10 AM Direct to Seattle. So I've spent a bunch of those kind of layover nights in Amsterdam, so it's an awesome, awesome place, but... Are you from there originally?   00:52 Remco: Yes, I'm from Rotterdam, so that's the other big city in the Netherlands so that's south of Amsterdam.   00:58 Pete: I see.   01:00 Remco: And I was a lot I think also on the same plane as yourself, so I had to do a lot... To Seattle with the direct flight in the morning. So... And also coming back with the flight early in the morning in Amsterdam again.   01:12 Pete: Yeah, yeah.   01:14 Remco: So I'm based at the moment in Utrecht, in the middle of the country.   01:18 Pete: Okay. So you've been at Altius for about a year or two, a couple of years?   01:25 Remco: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit more than a year. And the beginning of this year, there was an acquisition of Altius by Avanade...   01:34 Pete: Yes.   01:34 Remco: So, I'm joining formally Avanade from the first of January, the coming year 2021. But already, I think for 6 months, I'm working side by side with my Avanade colleagues.   01:45 Pete: And so I know you've been... I know another thing, I did a little research is you were... Altius was named Microsoft's AI Partner of the Year, so that's a big deal. So tell me more about that. What is Altius in AI? What is the... Do you consider Altius an AI company or more of an IoT company that's using AI or how would you describe it?   02:08 Remco: Yeah, so if you look at Altius, we are at the moment, with 400 people in the UK, Netherlands, and India. We've got a full focus on data and AI, so that's also our focus. So IoT is more or less, no side-job but we saw that...   02:21 Pete: A means to an end.   02:23 Remco: A means to an end, exactly. And then started when I joined Altius so that's one and a half years ago with also combining AI with IoT, 'cause I think that that's a great combination that we have there.   02:36 Pete: Yeah, for sure. A lot of times that we've had folks from Qualcomm and other... More telecom-related, I think we had BT on here recently, and it was like the 5G plus AI plus IoT or pick your network that certainly becomes kind of a game-changer for what you can do with a little bit of data, over a large number of sensors or a lot of data... [02:58] ____.   02:58 Remco: I think, already at the moment, even without 5G, 5G is of course already rolling out, we can already do a lot with IoT.   03:11 Pete: Yeah, so actually interesting on that topic. You talk about IoT, so how much do you think with AI and IoT are you seeing on the Cloud versus the Edge, and how much experience are you getting now, are you seeing in a more of an emergence of Edge AI in addition to the cloud AI or what are you seeing there?   03:31 Remco: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know, 10 years ago, we were moving everything to the clouds, but now we see some of our clouds going back again, so I do a lot of projects around connected buildings. I think that's a great example with Edge computing, is the amount of sensors, especially in new buildings and smart buildings, it's so enormous that moving every data point to the cloud, it's sometimes technical, not possible, and the second, it's too expensive.   04:00 Pete: Right.   04:01 Remco: So we see there are movement back putting Edge devices in the building itself again, and also doing AI on the Edge device itself because of course what you don't want to do in a building is controlling lights in the cloud, for example, you want to control locally, if the internet connection is out there you want to still put on your lights on. And since a couple of years, we are also doing AI on the Edge and AI on the cloud, of course already a little bit longer, and we are controlling, for example, Edge Tech Systems with AI depending on the expected usage of the building and certain conditions. We put certain settings into the building when running those... Yeah, AI is now on Edge device that help us and our clients a lot to control those devices.   04:54 Pete: Yeah, also I had understood talking to some other customers too about Edge AI, especially in AI Vision, it's something where you want to actually process locally, just from a privacy perspective too. I mean there's a transport, obviously, you can't keep streams of data going up into Azure and doing live video analytics, I guess you could and some people do, but for a lot of maybe smaller implementations or other implementations, you wanna kinda do things locally, act locally and then keep the data on-prem basically, right?   05:24 Remco: Yeah, exactly. So we felt also again the smart, to smart build solutions, things like security with cameras, where we can analyze the data off the camera, to see, okay, is somebody trying to breach into the building or do something else. And we all use Edge AI for it.   05:42 Pete: Right, yeah, yeah, that's fantastic. Tell me a little bit, I heard about some of the carbon-neutral housing efforts that you were doing, so tell me more about that. That sounds intriguing.   05:54 Remco: Yeah. So for one of our clients in the Netherlands, it's a company called TBI, and it's a local company with around six or seven [06:02] ____, and one of their main goals is to be the most sustainable builder in the Netherlands, and for that they are building carbon-neutral houses. So that means that the houses are totally carbon-neutral from a building perspective, but also from a usage perspective. So the people that are going to live in that home, on normal conditions, don't need to pay any energy bill every year, so they are really zero... We call it zero-net houses in the Netherlands but carbon-neutral is a better naming for that.   06:35 Pete: So, they're generating power on-site as well, so they're generating their own power...   06:39 Remco: Exactly.   06:39 Pete: And then also all the building is smart enough and efficient enough where it's only consuming the power that's generated on-site. Is that basically?   06:47 Remco: Exactly, so they put solar panels on it to be extracted data from the solar panels. We've got all kind of meters in the home, smart meters, smart edge meters, all kind of temperature, humidity, CO2 sensors in the home. We extract all the data into the clouds, to do the analytics and to prove that the house is also carbon neutral.   07:07 Pete: And so do those exist? [chuckle] It seems like... That's a tough one, isn't it? I guess it depends on the size of your house and what you're doing in your house, but is that feasible?   07:17 Remco: Yeah. So in the Netherlands, we don't have big houses like in the US.   07:20 Pete: Right, right. No McMansions.   07:23 Remco: So it's more, yeah, so it's more [07:26] ____ houses. And yeah, we have around, also normal houses, and I think 120, 130 meters, square meters, so that's not huge.   07:36 Pete: No, no. The square footage of the house also limits maybe the amount of energy you can create, right? You've got limited space for solar panels.   07:41 Remco: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of the other things that is of course very important is, of course, the energy with the solar panels. Second of all, of course, if in the winter, for example, if the homeowner put the window open, the whole day, that house will never be carbon neutral because heating will...   08:05 Pete: Yeah.   08:05 Remco: Go the whole day and all night.   08:07 Pete: Can't solve for bad behaviour.   08:08 Pete: And that's why we need to...   [laughter]   08:10 Remco: Exactly, yeah. So we also try to help the homeowner to get insight in that usage and that energy.   08:18 Pete: I see.   08:18 Remco: To reduce energy.   08:20 Pete: Is the power generated primarily through solar or is there any kind of wind or other geothermal or...   08:25 Remco: No, at the moment, in the houses, it's really solar panels and of course the extra energy that they bring into the home is from green energy. So in the Netherlands, most of the homes use green energy.   08:37 Pete: Ah, see, I see.   08:39 Remco: Or other solar panels...   08:39 Pete: So they're getting a power feed from the grid, from the government grid, that's green energy, that's probably wind-powered, right? And then they're augmenting that with local solar, and then the energy they're consuming...   08:50 Remco: Exactly.   08:50 Pete: Is kind of net neutral, I guess.   08:53 Remco: Net neutral, yeah. Exactly.   08:55 Pete: Fantastic.   08:56 Remco: Yeah. Because in the winter, of course, you don't have enough sun. We don't have enough sun in the Netherlands.   09:00 Pete: Right. Same here, I mean you know...   09:01 Remco: At the end of winter [09:02] ____.   09:02 Pete: Yeah, Northwest, we don't have... There's no sun here.   [laughter]   09:06 Remco: No. A lot of rain.   09:08 Pete: Interesting, wow. So has that solution been deployed then? I mean, your solution with...   09:13 Remco: Yeah. We have now around, I think 700 houses deployed.   09:18 Pete: Wow, fantastic.   09:19 Remco: And depending of the speed, of course, of building extra houses will be added every month. Something like that.   09:25 Pete: So basically what you're doing is you're instrumenting. 'Cause I know in the US and maybe in the Netherlands too, there are ways to instrument your patch panel, your incoming electrical panel, to look at loads on a per circuit basis. And then what you're doing is then you're doing that kind of analysis, you're doing the HVAC kind of heating cooling analysis. Are you doing anything about the appliances themselves in the house? Are there appliances that are kind of determining being smart about their energy usage or is that all just happening sort of asynchronously from the rest of the system?   09:58 Remco: Yeah, so we put some, let's call them Smart Energy power adaptors in the home... To see, okay, the refrigerator, how much energy is that costing, etcetera, etcetera. So we're also getting that data. In the future, there are plans to also put in a small panel in the home to give direct feedback to the... To the homeowner itself. So at the moment, it's more or less... It's more information behind for the homeowners, so they can watch later on how the house is performing. TBI can see it directly, but the homeowner sees it later. So they want to bring that information already directly in the home, so the homeowner can react on it directly.   10:44 Pete: Right, right. So you're measuring current draw from different outlets, for lack of a better term, right? It's... Giving them a heads-up and...   10:52 Remco: Yeah.   10:53 Pete: But in the future, then hopefully these things that are plugged into the wall will get smarter and smarter about... Everyone needs to sort of get a message to sort of go into a low power mode because somebody's running the dryer maybe... I don't know. Like is there intra-appliance communication going on here, or is it just sort of every appliance for themselves?   11:14 Remco: Yeah, we see that already with load balancing. So in the Netherlands, we've got a big amount of electric cars that we are charging at home. And so we've got a lot of solutions also in this case with load balancing. So depending on the usage of the home, the car will load more or less energy. So I expect much more solutions also in the more smaller devices that can do more or less the load balancing and talking to each other what's happening.   11:47 Pete: Yeah, exactly. I think that's kind of key. We actually just installed a level two charger here in the US, 'cause we have a Chevy Bolt, our newest car. It's great, and you know the 110-volt charge here, that doesn't really... That only works for emergencies. It takes like an hour to get five miles of charge, so the level two we had installed and run off a 40-amp breaker in the panel and... Yeah, I could see that the inter sort of communication between devices, that will be sort of maybe the next step.   12:16 Remco: Yeah, we see that already here sometimes with more [12:19] ____ systems that try to connect all the kind of devices to each other. But that's still, in my opinion, more for tech guys like us, because it doesn't work always, and... You need some pack of expertise.   12:33 Pete: And a bunch of logos on the box, it's supposed to work with the other thing, it never does. So, yeah, been there. [laughter]   12:38 Remco: Exactly, yeah. It never does.   12:39 Pete: So what are you using Azure for in this case? I'm curious. What are your... There's obvious things, I can name them, but I'm just curious. How are you leveraging Azure in this particular solution?   12:50 Remco: Yeah. So in the start, we've built our own device, our hardware partner did that in the home. And the device is managed by the Azure IT app, where we get the data from the device into that. But we can also control the device now. So it's...   13:05 Pete: And is that sort of a monitoring device that's kind of like a power monitoring?   