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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.
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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.
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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, independent civic engineer and former Chief Xbox Officer at Microsoft, Robbie Bach, discusses teamwork and leadership in the tech space.
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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]
00:23 PB: On this episode of the IoT unicorn, I chat with Robbie Bach, former Microsoft executive. He was there for about 22 years, he was the chief Xbox officer and drove that program for a long, long time. We talk about Xbox, Xbox Revisited the new book he wrote, we also talk about some other projects like Zoom and Microsoft Kin or what we call Project Pink, and just in general leadership principles and techniques for leading through ambiguity with a ton of technology, especially in the IoT space. So great Robbie, thanks a lot for taking the time to join us here on the IoT unicorn. First off, kind of disclaimer, the topics typically are IoT-oriented, [chuckle] but we're gonna take a little diversion today, but I think it's still gonna be germane and... So anyway, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to join us.
01:20 Robbie Bach: Happy to do it.
01:22 PB: Good, good. I don't know if there's a phone ringing there or something...
01:24 RB: Yeah, that's mine. [chuckle] We can start over if you like, that's a phone that I have no control over, it's actually the house phone ringing in my office.
01:34 PB: Oh, okay. That's alright. Don't worry about it we'll... It's part of a sincere authentic nature of the conversation, [chuckle] but I think one of the things... And I read your book, Xbox Revisited, which is cool, and I thought for today, one of the things that I thought was really germane was just talking about technology and leadership, or just leadership in general, and it was really fascinating to kinda read through your journey with leadership and the pluses and minuses and what you've learned about it. And I think in the IoT space, we're sort of like awash in technology. Before we started recording, I was explaining how I was futzing with my system and just too many pieces of tech, and a lot of companies, they have a tons of technology, there's no shortage, now we got 5G and LPWA and all these AI. But how do you take that ambiguous technologies swamp and actually provide some kind of leadership and guidance and structure or framework around thinking about things, so you can get things done and you can get organizations, especially big organizations, you can imagine, moving in the right direction. And I thought there was a lot in your book around Xbox Revisited that resonated with probably what a lot of companies are thinking about today, is like how do we navigate through some of the tech?
03:01 RB: The thing I always respond... I talk a lot about innovation, and I talk somewhat about that in Xbox Revisited, but I do a lot of it in the public speaking I do. And I talk about creativity and how do you come up with new ideas, and technology ends up being third on my list of things not first. And the things that come first are ironically, business model, because it turns out a huge portion of innovation actually happens in business models, and the second thing is experience and sort of how people interact with the technology, and then comes technology. And when something is technically lead, maybe it has a good sustainable business model and maybe it has a good experience, but maybe it doesn't, and that's why the first person to market with the technology doesn't always win. And my experience has been that a sustainable business with a great customer experience will beat somebody who has a great technology without a good experience, and so we tend to focus on those first two, first.
04:14 PB: Yeah, so when you... Probably you were going through this with the Xbox, was like, talking about the purpose, principles and priorities. I think I got that right?
04:27 RB: Yeah.
04:28 PB: So you manifested that with Xbox, are there other example you've seen where companies have been able to snap to a framework like that and get them moving in the right direction?
04:37 RB: Well, think about... One of the other companies I work with, is a company called Sonos, and they're really a great company, and they have amazing technology, they've got one of the best IP portfolios in the industry, they've done some very cool tech things, but they do not lead with technology, they absolutely don't. They lead with the experience, if you have somebody who has a Sonos system, they don't talk about the cool networking architecture that it has or how it makes sure to sync audio on a big TV screen and do surround sound easily. They talk about, "Oh God, it was so easy to set up and the music played and it sounded great." That's all experience-focused work. And it's super powerful, and they have their own business model which is fairly traditional, but when you think about somebody like Spotify and the access you get to the world's music and the experience you have in accessing that music, and they have a business model, which I think is challenging, but it's subscription-based, so that's been an innovation over the last 10 years or so, and those are the types of things people end up migrating to. And there are people in the world who have, there's higher-end sound systems than Sonos for sure, they love their sound quality, but if you wanna spend money, you can get higher-end sound systems, but they're hard to use, difficult to set up, and Sonos has this incredibly simple model and it just works.
06:13 PB: Yeah, one of the frameworks we've been using is the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, I think you're familiar with that, but that's another way of really titrating down to what are the outcomes you want to accomplish, and then how do you get those jobs done?
06:26 RB: Well, in particular, if the jobs done reflect back on customer issues, to me, so much of what happens in the IoT space has to be, "Okay, what problem are we trying to solve? And if we're trying to solve a customer problem, okay, I get that." And so let's focus on solving the customer problem. Well, like turning on lights, not actually a customer problem, right?