13:09 Remco: No, it's more, let's call it a gateway. I think that's the best naming convention for this device. So it's really the center of the device in the home. It'll extract the data from the solar panels, from the heating, from...   13:22 Pete: Okay. Right, right, right.   13:23 Remco: Etcetera, etcetera. And the data is directly feed into the systems. Of course, we've got also some devices that we cannot connect in the home itself, and we extract the data from APIs of those suppliers.   13:36 Pete: Right, right.   13:37 Remco: Those are more or less the two options for data ingestion into the platform.   13:40 Pete: Okay.   13:43 Remco: We're using Azure Digital Twins version two to make a replication of the home itself, so we get data from Outerdesk. Outerdesk is a piece of software where they design the homes with, the data from the Outerdesk we import into Outerdesk... Into the... Sorry, Azure Digital Twins. And we combine that data with the sensor data in the home. And that combination reflects into a digital twin of every home of TBI.   14:10 Pete: Wow. That's cool.   14:10 Remco: And next the data flow into the digital twin, we analyze the data with applications like Timeshare with Insights, where we can do simple Timeshare risk analytics. And of course, this data is all time-based data, solar data, panel data, with consumption and data, and energy data, etcetera, etcetera, so that they can do the fast analytics by themselves. And the other one is we use Azure Stream Analytics, where we can analyze the data for anomaly detection. So we know, for example, one of the biggest dealings with TBIS, it's a really simple one but it's water pressure. So in older homes in the Netherlands, we've got gas boilers, or sometimes electric boilers, and they need a certain water pressure in them. If you don't have enough water pressure, you cannot shower, and you don't have heat. And it's an easy solution because you just put extra water into the boiler system and it works.   15:15 Pete: Right.   15:16 Remco: But yeah, if you are in the morning, and you want to go to the shower and it doesn't work, most people will call, in distress, TBI... And say, "Okay, my boiler doesn't work." So then the mechanic will go to the house and fix the problem, and it gets quite expensive.   15:30 Pete: Right, they're very expensive. So you have... So there's sensors for water pressure in the pipes? Is that...   15:36 Remco: Yeah, no, it's a sensor for water pressure in the boiler.   15:41 Pete: Down in the boiler. Okay.   15:44 Remco: So it's indirect in the pipe of course. And that data we get in, and we see a certain pattern that it's declining every time, and then, of course, we can... Or call the homeowner at first, so they're now calling the homeowner, and ask them "Can you fill it by yourself?" And if not, they will come to you and fill it for you of course. But yeah, it's more... Let's say proactive maintenance. Instead of predictive maintenance, it's more proactive.   16:07 Pete: Right.   16:09 Remco: So that's one of the options they are doing. We're using Azure Machine Learning, also how to calculate optimized boiler temperature, to reduce energy in your boiler systems you can set a certain boiler temperature. And of course, how high the boiler temperature, or how more energy you will consume and you need to find per home the optimized boiler temperature, so we use machine learning for that, Azure Machine Learning. And of course, we use Power BI to present all the data to the stakeholders of TBI.   16:44 Pete: Wow, that's cool. So you're getting your money's worth then, on Azure. [chuckle]   16:48 Remco: Yeah, sorry, yeah.   16:50 Pete: That's cool. Are you doing any Edge AI, speaking of Edge AI, on the gateway itself, or is it really more of a data collector sender?   16:58 Remco: Yeah, so at the moment, it's really in Data Collector and of course we can send commons back. Based on this platform, we are also building out now also for the same customer a connected buildings platform, so same architecture but different use case, and therefore we use Edge devices of course.   17:16 Pete: Yeah, I can imagine. Actually, I had someone from RXR realty on the show about a month ago, I don't know if you've heard that one, but that was interesting 'cause they're focused more on the commercial... They're one of the largest real estate companies in New York City. And so they focus on commercial real estate, and in fact, they're using Azure for a lot of work, safe at work scenarios around social distancing, and mask-wearing, and occupancy, and other things. So I can imagine once you move into a commercial space, there's obviously the energy usage and the efficiency, which you guys are focusing on here for the personal home, but then there's all these other scenarios, and when you get into smart buildings, obviously that's kind of a whole lot more complex.   18:01 Remco: Yep. Yeah, and the other issue where, of course, we checked if we could do something with Edge devices, especially from a machinery perspective in the future that can be in a good solution, but if you look at the moment for the pricing model, between Edge device and then [18:18] ____ device, it's more or less almost 50% cheaper to put you and then, yeah, [18:23] ____ more stupid device in the home.   18:24 Pete: Yeah, no, that's true. That's true.   18:27 Remco: Yeah, and it's getting better also. On the simple devices, you can also already do some simple machine learning or smart analytics stuff, as a Microsoft... They put also a lot of energy, and with Edge [18:43] ____, for example, that can do really simple machine learning on a really simple device... You have a lot of CPU power.   18:52 Pete: So if your had your wish list of, "I really wish this technology existed to help me with these solutions, and it doesn't exist yet," is there anything that's kind of top of mind for you that you could snap your fingers and say, "Kinda wish we had that."   19:05 Remco: That is a really good question. Yeah, so for this use case is more or less for the device in the home. So as TBI, to get a bit of hardware power, maybe build some... Piece of hardware. And it's of course school, and I like that, but if you... As a construction company, do you want also to be in a hardware builder of those devices in the home? So I'm looking forward also, if you look at Microsoft, and what they are doing with things like Surface Laptops, etcetera, will they come ever with a cheap, really good more and less Edge or [19:47] ____ Autos device, Microsoft branded working really good... That's one of the things that...   19:53 Pete: I see. So sort of a Microsoft Edge AI sort of platform or something that...   20:01 Remco: And of course, yeah, there are some... Yeah, so there are, of course, already some development kits for that... With the fusion Kit and, etcetera, but that is more or less for the, yeah... For playing around with AI... It's really cool device. But from a production perspective, you need of course something else.   20:18 Pete: Interesting. Yeah, no, that would be good. That would be good. I think there's a lot of... Just a lot of work ahead of us in terms of... When you talked about Edge AI and just a lot of the things that Altius is doing is certainly on the cutting edge. You said you have about 700 homes, so obviously lots more to go with that. Do you know of any other overseas... I'm wondering if there's any equivalent sort of efforts going on in the US. I know that there's a lot around efficiency, but not necessarily around marrying efficiency with the kind of intelligence... I don't know if there's anything else.   20:52 Remco: No, we see in Europe a good interest now in this solution. We also try to more resell this solution. They say it's Avanade's. And of course, you can use the same concept in a building. I think in the US also, to save energy in a big building, you can save a lot of money.   21:14 Pete: Sure, sure.   21:15 Remco: I think these guys can also help with that.   21:20 Pete: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Fantastic. How's the pandemic been affecting your business over the past... I guess... Year, almost, God forbid.   21:30 Remco: Yeah. I have to say, in the Netherlands, it's quite good. So they are still building houses. There's a big need for houses in the Netherlands, especially cheaper houses. So we see a lot of attention, and I think if you look at the pandemic and data and AI, I think companies need more and more data and AI also during pandemic and also afterwards. From that perspective, I see a good future around this topic. If you look at IoT, a lot of companies are now investing... Okay, how can I do the same without the people, and IoT, of course, can help with that, with more automatic... Think about connect the factories.   22:16 Pete: I think actually it's interesting...   22:18 Remco: [22:19] ____ etcetera, etcetera.   22:19 Pete: One of the things I've heard in a constant theme is the pandemic, obviously, it's been pretty horrific, but the... We are getting a lot more data-savvy as a population, we're learning to understand data, and the importance of data and data can mean life and death in many cases, so just the sort of data savviness of the population, it's a positive thing and like you said, I think people are trying to just now use technology to be safer, to be more efficient, remote and automated. That's kind of fast-forwarded a lot of investment in technology over the past nine months or so. And I guess part of it is doing more with less, in many cases. We're trying to be more efficient and more effective. I think once we can get the pandemic under control, we get the... Climate change comes back into the front page, as you would say, and so the work that you guys are doing in terms of really being smart with energy, energy is such a finite resource and... Although I guess it's infinite, if you consider like the sun and the solar system, but anyway...   23:28 Remco: And the wind.   23:29 Pete: And the wind. I guess it's infinite. No. But that's kind of the next thing is we need to get smart and take some of the technology investments we've made and really apply them into our everyday life and... Yeah, yeah, 20, 30 years from now, this will just be commonplace, not having this kind of smarts in your home, in your building and not having a renewable energy, not being carbon-neutral itself will probably seem very odd a decade from now.   23:58 Remco: If you look at the IoT... IoT is already... They're frightened about... 20 or 25 years...   24:03 Pete: Yes, yes. We had that discussion the other day. I've been involved in it for that long. We used to call it embedded systems, and now it's called IoT. Now, but actually now they're gonna change it, it's gonna be called Edge, so Edge computing is now the cool... Even cooler than IoT. [chuckle] Get ready for another name change, but... Yeah, no, it's fascinating. Well, it's great, I really appreciate you taking the time and explaining what you guys are doing. Any kind of closing thoughts or other things you wanna communicate out to the audience around where this stuff is heading.   24:40 Remco: Yeah, I think what you just mentioned, if you look at sustainability of the epidemic, I think that should be one of the main topics for us in the world, and I think IoT can really help with that, creating that achievement with sustainability. And of course, in your home, it's all small what you're doing, but if everybody's doing it, it's really big for the world.   25:03 Pete: Right, right.   25:05 Remco: So we should use these kind of technologies in our homes, and our buildings. That will really help a lot saving energy and reducing a lot of, yeah, bad air, in the air, in the world.   25:18 Remco: Yeah, you know, I hear you. I think there's a phrase, I think it's like, "I can't solve the problems of the world by myself but I can solve the problems that are here locally, on the ground that I stand". And I guess if everyone is doing that and you kind of using technology in the right way to be sustainable, then it does add up. That's gonna be an important one. Perfect. Great, well, Remco, I really appreciate the time. It's been nice meeting you and I appreciate all the support of the Microsoft community, and hopefully our paths will physically cross at some point, maybe some future Mobile World Congress, I don't know, Barcelona or Netherlands or something in the future.   25:58 Remco: Or maybe on the airport of Amsterdam, man.   26:00 Pete: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure we've actually probably passed each other in the airport at some point.   26:03 Remco: Exactly, yeah.   26:04 Pete: Cool, alright. Appreciate...   26:05 Remco: Nice to meet you, Pete.   26:06 Pete: Thanks, Remco. Take care.   26:07 Remco: Thank you.   26:07 Pete: Bye-bye.

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard
Stop Poaching with IoT Technology and Project 15 with Sarah Maston, Senior Solution Architect, Microsoft

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2020 36:29


In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Sarah Maston, Senior Solution Architect at Microsoft, discusses the development of the animal conservation initiative, Project 15. Download Transcript Here 00:00 Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft, and this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started.   [music]   00:21 PB: On this episode of the IoT unicorn, we talk to a very interesting person doing very interesting things, and that's Sarah Maston of Microsoft. We talk about Boston University where we both went to school, a little bit about nutrition and nutrition technology, but we spend quite a bit of time talking about Project 15, which is an open platform effort that her and her colleagues have been championing. It's an anti-poaching platform that's been adopted by a number of NGOs around the world, and we talk about that and the technology behind it. So please join us.   [music]   00:58 PB: Sarah, thanks for joining us. We've had a lot of different guests on the show from silicon partners to telecom, internal Microsoft, I think you kind of fall into the category of very interesting Microsoft people that are doing very interesting things, so I'm gonna tee that up. Maybe you can give us a little bit of an intro yourself and sort of some background.   01:18 Sarah Maston: Sure, it's funny, when I look at my cats, I don't know that I'm that, they think I'm that interesting, but thank you. [chuckle] I'm really happy to be here. Where did I come from? So I actually have a really long history in the database space. I started out making data warehouses before that was a thing, that kinda grew, and so I started out as a medical programmer, actually, at a company called Meditech in Massachusetts.   01:56 PB: I see. Oh, where in Massachusetts, by the way?   02:00 SM: Ah, they were in Natick, but I lived in Arlington, I went to BU.   02:04 PB: So interesting, interesting... Oh, you went to BU? Oh, I went to BU also.   02:08 SM: I did, once upon a time. Oh, yay!   02:10 PB: I was a BA/MA BU grad, isn't that weird?   02:12 SM: Go Terriers!   02:12 PB: No, I was gonna say... Yeah, go Terriers. I was gonna say I had, my first job out of college was in West Natick.   02:19 SM: Oh, interesting.   02:19 PB: There was a little shop called The Bit Bucket computer store, and my professor from BU, my assembly language professor actually ran the company, The Bit Bucket, and we built computers, branded computers, and I was his first engineering hire, and it was in West Natick. I didn't stay there that long, 'cause it was kind of like a weird job, but yeah, The Bit Bucket, I remember West Natick... Yeah, Natick's a nice area. That's cool.   02:49 SM: So I was gonna say did they have a lot of Twinkies, 'cause I believe that the Twinkie fact... I don't know. I think it's in Natick...   02:57 PB: Oh, the Twinkie was there?   02:58 SM: I'm unclear.   03:00 PB: I think that was it, I know there's Necco Wafers too was out there.   03:01 SM: Oh, delicious, delicious.   03:01 PB: I'm not sure where that is, yeah.   03:03 SM: Yeah, no, I actually have a degree in psychology and women's studies from BU.   03:08 PB: Fantastic.   03:09 SM: So, a little bit...   03:10 PB: Fantastic, okay. Go Terriers, yeah. Okay.   03:13 SM: Okay.   03:14 PB: There you go.   03:15 SM: Back to this.   03:15 PB: We should have cleared that up in the pre, in the preamble before we started recording, but that's okay, now we know, so that's good.   03:21 SM: Thank you. Yeah, so I did a lot of data warehouses, and I put myself actually in Harvard's night school to kind of get out of data and start learning more Java-ey, getting into more programming stuff, because I had a really weird side hobby then as well, where I had been really sick in my late 20s, and I started studying nutrition, and I ended up creating what was a graph database of food, and I wanted to go and put myself in Harvard 'cause it was easier to learn how to code it than to sort of explain it. And so that journey led me to... I actually invented that over at IBM a couple of years ago and working at IBM, I met a colleague there that had come to Microsoft and so how did you come to Microsoft? Well, I had a friend, and then I met the IoT group and they... It was funny because I hadn't, I was kind of the first person in the group that hadn't built a computer to be.   04:44 PB: Right, right.   04:45 SM: Wasn't a hardware person, and but when they brought me in to start talking about that bigger data conversation, so that's how I got here.   04:57 PB: Interesting. Yeah, cool, so obviously you've been here, I think a couple of years or two years or...   05:01 SM: I have.   05:02 PB: Just about that. That's exciting. Yeah, so that's an interesting path, I think a lot of people get to Microsoft through professional connections, personal connections, there's all sorts of different ways and so you were involved in nutrition and...   05:16 SM: I was.   05:16 PB: And kind of analyzing that. Is that still a big kind of passion of yours, personal nutrition and things?   05:22 SM: I, well yes, personal. Once I designed the graph with the team there, which was the connection of food to disease through phyto-chemicals and the reactions in your bios, kind of like a Facebook of food. I had spent so much... Honestly, I had spent so much time on that in my life that the IoT space and starting to learn more formally about that was so exciting, and a lot of my data colleagues in my circle, same thing, because sometimes you can be doing the same thing and database, database... What's new? And so this was actually really fun, and it was in the beginning of when I got here, my job was a lot of enablement. We were gonna teach people how to use Azure and how to use Azure IoT and etcetera. And that's my fault that I'm having a notification 'cause clearly I...   06:25 PB: That's okay.   06:26 SM: I could have turned that off.   [chuckle]   06:30 SM: But what's interesting is that I... This, it's kind of a strange story in the sense that I... It's not that strange, but I was outside and of my apartment and I saw a lot of smoke and I freaked out, and I ran into my building to save my cats and long story, very short, lots of stress, but the next day, I ended up designing a safety platform that could use IoT to speak differently in a crisis, and so that's really something that whenever I talk about my journey to Microsoft and learning something new is that it was so great to have the space to be like, "Hey, I have an idea." But anyway, that's another story. [chuckle]   07:26 PB: Fascinating. Yeah, I do actually, I use the... I'm kind of a Fitbit fan, and I use the food logging on Fitbit, and it gives me a macro-nutrient breakdown and stuff, and so I've been kind of on my own health journey in the past year or so and feeling good, feeling fit. And part of it is kind of analyzing what I ingest, and I feel like we're just sort of at the beginning of a lot of that science like I would love for the data I'm putting into the Fitbit system, which I guess is now Google, just to get even more analysis of that over time. So it's fascinating kind of measuring what you put into your body and how your body is working, and we had a Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft's chief medical officer on a few weeks ago, and talking about COVID of course, but also just more of the intersection of health and technology and very early stages of really taking advantage of that kind of combination, so...   08:24 SM: No, that's true. It's my work, it was... My work pretty much focused on just taking stuff we do with process, architecture and analysis, and then data, of course, but if I think back when my hair was much browner, I just thought what's breaking when it came to metabolic syndrome, and it was... Well, what happens when I do this and then how does your... And what does your intestinal villi do? And so basically connecting those dots to go through the process architecture of digestion and then to make sort of the data model of that. And to say, "Oh, when you eat oatmeal, the pectin and beta-glucan, pectin from apples and pears comes in, it absorbs bile salts." Basically, all those different processes and then how those can combine and really... Back in the day, I created what's called a food program, and that's also known as a diet, but a food program that would layer what foods to eat, how to change your internals to do what it needed to do. And I guess my own doctor took notice because I lowered my cholesterol 90 points in under three months, so...   09:48 PB: Wow.   09:49 SM: Then I made a system that did it, and so that was really... And I met a lot of really cool people in that journey. Then unfortunately, I got sick from stress, but when I came out of that, here I was, and then I invented some new stuff.   10:12 PB: Good, so let's talk about some new stuff. You've been sort of very, very busy, not only being a new... Fairly new Microsoft employee, but also building up something that is referred to as Project 15 for probably some of our listeners are probably familiar, but why don't you give us a little bit of a recap of the origin story around Project 15 and where that's at?   10:40 SM: Sure, I'd love to. I do a little project in the... Although it's a little bigger now, in my spare nights and in weekend hours with a few friends of mine here at Microsoft and... Alright, so the origin story, once upon a time, it really speaks back to that incident with the cat, and essentially, I made a safety system that could use IoT devices to speak to a community within an emergency. So if you thought about some of the stuff that was going on, you have to go to Twitter to find hashtag, you have to go... You don't really know what's going on. There are so many systems getting good data to first responders, but for us, we don't really know what's going on. So that project became known as Project Edison. And so it went for about a year, we built that with a partner, Insight, and we went on the IoT in Action global event tour and talked about it, and I talked about safety in every context you could imagine.   11:55 SM: I talked about safe retail, I talked about safe cities, I talked about safe schools, safe workplaces, safe buildings. And then, actually, I met a guy who does anti-poaching and his name was Eric and... Eric Dinerstein, and I realized in one of these very stereotypical, I was at the cafe with my colleague Daisuke, and I started drawing, and I said, "Anti-poaching, it's the same use case as a Project Edison safety case," and he looked at me and I said, "Well, it's a population that can't defend itself, and it's someone that you wanna stop or making it less impactful, using devices, and then people you need to talk to to get help. So maybe we can get other people that were like us to have this aha moment that scientists are remaking these wheels that we've already made in the commercial space." And so, that's how Project 15 started, which was like, what do we have in our world that we just don't know the use cases of the scientific world. And the second person I met was another professor, Wasser, Dr. Sam Wasser, and he was at U-Dub, and he also was involved with trying to prevent animal... The tracking of tusks and things, illegal trafficking, and I learned about a pangolin from one of his research fellows, which is a tiny, cute, little, scaly animal, and...   13:42 PB: Okay.   13:43 SM: I had never heard of a pangolin, so cute. And they're slow. And the problem is, is that their defense mechanism is that if you scare them, they turn into a ball.   13:55 PB: Okay.   13:56 SM: And if you are...   13:57 PB: Sounds fair.   13:58 SM: Right, I do the same thing.   14:00 PB: Yeah, I can relate to that.   14:01 SM: I'm just gonna be a little ball over here, but and that works for lions and tigers who are like, "Oh, that's a sharp little ball," but it doesn't work for, poachers will just make a noise, it curls up into a ball, they pick it up, they put it in a bag so.   14:21 PB: I see.   14:22 SM: That's our most poached animal on the planet, actually.   14:25 PB: Oh no.   14:26 SM: Anyway, but I thought, "Well, what's the difference between shoplifting a sweater at a store and shoplifting an animal?" And so that was really where this started was, can we just think about this?   14:44 PB: Right, right. Fantastic. And I think, and I did see you had a segment on a recent video, it was like a United Nations gathering of interested parties around the equator initiative, and I guess I was labeled on YouTube. But can you talk a little bit about that. I mean you're getting some pretty good NGO type of engagement off of project 15.   15:13 SM: Yes. So that was super exciting. I would be... I'll just, full disclosure, I was very nervous, but... And I was a little frustrated with the pandemic because I think I could have gone to the United Nations in another reality.   15:32 PB: Yeah I know.   15:33 SM: But virtually, was very fun and so what happened was, is so we put up a video because we had support from my CVP and my management tree, and pretty much everyone in the group that I was in was very supportive of Project 15 right in the beginning. And so we put up a little web page, and I used to call it the bat phone, because we wondered if anyone would call from the scientific realm, and we actually started meeting NGOs. We had... People used our web page to get in touch with us and two of the people, one of them is... That we started working with, is Red Panda Network, which is a fascinating, wonderful organization. Another one is called the Zambezi project, and the third was a woman who runs the small grants program at... The United Nations Development Program has different sections and small grants is a department that funds scientific projects and that are all very, very much sustainability focused.   16:55 SM: I could give a whole talk about... They're so fascinating. And I met her because she actually knew... Her husband was friends with Daisuke so it was like one of these things where somebody hears about what's... And, "Hey, that's really interesting. Let's see if that would work." And then six months later, I'm speaking at their conference. But what happened was, is that we kind of paired up together to see if we could bring our commercial processes that we do normally with my day job, IoT engagements, we're gonna do an architectural design session, we're gonna get to know those processes. And then she gave us... We piloted with three grantees and started to try to figure out, we have different worlds, but we do the same things, it's just different words to describe them.   18:01 SM: And so we had a few epiphanies during this process, and so the thing is, is that she... Her group funds thousands of NGO companies and projects, scientists that range from urban sustainability, so like smart city type stuff, all the way to biodiversity, which is where we kinda focused, and so how do you scale? And so we've been working with her and her group on scaling up and digitally transforming this area through not only Azure IoT, but how does that work with the research part, there's a lot of machine learning, there's a lot of CAMS, so connecting that into something like Teams, so it's bigger than Azure IoT specifically, as all IoT solutions are, and so...   19:05 PB: Exactly.   19:06 SM: So that... Yeah, so that I got invited to speak about our work.   19:09 PB: Yeah it's interesting. Who do we have on recently... Oh, we were talking to Cory Clarke from RXR, and he was talking about the smart building solutions that they're rolling out for office space and office space post-COVID, and how do you use AI and sensors to detect occupancy and distance from each other and a lot of the core tech around using AI, vision and other things and processing that data, it's all very similar. The core tech is similar, but now we have all these other ways of applying it, whether it's in healthcare or bio-diversity or whatever. And so that's an exciting thing about Microsoft, is a lot of the platform tech that we're doing here gets used in all these different directions. And so you've found a particular slice where obviously there's a super high need and folks should look up and learn more about the poaching problems that are happening in the world, but it's pretty significant.   20:11 PB: And to take some of the tech that has been used for more of the, I don't know, traditional digital transformation that we talk about, but actually using that tech in a really smart way out in the field and the real world to help a problem. That must be pretty satisfying for you as a Microsoft employee. And I guess one of my questions is, that must take up a pretty good chunk of your time, as it should. And so you're doing that and you're also working at Microsoft. And so how do you end up balancing all these things? Is this a... Is that... Give us a little more insight. How do you do that? [laughter]   20:49 SM: Well, I have a very supportive wife who feeds me and makes sure that I eat and...   20:56 PB: Yeah.   20:58 SM: So good question. So when we started to scale, and I clearly... Daisuke and I cannot meet with every NGO to do an... Etcetera. So COVID, in the beginning of this, we did have a very big partnering model. And so we have all these great IoT partners, they've got platforms and just connect these projects to them like we would a startup, a retail startup or something. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and of course, as we know, it's all hands on deck to start landing our... Like you just mentioned, the return to work and employees safe. So Daisuke and I had another coffee talk, though virtual, and I said, "You know what? Why don't we use the company Hackathon and make an 80% solution for these folks?"   22:10 SM: That's an easier way. And so we actually got reached out to by a couple of colleagues, one of them was Pamela Cortez and Anders in my group. And they both said, "We'd love to join this because we know what you're doing and we need to figure out how to do the least amount of stuff to have a big impact. And to do that, we need to rely on existing enablement motions and partnerships within other groups. And if we could just build that, then we can roll that out, and off it goes just like anything else."   22:58 PB: Yeah. Well, Microsoft has a great partner network too. So that's the good thing, when we have developers, we have channel partners, we have solution providers, this huge force multiplying engine. It's one of the cool things also about Microsoft is just to get that great idea out there, partners picking it up and amplifying it and landing it locally. So it was good that you took advantage of it. I do wanna make sure people know the... So the aka.ms/project15, is that the go-to place to get the latest?   23:31 SM: That is the place. And then if it can... Down at the bottom there, we have a new link on that page that brings you to the open platform, if you wanna check that out.   23:41 PB: Wow, fantastic. So yeah, let me ask you too, another question. You mentioned COVID-19 and obviously we're all working through that in so many ways. And how has that affected some of your efforts around Project 15 in terms of... Has it been some acceleration in the adoption of technology? Has it slowed down some of these NGOs? Has it...   24:09 SM: This is a multi-faceted answer, so let me think about my words. Okay. So what happened, because now, in the past year, in my private time, and I'm just learning and meeting new people and learning about this space, 'cause I didn't know anything. So if you're somebody who's like me who always wanted to help but didn't think you could, so you just watched, that is not true. All of our skills are welcome and wanted, and a lot of these organizations are non-profits.   24:47 PB: Sure.   24:47 SM: And there's a lot of tech developer groups that you can code for good and get involved on the device level and the software side. So I just wanna put that out there. But what happened was, is that the places where these things are happening, you'll read news articles that poaching accelerated or the lack of tourism has caused some problems. So this space seems to be having the same problems that every other part of the world is having when it comes to learning to adapt to a pandemic world. We weren't exactly affected in terms of getting on the phone at 7 o'clock at night, Pacific Time, to meet with Sonam, who runs the Red Panda network, who's in Nepal, because we were always virtual. And actually, I would... The lack of social life [chuckle] being quarantined probably helped myself, and Daisuke, and Pamela, and Anders when we were cranking out the code and the plan for scale. And so the answer is no.   26:08 SM: One thing that's been... Is a little bit challenging is that I was used to meeting up with our partner architect friends, and we would draw on pieces of paper and we'd talk about smart factories, and then we'd talk about this. And so those kind of conversations got harder, but I did get involved with a Hackathon that came out of Hack-Star and where they were hacking on the OpenCollar project to build the smartest elephant. That's the goal, is to build the smartest elephant collar for Smart Parks. So I just wanted to mention that, is the partner ecosystem is out there, they're doing stuff in this area as well as all the areas. But so it didn't... I don't think it stopped. It's just, at least not...   27:03 PB: Yeah, changed it a little bit.   27:03 SM: For us sitting at the desk, yeah.   27:06 PB: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. I've definitely missed some of the more serendipitous conversations I've had. Sometimes you... That's where you have the serendipitous meetings and conversations that connect things, and it's been a little more planful maybe in terms of conversations and time. But I know also that there's been a lot of tech acceleration by a lot of companies too, and the whole notion of remote and leveraging the cloud a lot more. So hopefully that does work in your favor. I was gonna mention the... We haven't talked about the tech behind Project 15 too much. You mentioned AI is obviously like big data sets. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I think this sounds like a really exciting potential for 5G/LPWA tech in some form. I know that the... I don't think they've rolled out 5G yet in Nepal, but the idea of some sort of low frequency or low spectrum cellular connections that can blanket those areas is exciting. So that's a follow-on for me. I will actually take that as an action to circle back and see what we can do to help there.   28:20 SM: That's actually one of the... So when it comes to the spectrum of silicon to cloud, I fall squarely into process architecture and designing how you're gonna get this to there, and what are we gonna do and strategy on that. I also fall squarely on data because of my background. When it comes to connectivity, Pamela and Daisuke on the Project 15 meta team, they're really interested in that. But something I noticed is that my assumption that some place like the Himalayas wouldn't have any connectivity or something, that was just my own... I don't know if that's a pre-conception or just like a, "That's the woods and the mountains." However, when we looked into it, and we've been working with some groups in the Caribbean as well that go out into the ocean, it's all got coverage. It may be 2G. There's always a satellite, which then you're gonna bring in some edge, let's compute as much as possible over here at the camera or the gateway. But that was really surprising. So I'm really, I'm interested in... We'll loop back on your response because...   29:45 PB: Yeah, yeah. We'll have to loop back. There's some really interesting things happening, especially if you wanna have... You're designing for very low-bandwidth networks, like low-cost low-bandwidth networks. You actually need to do more processing on the edge, and then it's more of a metadata that's going to the cloud as opposed to the actual streams of video or camera images. So some really fascinating things going on there that I think would be really exciting, not only to land in low-bandwidth networks, but also that also enables some very low power endpoints. So imagine you wanna stick some sensors onto a tree out there somewhere, if you want it solar-powered, you need to keep that power profile really low. So projects like these, not only are they inherently just good, but they are also pushing the tech maybe more-so than the more business-oriented deployments that we have that maybe are a little "easier." These are hard deployments because of some of the different environmental factors. So it's always exciting to see the tech being pushed in that direction.   30:51 SM: I was gonna say, just to jump in. You actually raise... This is a really big deal. There's what we're doing with Project 15, but there's the bigger Microsoft sustainability mission. And so this year if you go out to the Microsoft sustainability web page, we just made a recent announcement about water. There was a really interesting announcement about the circular economy and waste. And so when you start to think about devices... So let's say you come from the more device side of the spectrum of our solutioning. I met a scientist who said something really that stuck with me. "We're trying to save the oceans from plastic using plastic." And so when you start to think about how we make devices. How do we make better batteries? How do we use solar? Like you said...   31:54 PB: Yeah, solar.   31:54 SM: That's when we just kind of was like... We also as a technical community should be thinking about that because it really wasn't purview a year ago. But oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense, I never really thought about that.   32:10 PB: Yeah. No. That's fascinating. I was gonna ask you about that before we... I don't know where we're at on time here, I have to check my clock. But I know we're not traveling any more, but I still stay in touch with BU through their various alumni programs and things. Do you stay in touch with any BU alums or any Boston related things these days? Or...   32:32 SM: Well, I do. I do.   32:33 PB: 'Cause we're pretty far from Boston. People don't know, we're actually in Redmond Washington. It's like the polar opposite of Boston.   32:40 SM: Three thousand miles away. I do, I have friends that I went there with, and I get the magazine. And I get...   32:49 PB: Oh yeah, the magazine.   32:50 SM: I was very proud of, what was it? One of the alums, she was in the Orange is the New Black and I was like, "Whoa, BU!" And of course on LinkedIn I see different things. Actually, speaking of COVID, I saw a really cool video that I thought was very edgy and he did a video about everybody wearing their masks and I was like, "Yes!" But yeah, no, I keep an eye on what's going on there.   33:24 PB: Good.   33:25 SM: So yeah.   33:27 PB: Yeah, no, it's fascinating to see all this stuff, how it's evolving and how we're all sort of connected, right? So now you and I are connected through Boston University, and we didn't even know that so that's fantastic.   33:36 SM: Who knew? T. Anthony's pizza.   33:36 PB: Who knew? T. Anthony's, yeah, I love that place, yeah. Although I don't eat cheese anymore but I still love pizza so... [chuckle] Cool. So any final thoughts Sarah? We... You kind of said that the URL people should go to. What's the call to action here? Where do you want people to go do now they've been sort of educated here?   34:00 SM: We love... When you think about it, if you go out and you get to the Project 15 open platform, for those of us who are very familiar, when you see the architecture you'll say, "Oh, this looks like everything else that is the components of an IoT solution." That is true. I've actually been using it with, met some startups and I said, "Well hey," doing my usual day job, which is, "How do I learn Azure IoT?" And, "Oh, go here, go here. Ask me questions if you have them." So people who are on the coding side of our world, feel free to bug bash that, and any feedback is absolutely welcome. It's really a passion project when you get down to it, which we hope is really useful, and if you do have people who are technical on the scientific side and it's interesting to them and we are building it through Pamela's work with community so that people will be able to get enabled on it. This speaks to the, "How do you do all of this?" Well, I have smart friends. And so yeah, so that really it's out there for you to use. Any feedback is welcome. And yeah, we hope it helps.   35:26 PB: Yeah, I encourage people to go to that website and learn more about it. And Sarah, I really appreciate the time today. I know you're really busy, so carving out a little time here, much appreciated. So hopefully we can actually meet each other in person at some point in the near future. So that'd be great.   35:47 SM: Soon. Soon.   35:48 PB: Soon.   35:48 SM: Wear your masks everybody.   35:51 PB: Exactly.   35:51 SM: Alright. Yeah, no, thank you so much. This has been fun.   35:53 PB: Sure. Okay, cool. Alright, thanks Sarah.   35:57 SM: Thank you.   35:57 PB: Bye bye.   36:00 SM: Bye.   36:00 PB: This is Pete Bernard. You've been listening to the IoT Unicorn Podcast, and thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode, and feel free to give us some feedback at TheIoTUnicorn@Microsoft.com. Thank you.   [music]  

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard
Lessons Learned on a Submarine, and the Heroic Internet, with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2020 28:53


In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rob Tiffany, VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson explores the development of 5G and LPWA technology for IoT solutions, what it looks like for Telco's to be successful in the IoT space, and how the Internet is playing the hero during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Download the Transcript Here   00:00 Pete Bernard: Great, so Rob, thanks for joining us today on the Unicorn, and really appreciate you taking the time. I was going to start by asking you a couple things about what your role is currently at Ericsson, kinda how you got there. I know that you and I did work together at Microsoft years ago back in the Windows Mobile days.   00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.   00:25 PB: Good times, good times.   00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]   00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...   00:38 RT: Yeah. And certainly by 2010 or around that timeframe I took an architect role in another group and probably started spending more time on Azure. I was at Microsoft for 12 years and so the first half was Mobile, Windows Mobile, CEE, Windows Phone. Second half was Azure, Azure IoT. And you know what? We had some good times in the Windows Mobile days when it was just us and BlackBerry slugging it out. We were making... When things like Exchange ActiveSync was a big deal to people.   01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.   01:24 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then no doubt, when we rebooted and did Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 and all that, I used to do so many EBCs for mobility and you noticed a difference and you had to get really thick skin. [chuckle]   01:42 PB: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Well, I peeled off after six... I think, so I went on to Zune incubation, I did Kin and I did all kinds of weird phone things and went off into the wilderness for a while on that while everyone else finished up with Windows Phone, but...   02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.   02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...   02:07 RT: You know what? I finished college on board a submarine, so when I was in the Navy driving subs I had what, maybe 30 or so hours to go to graduate, and so I've actually never set foot on the SUNY Albany campus...   02:26 PB: Oh, wild.   02:27 RT: But the military has programs with lots of different universities around the country and to show how old I really am, I was able to take college courses underway on the submarine using Pioneer LaserDiscs.   02:42 PB: Wow.   02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]   02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.   02:50 RT: That is fully old school.   02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.   02:58 RT: Oh, okay.   02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.   03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.   03:09 PB: Yeah.   03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.   03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.   03:14 RT: To say the least. But you know what? I think everything started back then with submarines and teaching myself how to code and do databases, and when you think about IoT, you're just remoting information that you had on these local sensors and we were surrounded by sensors on the submarine. There's the obvious things like sonar and things like that and this higher frequency one to see what your depth is below the keel, but inside you had CO2 radiation, all kinds of gas sensors and things like that to make sure we were still alive, which was kind of a thing. [chuckle]   04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.   04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.   04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?   04:13 RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the Microsoft thing. I was recruited out of the Azure back when we were doing incubating Azure IT. There was that time... And actually Microsoft IoT stuff started in the embedded team with Intelligence System Service, but then I went to Hitachi actually to build an industrial IoT platform called Lumada, which was really interesting. But yes, I joined Ericsson a couple years ago. Up until recently, I split my time between Seattle and Stockholm. Normally I'd be in Kista, the Ericsson headquarters with the rest of my team. So yes, certainly disconnected these days.   05:00 PB: Yeah, interesting.   05:00 RT: And what Ericsson is doing in IoT is very different than my background both at Microsoft and Hitachi for sure, which was more data-focused, outcomes, analytics. Ericsson manages among... We have an IoT team. We have three products. Our big one is this IoT Accelerator, which is basically a global connection management platform. If you know what Jasper is, it's kinda like that in some ways. It spans about 35 or so mobile operators around the world and lots of enterprises. But the key thing, you know how we're always talking about that initial bootstrapping of devices to get them connected, right?   05:46 PB: Yep.   05:47 RT: In the event that you're using cellular for IoT, one of your options would be this IoT Accelerator thing we have at Ericsson, and so the narrative would be if a machine is being manufactured in Shenzhen and at manufacturer time, they're putting in the microcontroller and the software and the security keys and all that stuff, and there's also a cellular module, and if they're using our technology then when a customer buys that product and they turn it on the first time somewhere else in the world, maybe France, then it wakes up and connects to a local mobile operator to start sync telemetry.   06:24 PB: I see, so it's like a bootstrap profile kind of thing that phones home and then you guys connect it up to the right telco network.   06:35 RT: Yeah, and then it roams as well. But it's different than anybody who, if you... At least when IoT was getting hyped I was doing IoT-M to M in the '90s, but when it really started getting hyped after 2010, 2012, whatever, you started seeing these global SIMs and things like that that are just roaming all the time.   06:58 PB: Yes.   07:00 RT: But what the average person doesn't realize is mobile operators don't always want you roaming and just camped out on their network if you're from somewhere else.   07:08 PB: Yeah, yeah.   [laughter]   07:10 RT: And so our technology, aside from the technology and we're operating our own network, so even though Ericsson creates the technologies that mobile operators use, we actually manage our own network that spans the globe, that interfaces with all these other mobile operators, and then there's lots of contracts and everything. But the take away to make sure that it's all okay with them, that these devices... And we are also in the connected car space and we've been doing that for a long time. And so you can imagine a car manufactured in Japan and sold in Europe.   07:46 PB: Sure.   07:47 RT: And the whole infotainment, and then as we move forward, more and more IOT telemetry coming off, those cards may wanna roam from country to country, so we do a lot of stuff with those guys too.   08:00 PB: I noticed that recently I got an email this morning from account team in Finland talking about a telco, there seems to be this confluence of telco and IoT. And I've seen, and I think you might have had some commentary on that too or pointed some articles about 5G plus AI plus IoT, or there's something about... We're seeing some telcos have really... Forward leaning telcos, really investing and thinking about IoT as the next big wave for them. Ericsson is part of that story too. Is there some unnatural attraction between IoT and telco or what's going on there? Are you seeing the same thing?   08:40 RT: Yeah, I am. But of course, if you'll remember, we saw this before. When the IoT craze started taking off, you might remember a lot of the telcos built their own IoT platforms and waited for people to come...   08:54 PB: That's right.   08:54 RT: And people didn't always show up, and so it seems like most of the mobile operators actually took a stab at it back then. Of course, if we go back further in time, most mobile operators thought that it was their right to be the cloud as well and they gave a shot at that, but it didn't work out either. But you're right, there's a renewed effort. I think a lot of it's just numbers and money. We've saturated smartphones and people, and so we need... Lots of mobile operators for better or worse, think of the world in SIMs. [chuckle] Connected SIM endpoints, that's how they see the world. And so it's like, "Okay, we've maxed out all the SIMs on people. [laughter] Where are we gonna get some more SIMs?" And so they're thinking, "Oh, it's IoT." And so that's where a lot of it's coming. We've certainly seen some of them turning on, some of them like NB-IoT and CAT-M1, LTE-M networks to try to take a stab at that. And so that's kind of cruising along.   10:09 PB: I noticed that... And I love to buy all the gadgets and stuff and I'm also very invested in the whole LPWA space, I'm a big believer in that. And I'm curious and I see some things happening there, but it just seems like such a no-brainer for some of these WiFi connected things. Like I just installed a garage door opener in my house, I have a separate garage and it's WiFi connected for some reason, but I have to stand on a step ladder and scan a QR code and hold it next to it. I'm like, "Why doesn't it just turn on and connect through a little power cellular?" Just such a no-brainer, but it hasn't quite yet turned on.   10:49 RT: Yeah. No, you're right. Are you connected much with the SemTech guys doing LoRa?   10:56 PB: SemTech, not that much. No, no.   10:58 RT: Okay, okay. It's funny, so much of this is the people you work with over the years. When I went to Hitachi to build this industrial thing, I had a couple of compadres from Microsoft come along as well, but needless to say a couple of those guys are actually working for SemTech now and pushing hard on the whole LoRaWan thing.   11:23 PB: I see.   11:24 RT: And it looks like they're getting traction actually.   11:27 PB: Is LoRaWan, is that unlicensed or is that licensed? I think that's unlicensed.   11:31 RT: It's unlicensed, yeah.   11:32 PB: There's always those two camps, there's the licensed, which you got all your telcos with their spectrum and their 3GPP stuff, and then the unlicensed, which is probably a lot faster on the innovation side, but...   11:45 RT: Yes, they can get to market faster. You may remember, gosh, how many years ago was it when we were at Mobile World Congress and Sigfox launched out of nowhere. And they raised a bunch of money and they... But they weren't gonna do what the LoRaWan and guys did, they tried to be their own mobile operator as well. And so yeah, it's been interesting watching that. And you're right, they can get to market faster. They were using Sub-1 GHz and some rules, EU rules about how often you could send a signal and how big it could be, and they're like, "Hey, I think we can thread the needle here."   12:21 PB: Yes.   [laughter]   12:23 PB: Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to the LPWA stuff becoming more mainstream and just more turn key, if you will 'cause it just seems like it's such a low hanging fruit. There's the obvious metering and telemetry and that's parking meters and gas meters but even a lot of this current WiFi connected gear that people buy, it's just painful to get it all... I just installed a juice box level two charger for my house.   12:55 RT: Okay.   12:56 PB: And again, I had to download the app and the app... I had to connect the juice box to my phone and my phone to my WiFi and the blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, "What is happening?" It's just...   13:06 RT: Absolutely. You know what? It's so important, or at least from my perspective, to put yourself in the shoes of a developer and what they have to go through to get something connected, and I always think of the hassle factor. If I talk to people in the telco world and say, "Why is it cellular IoT is so far behind WiFi or other ways to connect?" And a big reason is actually what you just described. It's just such a hassle and it's expensive. A developer's like, "Oh, I gotta get some kind of SIM-based module thing and I gotta... Do I need to call a mobile operator and get a plan?" And you know what? The mobile operators, they still need to work on getting their prices down lower or at an appropriate amount for a IoT endpoint, because in many cases the prices are still too high.   14:01 PB: Yeah. Well, like my garage door opener, how much data is that sending? It's like either the garage door is open or closed. It's like one bit, plus 500K of overhead. A one or a zero, open or closed.   14:15 RT: Exactly. One or a zero, yeah. And so I think for telcos to be successful, while they would probably love to charge smartphone prices for plans for things, the reality is is no one's gonna use it unless they can still have an ROI. If I'm doing agriculture and I'm trying to put a weather station in a orchard and my plan with a mobile operators costing me $30 a month, I'm never gonna make any money on that deal. It's not worth doing.   14:48 PB: Yeah, I think you're right, there's the simplicity factor, the economics obviously drive the big deployments. But yeah, hopefully we'll start to see that take hold a little bit. I wanted to actually ask you a question about... I saw a post of yours the other day talking about 5G, and I'm sure you and I both get emails and questions about 5G on a daily basis or hourly basis, but you said that it's not just another G, which I thought was a good way of describing the other aspects of 5G. When people think of 5G, I just got this Samsung Ultra, Note Ultra 20 thing beautiful... It's a beautiful thing.   15:26 RT: How do you like it?   15:27 PB: Oh, it's fantastic. It's just like, it's hard to describe how awesome it is, but... And it's got 5G in it, and so fantastic, classic use case. And I work with Qualcomm all the time and Cristiano Amon and all these folks and they're all like, "5G all the way." But it's almost like the rest of 5G doesn't quite get the airtime about the high density and low latency. How do you see that impacting the IoT space?   15:56 RT: Yeah. Well, if the IoT space had actually been successful, 'cause we've massively underperformed across the board, it doesn't matter what company you are or what technology you built, everyone's massively underperformed, and so... But let's just assume for a second that we've been successful and we weren't in the trough of disillusionment right now, we would've found that we would've hit bottlenecks with lots of concurrently connected devices, if we were using cellular just over normal 4G networks and things like that. But we didn't hit those bottlenecks because IoT deployments haven't been that big yet. And so, the great thing about 5G is just with that same hardware, that same gear, all of the sudden you're getting more capacity. And you're right, that's what I wrote about, no one ever talks about the capacity angle. They talk about speed and they talk about the really low latency, and all that's super important, but for IoT capacity is gonna be the most important. And so the fact that it's a hundred times more capacity for the same cell tower, the same gear, is miraculous. And then that supporting a million devices per square kilometer is... That's how we're actually gonna have connected cars working well, smart cities, all those urban, a lot of those things that require a lot of density and a lot of devices all talking together over cellular networks, that's gonna make that real and make it happen.   17:29 PB: Yeah, I hear you. And yeah, you're right, we haven't really hit the bottlenecks yet so we're not quite appreciative of it, but when you think through how many billions of devices will be connected over the next few years, you just have to go there and you have to have that infrastructure. And then the ultra-low latency stuff, I think is fascinating. From the Microsoft side, we do a lot of commercial stuff, manufacturing, healthcare, a lot of things like that, and the ultra-low latency and some of those aspects of 5G are pretty fascinating, I think, and start to get more industry 4.0 type of scenarios.   18:06 RT: Yes, absolutely.   18:09 PB: I was curious what you think about... My next question around 5G and Release 16 for 3GPP. Do we need 3GPP Release 16 to really make this 5G thing work for IoT or do we need 17? Do you have any opinion on that or is that too esoteric of a question?   18:31 RT: It's a little esoteric, and the only reason I say that is I remember talking to folks in the past who would say ridiculous things to me like, "Oh, now that we're gonna get 5G, we can finally do IoT." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? We've done IoT forever and we've done it a million different ways, and we certainly did it over GPRS and it was fine [chuckle] and so I don't need 5G to do IoT." Is it gonna make it better and is it gonna help us with this capacity? Absolutely. And you're right, these subsequent releases, getting that ultra reliable, that low latency for mission critical stuff... 'Cause as you can imagine, you're talking about Microsoft being in the industrial world, Ericsson makes private LTE and private 5G technologies. And so that's complementary to what you're doing at Microsoft, 'cause we are certainly getting pinged on a lot by a lot of giant manufacturers around the world who, as they're heading into industry 4.0, they look at some of those use cases that require mass customization, flexibility around the factory...   19:47 PB: Sure.   19:48 RT: The notion of a fixed assembly line that doesn't change is gonna go away.   19:53 PB: Right, right, that's a novelty... That's Henry Ford style stuff. Yeah, that doesn't work.   19:55 RT: Yeah, and so therefore, they won't be able to use Ethernet anymore because it's gonna move around so they need wireless, they haven't had a lot of success with WiFi and so lots of people are piloting private 5G, private LTE inside factories, distribution centers, and so that's really interesting space there.   20:19 PB: Yeah. We've seen that as well, and we also see interest from transportation hubs.   20:24 RT: Yeah.   20:27 PB: Shipping ports, airports, places that have just a lot of acreage.   20:33 RT: Absolutely.   20:34 PB: So you're talking about oil refineries, places where there's 100 acres of space and they need a homogeneous, high speed network. You're not gonna stick WiFi repeaters out on poles down the runway.   20:49 RT: Right.   20:49 PB: So yeah, so I think that's another big area. We talked about the LPWA side is cool with the parking meters and garage door openers. And then the other side, you talked about there is gonna be this big wave of transformation going on with some of these big industrial players, I think using 5G or some kind of cell technology, private cell there.   21:12 RT: Yeah. And it's amazing 'cause I've seen it in action and the coverage is insane, the distance, the speed within a large building, instead of having zillions of WiFi access points trying to create coverage, you just have a few of these radio dots that we make and it just roams and it just works seamlessly all over. That's gonna be fun to watch.   21:37 PB: That'll be fun to watch, yes. Hey, I was gonna ask you kinda change gears a little bit, so we're recording this on August 25th so we've been in this pandemic mode for quite a while. What kind of insights have you gained from this pandemic?   21:56 RT: Yes. You know what? I think I put it together 'cause I have thought about it, I've kind of taken down notes, what's worked, what's not worked. And so I would say, succinctly, digital experiences delivered over connectivity is making remote things local and so whether it's you and I chatting here, the rest of the world on Zoom like you're seeing, it's kept people together. My wife is a school teacher and so she had to start teaching remotely and her school district uses Teams 'cause I'm right by Redmond, of course. [chuckle] So an Office 365 school district.   22:49 PB: Right.   22:50 RT: Yeah, as opposed to a Google classroom school district.   22:53 PB: Sure, sure.   22:54 RT: You've seen it in the stock price with certain tech companies, it's like, "Wow, we're really using this." But it certainly plays back to IoT and the taking an experience where I would normally be local in person and making it remote and I know it sounds really simple to say that but the hero in all of this is the internet.   23:20 PB: Right.   23:21 RT: It's held together.   23:22 PB: Yes.   23:23 RT: It keeps reaffirming that it's maybe one of the greatest creations ever and it's holding together for the whole planet, which is just miraculous.   23:33 PB: Yeah. The idea of remote everything, it sounds simple, but it's so complicated and...   23:39 RT: Yeah.   23:40 PB: We talk about latency and bandwidth and other things, and just... I think it's been a lifeline for so many people, to be honest with you.   23:49 RT: It has.   23:51 PB: Just with just the video conferencing, Satya talks about the acceleration, like two years worth of acceleration in two months, basically, just 'cause people have to start collaborating with these tools like Teams and Zoom and everything else, and so we've all fast forwarded a couple of years in our adoption of some of these technologies...   24:14 RT: Absolutely.   24:14 PB: And it'll be interesting to see what sticks. As we get out of this pandemic at some point, which of these habits will stick, that we'll get more used to, and then obviously... I think maybe also for me, I also now probably have more appreciation of the in person experiences than I probably did. And I did travel recently with my daughter to get her to school and I actually enjoy traveling, I enjoy being on an airplane, and these days it's a pretty high anxiety kind of thing with lots of face shields and wipes and things, but getting back to that mode, that's something that I'll probably, for the rest of my life really appreciate being able to just freely travel.   24:58 RT: Yes, absolutely.   25:00 PB: 'Cause of this situation we're in. So it will be interesting to see. I agree with you though, I think the internet has held together and that has been the hero amongst many heroes, but...   25:10 RT: Yeah. This internet infrastructure, fiber electricity beneath the cities and the country, and then little things popping up, either cell towers or WiFi access points, that let us roam around mobility and keeping us together. Obviously, we see a lot of stuff, there's been trends and things that we've had before that's just super accelerated, like you said, like tele-medicine, remote healthcare...   25:36 PB: Yeah.   25:36 RT: Just skyrocketed.   25:39 PB: Yeah. Well, I know that there...   25:40 RT: Out of necessity.   25:41 PB: Yeah, there was... I know there was a lot of rules in place for practitioners not being able to work across state lines and a lot of those rules were suspended during the pandemic to enable people to do tele-medicine, which I thought was fantastic, they were pretty... From a layman's perspective, they seemed anachronistic that you couldn't Zoom conference with a patient in another state and actually provide support or guidance.   26:09 RT: Yeah.   26:11 PB: And so yeah, things like that, where we just moved the whole ball forward, which is a good thing.   26:17 RT: Absolutely, absolutely. No, it's all good.   26:20 PB: Good stuff.   26:21 RT: I think you learned a lot. And I do miss traveling too. I complained about it when I'm flying every few weeks to Sweden or wherever...   26:30 PB: Sure, sure.   26:31 RT: But then that abrupt end of it and just the silence and being at home... You know it's weird, when you travel a lot and you're accustomed to all these international airports and maybe the place you go to get coffee or... This broad world, for a handful of us, it's like our comfort zone and then it just ended, and I miss it. No doubt about it.   26:54 PB: Cool, so, well, Rob, thanks a lot for the time, appreciate it. And good to see you again and...   27:01 RT: Absolutely.   27:02 PB: I see you pop up on LinkedIn on almost like a daily basis, so we'll keep communicating through LinkedIn and stuff.   27:10 RT: We're teachers.   27:11 PB: Yes, exactly, exactly.   27:14 RT: Spreading the word, absolutely.   27:16 PB: Exactly. Sounds good. Alright, Rob, well, take care stay safe.   27:19 RT: You do the same, it's great talking to you.   27:21 PB: Okay, thanks.   27:22 RT: Alright, bye bye.

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard
Powerful Lessons for Building a Scalable IoT Business with Lou Lutostanski from Avnet

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2020 28:08


On this episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, learn from Lou Lutostanski, VP of IoT at Avnet, as he discusses the evolution of IoT including the need to partner on solutions, especially at scale, lessons learned from years in IoT, and the ways IoT and AI can be leveraged specifically within the healthcare industry, including with remote telemedicine. Download the Transcript Here Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So, let's get started. Pete Bernard: This week we are talking with Lou Lutostanski, who's the vice president of IoT at Avnet. Lou's been in the business a while and he's going to be talking about his journey there and also reflect a little bit on the lessons learned that he sees over and over again. And how can we work together to help mitigate some of those things. We'll also talk a little bit about how things like national emergencies like the pandemic accelerate existing trends.  This was recorded actually only about a few weeks into quarantine back in March so an interesting perspective there. So please enjoy my conversation with Lou. Pete Bernard: So Lou, thanks again for taking the time to join us here on the IoT Unicorn. I know that we've been working together for a few months now, I think we met last June at the NXP Connects event for the first time. And, maybe you can give us a little background as to what you're currently doing at Avnet and maybe we can chat a little bit about how you got there and what that journey looks like. Lou Lutostanski: Sure. Well Pete, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be on your podcast. It was last year at the NXP event that we met and we've been working together quite frequently here over the last few months. But I'm currently the VP of IoT at Avnet. We're traditionally come from a historical industrial distribution business and we realized that the next wave in technologies was all around IoT. So I'm doing that now. But to go way, way back, my formal education was in electrical engineering at Purdue University. Pete Bernard: I see that, yes. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile as we speak. Lou Lutostanski: Yeah. And I quickly discovered that my area of interest wasn't really in hardware and moles and electrons migrating across a PM junction, but more interest in software, all kinds of software. So there was a new technology in electronics when I went to school sweeping the land called microprocessors and I kind of fell in love with the 8080. So by the time I graduated college I had taken classes in computer system design, which is the equivalent of computer engineering before there was a name for it. I did a lot of embedded programming. I had written two pass assemblers for the PDP-11 processor in   C and wrote disk allocation systems for mainframe resource management. And I actually worked summers for my dad's company writing applications around accounts payable or accounts receivable, inventory management and work orders. So, I kind of loved all kinds of programming. Pete Bernard: Sure, sure. Cool. And yeah, it's interesting. I've had some guests on here, it's okay to refer to IoT as embedded systems because that's what we used to call it. But now it sounds a lot cooler. But it sounds like you had a lot of hands on experience with that through your career. So you ended up at Avnet, it says 2013, was that when you started at Avnet? Lou Lutostanski: Actually, I ended up at Avnet in earlier than that. 1987. Pete Bernard: Holy mackerel. Lou Lutostanski: Yeah. I came off a brief stint at IBM out of college went to work for my dad's company. He had a company that did industrial equipment and so I sold for him for a while before I moved back to Austin, Texas, where I had started with IBM. Love took me there, I married a girl from there, and got involved in the wonderful world of distribution. So, my first job was with Hallmark Electronics and I was a sales manager, or actually a system sales manager selling storage terminals, PCs, monitors, motors, and printers. And I did that job for about a year before I figured out all the action in industrial distribution was in the semiconductor world. So, I converted over to become one of the first field applications engineers in distribution for the Motorola line. And later on, I moved up to sales management in Dallas and moved back to Austin as branch manager. Around that time Avnet bought us. So that's where I became a member of the Avnet family, even though I started in '87, 1993 was when the acquisition happened. Pete Bernard: Wow, okay. You put your time in there. That's good. Lou Lutostanski: I did. And I floated through the ranks of VP area director until 2000 and that's when I went on my, what I'll refer to as a sabbatical. So I left for Motorola and after serving as a VP of global sales for both the HP account and later the Motorola account, I became the VP of sales and marketing for the Americas as we transitioned to Freescale. So my sabbatical there lasted 12 years and I returned to Avnet seven years ago running sales for the Americas. Pete Bernard: Wow. So you've been involved in sort of industrial, commercial, computer things kind of forever. You followed your, that's a kind of a red thread, they call it, through your career. That's pretty awesome. Well, it's good. It's good. It's good to have that, I think sometimes people take wildly different right and left turns to sort of find their passion and other folks just know, they have an internal compass that sort   of just kind of keeps pointing them in the right direction, which is pretty awesome too, but that's cool. Good stuff. I was down in Austin, let's see, I was visiting with NXP, I think I told you this story, and they took me to a place called Chuy's. Lou Lutostanski: Absolutely. Pete Bernard: That was delicious. And it had hubcaps on the ceiling, and it was kind of one of the local, I guess, awesome restaurants that you have in Austin. So that was pretty good. Lou Lutostanski: You got your chips and queso out of a back of a classic car's trunk, I imagine. Pete Bernard: That's right. Yes, exactly. Yes. And the Elvis chicken, I think it was what I had, but good stuff. All right, I'm getting hungry. It's around lunchtime, by the way, when we're recording this, I probably shouldn't talk about Chuy's restaurant. Anyway, so you've been in the business a while. You've seen the evolution, like I said, we used to call it embedded systems, now it's called IoT and stuff. Maybe you can share with us what have we all learned as an ecosystem, as a community around this space over the years. What are some of the lessons learned that you've seen sort of repeated over and over again? Lou Lutostanski: Yep. So it was a funny story. I was in the field selling for Avnet, running the sales organization in the Americas. And I started hearing about IoT and over time that's all everybody wanted to talk about. So I thought originally thought IoT was kind of a marketing hype thing. So, when they created the position here at Avnet, I lobbied for one of my marketing friends from Freescale to come over and join and unfortunately he didn't get the job, but a year later it was available again. And in that year I grew and understood it was really an incredible opportunity to transform businesses through the application of IoT. So, three years ago I joined this mission here at Avnet. And the lessons I learned in IoT were many. And I've kind of distilled them down to the 10 main issues. Lou Lutostanski: So it was funny the first time, I got this job around March, three years ago and I was a keynote speaker at a IoT World in Santa Clara a couple of months later. And my first thought was kind of being intimidated on what am I going to talk to all these people about? And when I got there, I realized IoT was really in its infancy and there were a whole lot of people there trying to figure out really what IoT was. Even though they've been working on it for a year or two or decades when it was called- Pete Bernard: For a decade or two, yeah exactly.     Lou Lutostanski: But the first lesson that I learned is that nobody knew enough about IoT, but they were certain, whatever it was they contributed to, it was the most important, and was the most margin. Lou Lutostanski: I tell the story about the blind men and the elephant going through and feeling various parts of the elephant and all coming out and having a violent discussion over what exactly an elephant was. And it's the fact that no one saw the entire elephant holistically. None of them were wrong, but none of them saw the thing holistically. And I think that's where IoT was several years ago. I also learned very early on lesson number two, that from Microsoft, it took 10 to 20 companies to do an IoT implementation, which is why very few IoT implementations were happening. It's just a lot of work to try to get 10 people or five people to agree on anything, much less figure out how you're going to support a customer over long-term and where are the liabilities for service and warranties are going to lay after the original installation. So that was another thing I learned. I also learned that IoT is really about, it's a technology enabler for business transformation. And what I saw when I got here was that people were very focused on the implementation without even understanding why. So, I learned very long that that business case has to far precede the actual implementation because, there's no way you can succeed understanding technology but not understanding why. Pete Bernard: Yeah, totally. We see that a lot now and a big part of our process with customers is to start with the business leadership and talk about business outcomes and objectives and then let's get clear on what those are. And then the technology will follow. There's no shortage of tech, but if you don't have a North Star of a business outcome that you're shooting for, then you're probably just going to have a series of science experiments. Right? Lou Lutostanski: Exactly Pete, exactly. I think another thing I learned was that the true value of business transformation goes beyond just asset monitoring. And it must have a component of AI applied to the data that you're getting. And I think the initial reaction is, "Okay, I can monitor that machine and I don't have to have somebody stop by and check it." But that's really not what it's about. It's about taking information off the machine on a continuous basis and analyzing that and trying to predict things that are going to put you in front of the competition or things that are going to lower your costs or things that are going to please your customers, more than anything else. So much more than just simple machine monitoring, or asset monitoring. Pete Bernard: So, just kind of little sidebar, we're recording this podcast here in late March, and we're living in some extraordinary times as you know. And we've talked about that. I just saw a section on something last night on Rachel Maddow, is a company that had web connected thermometers and they were looking at their data, so you're talking about just kind of analyzing data, but they were looking at the trend data from their thermometers. Looking at it across the United States, and they believe that they're able to get a few weeks' worth head start on where certain fevers and other higher temperatures are starting to occur. And I thought that was really an interesting way of thinking about, we think about sometimes   looking at data for preventing motor burnout and other kind of industrial things, but also the ability to predict certain trends based on kind of the analysis of that data could be pretty consequential, for sure. Lou Lutostanski: They say Pete, that there are billions of people that are confined to their homes right now. And the thing about IoT is if you scale it beyond a small sample of a thousand, if you really had sensors on billions of people, it's unrealistic to think you're going to send some poor guy a spreadsheet and try to ask him what the trends are globally. That's where AI comes into play and not being able to monitor individuals, but trends across geographies over time, and trying to predict where the next outbreaks are going to be and how long the outbreaks are going to last based on the temperature of all your subjects out there. So I think scaling IoT really requires AI to get the insights to the golden nuggets of what we're looking for. Pete Bernard: Yeah, definitely, yeah. They go hand in hand, the big data analysis and, IoT is there to provide a lot of that real time data across all kinds of geographies and transports and things. And then there's the action taken on the data that they really need the hyperscaler cloud and AI capabilities to do that. So, for sure. Lou Lutostanski: Exactly. I think another one of my learnings was I learned that customers will not live with 95% of the solution. If you give a customer 95% of the solution and you ask them to go figure out the other 5% it will never get done. So you've got to be able to walk the customer through and make it very, very easy, because this is very complex with all kinds of visible insight together. And there's very few people that understand all of it or even large pieces of it. So it's required to give a 100% of the solution to the customers. Pete Bernard: They say the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort, so- Lou Lutostanski: Exactly. And that's where all the value is added as well, right Pete? Pete Bernard: Sure, sure. Lou Lutostanski: Along a similar line, I've learned that there's no silver bullets for 100% repeatable solutions. They all require some modifications, and some are in hardware, some are in software, some are in AI, some are wireless infrastructure. And it goes back to what you just said. That last 10% is where all the hard work's done. But that's the thing that makes it fit specifically for the customer's application, for their own application. I think another thing that I learned is that without complete knowledge and capabilities of the IoT stack, including a robust security capability, an organization can never lead in IoT. They could participate but they couldn't lead. So I think that's very, very important. And I think few organizations possess that capability, which I think is another reason, if everybody had that capability, I think there'd be more IoT implementations out there.   Pete Bernard: That's an interesting point. I was reading about McDonald's did an acquisition of a company in Israel and I think Walmart obviously has lots of technical capabilities. So, a lot of these bigger companies are building in-house technology capabilities. They're becoming software, and in some cases, hardware companies in addition to being restaurants or retailers or whatever. We talk also about Tesla being able to, the number of software engineers they have is really far and above any other automaker. So I think a lot of the technology companies, or companies I should say, that are really taking advantage of some of these C changes that are happening in digital transformation, are companies that are empowering themselves with more capabilities around technology. Whether those are in-house software capabilities or hardware capabilities. But like you said, you can't really take full advantage of the tech if you're a sort of a passive bystander. Lou Lutostanski: If you take somebody like Tesla, their software is core to their product. They are really a software product that has some metal wrapped around it. If you go to somebody like a McDonald's or other large corporations that have a lot of resources, their competitive advantage is their ability to predict what's going to happen. And doing that through IoT with a team that understands a lot of the pieces and bringing on other people to do parts of it, I think is good. But for the vast majority of the companies, in terms of numbers, they just don't have the resources to put all of it together or even understand most of it. And I think that's the big spot where IoT can shine in the future when it's allowed to scale. Pete Bernard: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Lou Lutostanski: At our company, I think one of our other lessons are, we learned that one company with all the capability to do end-to-end can never scale. The world is so vast, that just the resources within one organization, even if he can do it well for one, for five, for 10, when you talk about hundreds of thousands, it's not practical. Pete Bernard: Right, right. And that's a big challenge, right? We had someone on recently, talking about the heterogeneity of the ecosystem in IoT, relative to the PC. And this is a transformation that Microsoft's been going through, is how do we work with a broad range of commercial customers and a very broad ecosystem of Silicon partners, hardware manufacturers, system integrators. Like you said, it's kind of a team sport, I'd heard that before too. And in order to scale everyone needs to be able to glue pieces together essentially, or reuse platforms and other elements from different parts of the ecosystem to get to the outcomes they want to get to. So, I think it's part of it's are there the right platforms and tools out there and protocols, but also it's part education too. I think people just learning more about how they can make that connection to the cloud or add AI capabilities to their systems or get devices that they know will work with other devices. So it's a definitely a big problem to solve.     Lou Lutostanski: Again, I learned that determining how to put together an infrastructure for people with hardware, IP, and services together, is the only hope of achieving scalability in the IoT market. So that's something that we spent a lot of time on. Pete Bernard: Yeah, we call it repeatable solutions. I think that's not a unique term. We try to help customers understand, there's a solutions out there for all kinds of business outcomes and being able to implement those without having to reinvent the wheel or pour sand in one end and the solution comes out the others kind of required because otherwise the ROI just gets blown up, and you can't start from scratch and invent everything from scratch and still get a good return on investment. So, I'm sure- Lou Lutostanski: It's really about two major things. One is scalability and one's time to market. Customers lose interest after a couple of years, right? Pete Bernard: Yeah, exactly. Lou Lutostanski: I do think speaking of the time to market and the losing interest, I think another big, big learning that I had is the action short term in IoT is going to be brownfield. So how do you take equipment that's been out there for a long time and retrofit it to get the information to the cloud and apply AI to provide immediate services to customers? Pete Bernard: Yeah, that's a big thing. We had talked about with Azure Sphere, the work we did with Starbucks and with you guys on outfitting those existing espresso machines. But I've also seen really interesting implementations where, by measuring things like current draw on motors, you can actually use that kind of dumb data and AI and anomaly detection algorithms on that current draw data to actually discern preventive maintenance and other things in the cloud, which is kind of fascinating. Real brownfield stuff where that device was not designed at all to be cloud connected but you're able to attach something to it to do some basic data monitoring and then use the cloud and some big data analytics to come to some conclusions. Lou Lutostanski: Exactly. By the way, Pete, those are the high level learnings I learn every day. I'm always smarter, two o'clock in the afternoon than I was at nine o'clock in the morning, every day. Pete Bernard: I feel like I get dumber as the day goes on. I don't know. I'm more of a morning person. I feel like I'm totally on my game at like 10:30 and then by four o'clock I'm just kind of listening at that point. I don't know what's going on, but that's just me. But I get the sentiment. Yes, of course. It's a daily learning.   Actually speaking of that, one of the things that I was reading about yesterday was, and we had mentioned kind of the extraordinary times that we're in, and there's an author named Yuval Harari and he's written some excellent books. One of the interesting things he said was that in emergency situations emergencies basically fast-forward historical processes. Pete Bernard: I think before we started recording actually we were talking about Teams and we're on Teams right now and recording. We're all using Teams a lot now on a daily basis. You were talking about how quickly Avnet has now sort of learned to use Teams, because we're in a situation right now where we have to, and so things that maybe would have taken six months, a year, or years, because of an emergency situation, they're being fast forwarded and they're becoming daily habits now. Whether that's online learning or working remotely. So it'd be interesting to see when the dust settles on this whole thing, which hopefully will be soon, what other processes have been fast forwarded that were sort of already in the pipeline, especially in the technology space. Lou Lutostanski: I would say you're 100% right. And I would think the leader in that category would be remote telemedicine. You see all the time, every night on the news, that doctors don't want to go in and visit patients and patients don't want to go to places where sick people congregate. Telemedicine was already something that was in development and I'm sure it's being accelerated right now to meet the current needs of the global marketplace. So I'd be very surprised if those programs hadn't been accelerated and people buying those types of products and demanding those kind of solutions yesterday aren't really driving a demand for telemedicine. Pete Bernard: For sure. I think that's a big one. Online learning, remote learning, remote work, maybe even take out on restaurants might get a little better. Might become standard fare. Actually one of the interesting things I've been using more, and I don't venture out much, but when I do venture out, I have a Fitbit Versa 2 that I've been wearing and it has a cool little wallet on there. And so I have my Amex card programmed in there and I can pay for things just by sort of leaning my wrist toward the payment instruments so I don't have to give anyone a card or get the card back and all this other stuff. So contactless payments I think is another thing that people will start to just kind of by necessity just start using much more. And I think that'll be another big, big thing that kind of sticks around after a while. But it'll be interesting to see what habits are we building now that will stick with us for a long time to come. Hopefully- Lou Lutostanski: Not to make this a Fitbit commercial but I have my Versa 2 on as well. And I absolutely love it, for all the same reasons. Pete Bernard: #Versa 2, we should get a sponsorship on them. Well the other thing, I was going back to that thermometer, that web connected thermometer example was fascinating data and you can look it up. Thinking about sort of the measured self, right? And that is kind of a what Fitbit and a bunch of other   companies are doing. So I'm getting this data about myself, about my sleep patterns and my resting heart rate and whatever and all that stuff and people will be, I think, a little more self-aware about kind of listening to their health and understanding where they're at and if there's things that they can wear, other things they can do to sort of be more self-aware about their health and trends in their health. That might be another thing that sticks around after all this too, which would be good, I think. I think people need to be self-aware about their health. Lou Lutostanski: Absolutely. Pete Bernard: I think we have a lot of work to do, a lot of work ahead of us to, like you said, help people stitch things together to get these repeatable solutions out there to get time to market. But also I think just kind of keeping our ears open as to how the world's changing around us and how we can help make sure that is a productive for everybody and healthy for everybody. So lots of work to do. Like you said, you've been in the business for a while. I think we still got another few decades of work ahead of us. Lou Lutostanski: I think it's just getting started. I think we're in for a 30-year run on IoT and all the things it can do. It's funny, people ask me all the time "Is it hype?" And I'm so excited every day about the stuff that we work on and it's not hype, but I understand why people think it is because we've been talking about it forever and the conditions aren't right yet for it to scale. And I think people bringing together ecosystems on a limited number of platforms will add to that scalability. And I would imagine five years from now it's going to be commonplace and 10 years from now people will forget when you couldn't get information off of any device. Pete Bernard: Right. Yeah, exactly. I think it's sort of extraordinary these days when you can show a system like that in process and how it can drive some great business outcomes. I think, like you said, 10 years from now it will not be extraordinary. It will be sort of required to be competitive out there and to just be able to use that data and be able to just make assumptions that data will be flowing and you'll be able to take actions on it. It's exciting. It's exciting stuff. Any kind of closing thoughts or words of wisdom, things we should squeeze into this podcast? Lou Lutostanski: I just think we're on a mission to bring people together and take the best that they have, like Microsoft's Azure IoT suite and build on that. Allow people easy building blocks and interfaces to be able to how these implementations come together with the predefined rules. And I think until somebody orchestrates an ecosystem around the platform or maybe a couple people do, as you've had with iOS and an Android in the B2C space, I just don't think you're going to have the scalability that's going to make all of us happy. We're trying to make a living in this industry. I think picking key partners is very, very crucial to making this all work.     Pete Bernard: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I definitely share your perspective on that one. Lou, thanks again for taking the time with us. Really appreciate it and stay safe. Lou Lutostanski: Will do Pete, thank you. Pete Bernard: All right, take care. Lou Lutostanski: Have a good day. Bye-bye. Pete Bernard: This is Pete Bernard. You've been listening to the IoT Unicorn. Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next pod.    

The Data Binge
26 | Industry 4.0 - Part 4 | IoT, Making Dumb Things Smart, and Smart Things Smarter

The Data Binge

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2019 56:50


Today, we have Dean Bethke on the show. Dean is a Director of Sales and Business Development for Azure IoT in the West, US. As part of an elite team that serves to help businesses with specific capabilities, the Global Black Belt team. Internally he's considered a hyper specialist in the area of all things connected. Dean has been with Microsoft for a little over 20 years, celebrating his 20th anniversary just this last December.This episode is the 4th and FINAL segment of a special series focusing on Industry 4.0, which has concentrated around the capabilities, technologies, and realities of today's digital era of AI and Cloud computing, and most importantly, the collaborations with the worker, and how this is impacting all types of industries from automotive all the way to dairy production and cattle herding - which you'll hear more about today.Some big items we discuss:-the infamous 3 letter word, IOT, and how this ambiguous technology has evolved - Dean simply perceives this genre of tech today as "making dumb things smart, and smart things smarter"-the hidden challenges in connecting devices and pulling insights off of them and the importance of data , and why any IoT effort must be anchored into a well thought out data strategy-importance of stories in the world of technology, and why it helps people explore their own journey and the challenges to innovation and change management-the emerging divisions and collaborations between IT (information technology), and OT (operational technology), and why the current state of technology mandates that these two entities must work together-ideas about privacy and security in the realm of all things connected, from ambient sensors to cameras, and how these can be easily misusedThank you for listening!How to contact dean:Email: Deanb@microsoft.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanbethke/Additional resources mentioned:https://www.networkworld.com/article/3322517/a-critical-look-at-gartners-top-10-iot-trends.htmlhttps://news.microsoft.com/features/connected-cows-help-farms-keep-up-with-the-herd/Ginni Rometty keynote: CES 2016https://www.networkworld.com/article/3322517/acritical-look-at-gartners-top-10-iot-trends.htmlhttps://www.gizbot.com/news/number-connected-things-use-will-go-up-25-billion-2021-055276.htmlhttps://go.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2019-iot-devices/https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43722418Learn more at www.thedatabinge.comConnect with Derek on LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9
At Build 2018: Azure IoT Central

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2018


Azure Friday visited various Microsoft booths in the Expo Hall at Build 2018 to learn what's new. In this episode, Scott Hanselman gets an update on Azure IoT Central from Miriam Berhane Russom.For more information, see:Azure IoT CentralAzure IoT Central docsAzure IoT Dev KitCreate a free account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9
At Build 2018: Azure IoT Edge

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2018


Azure Friday visited various Microsoft booths in the Expo Hall at Build 2018 to learn what's new. In this episode, Lara Rubbelke gets an update on Azure IoT Edge from Olivier Bloch.For more information, see:Azure IoT Edge overviewAzure IoT Edge docsAzure IoT Edge (GitHub)Azure Iot Edge Starter Kit Create a free account (Azure)Follow @sqlgal Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9
At Build 2018: Azure IoT Central

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2018


Azure Friday visited various Microsoft booths in the Expo Hall at Build 2018 to learn what's new. In this episode, Scott Hanselman gets an update on Azure IoT Central from Miriam Berhane Russom.For more information, see:Azure IoT CentralAzure IoT Central docsAzure IoT Dev KitCreate a free account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9
At Build 2018: Azure IoT Edge

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2018


Azure Friday visited various Microsoft booths in the Expo Hall at Build 2018 to learn what's new. In this episode, Lara Rubbelke gets an update on Azure IoT Edge from Olivier Bloch.For more information, see:Azure IoT Edge overviewAzure IoT Edge docsAzure IoT Edge (GitHub)Azure Iot Edge Starter Kit Create a free account (Azure)Follow @sqlgal Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9
Windows 10 IoT and Azure IoT Device Management Enhancements

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2017


David Campbell joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Windows 10 IoT and how it enhances Azure IoT Device Management (DM) capabilities on Windows IoT, simplifying DM and aligning Azure DM with other Windows DM solutions.For more information, see: Windows 10 IoT Azure DM Blog postWindows 10 IoT Azure Device Management clientWindows 10 IoT Azure Device Provisioning Client Windows 10 IoTAzure IoT HubAzure Friday: Azure IoT Hub episodeCreate a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9
Windows 10 IoT and Azure IoT Device Management Enhancements

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2017


David Campbell joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Windows 10 IoT and how it enhances Azure IoT Device Management (DM) capabilities on Windows IoT, simplifying DM and aligning Azure DM with other Windows DM solutions.For more information, see: Windows 10 IoT Azure DM Blog postWindows 10 IoT Azure Device Management clientWindows 10 IoT Azure Device Provisioning Client Windows 10 IoTAzure IoT HubAzure Friday: Azure IoT Hub episodeCreate a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday

Azure Friday (HD) - Channel 9

Olivier Bloch joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Azure IoT and how it is more than just about connecting IoT devices and sending telemetry to the Cloud. They also talk about Azure IoT device topics such as twins, provisioning, and lifecycle management.For more information, see:Azure IoT HubAzure IoT MXChip starter kitAzure IoT Developer CenterAzure Friday: Windows IoT and Azure IoT Device Management Enhancements episodeCreate a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @obloch

Azure Friday (Audio) - Channel 9

Olivier Bloch joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Azure IoT and how it is more than just about connecting IoT devices and sending telemetry to the Cloud. They also talk about Azure IoT device topics such as twins, provisioning, and lifecycle management.For more information, see:Azure IoT HubAzure IoT MXChip starter kitAzure IoT Developer CenterAzure Friday: Windows IoT and Azure IoT Device Management Enhancements episodeCreate a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @obloch