06:54 PB: Right. [chuckle]
06:54 RB: Unless you wanna turn on the light. Now, if you say, "Oh, customers want controlled settings and they wanna make... " There's other issues with lighting that customers can relate to and wanna fix. Okay. Great, let's get after those. Customers knew how to set their heat, it turns out, but now solve some other issues around heating that were actually real customer problem. And so if the jobs done relate to customers, I'm all in.
07:22 PB: Right, right. Yeah, no it's true. At the end of the day, if you cannot solve a customer problem. I thought what actually was interesting in your book, they had a couple of things that caught my eye. First of all, I didn't realize you were a tennis player.
07:33 RB: Right.
07:34 PB: So, I'm a tennis player.
07:35 RB: Oh, cool.
07:36 PB: But you were in the top 50 in the US, so you'd probably kick my butt, but I thought that was cool. Are you still playing tennis by the way?
07:45 RB: I play a little bit of tennis, I don't play as much. I have a shoulder that has hit about 300 and too many serves.
07:53 PB: Okay. Yeah. That's a tough one.
07:54 RB: So I'm trying to avoid shoulder surgery. If I really wanted to keep playing competitively, I would have to have some work done.
08:00 PB: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I was good. Actually, I got back into it, kind of a funny anecdote. I'd played for a long time back in the... When I was a kid, back in the '80s, and took a long time off and got back into it a few years ago and actually stepped on to the court at the pro club here. And I had my Donnay racket with me and the pro is like, "They went out of business like 10 years ago." So the first thing was, "You need to get your gear in shape." And so I learned a lot. But yeah, I play a few times a week, that was fun. That's good.
08:35 RB: I had the same experience I went to... I had some mid-size rackets, which were old and I went to upgrade them, which was fine, and then I went to go get them strung, and the guy asked me what tension I wanted them strung at and I was, "Oh, I don't know, 58 pounds." He said, "Well, is that for the horizontal strings or the vertical strings?" I was like, "Oh, well, that's a new idea." And, "Dude, what kind of strings do you want?" Oh, different for horizontal and vertical strings, I mean, these are all new ideas when you had a small face Donnay, none of that mattered. Now with these big surfaces. Again, the thing we're talking about, the technology, the solution you're solving is tennis players can keep the ball on the strings for a long time. And that would be a lot of control.
09:18 PB: I know. It's amazing I mean, how the sport's evolved, but like many things. The other thing that kinda popped out, I love this phrase, seagull management. Maybe you can talk a little bit about seagull management, that is something I will use over and over again, but can you give me like a...
09:35 RB: Yeah, look, I think there's lots of people who as leaders think their job is to dive in, evaluate something, poop on it and then leave, and so those are the seagulls. And in fact, as a manager, your job is actually quite different than that. Your job is to put a framework in place, to work with your employees to establish the set of priorities and things that they're gonna focus on, and they'll come back to you and say, "Hey, here's how it's going." And you'll give them ideas and thoughts on how to improve or make progress and answer questions, and, oh by the way, facilitate solutions where you can actually help. But the idea in your job is to sort of occasionally fly in and spot check their work, and then tell them they're doing the wrong thing. It's just not super helpful, and by the way, you have no context, you don't know what's going on, and it's the way a lot of... There's a lot of seagulls in the tech space. It's a problem.
10:46 PB: Yeah, definitely resonated for me. I think another thing that toward later in the book, is you take some of the lessons around Xbox and leadership into more of the civic area, which I guess is a super trimming it today, since it's the day before Election Day.
11:04 RB: That's right.
11:04 PB: But that's a whole other podcast, we won't get into it. About leadership, and I totally subscribe to this too, I think at Microsoft, just like other companies, leadership is not for just for people in power. Leadership is for everybody to sort of be a leader in their own space and about what they're passionate about.
11:23 RB: Well, look, I think whenever I address a room of people, let's say there's 50 people in the room, it's easy for me to say to everybody, "Look, there's 50 leaders in this room. Now, you each have a different leadership superpower, you each have a different leadership skill, and the question for you is, are you self-aware enough to understand what that leadership skill is? And are you capable then of figuring out how to apply it in the environment?" And you can be a leader by being part of the team, you think about a prototypical football team or a soccer team, and you'd say, "Okay, well, who's the leader?" Well, in particular, in football you'd say, "Well, maybe the quarterback." Maybe, but there's leaders who, amongst the wide receivers, there's leaders... The center is the leader of the offense of line, I think that's the middle line backer, sort of the quarterback and the defense, but the safety actually has to manage the secondary. Everybody has to play their role in those things. And so you're challenged regardless of what your role is on a team, is to find how your leadership superpower applies to what the people you're working with need to get done. And I think sometimes people think of themselves as being sort of, "Okay, I'm tagging along, I have a manager, he or she's gonna tell me what to do, and I just do it and keep going." And I don't subscribe to that at all.
12:48 PB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I've encountered folks like that and I've inherited diverse teams at Microsoft, and inevitably there's somebody that's been there and they've been turning the crank for 20 years on this thing, and I'm always... I remember talking to one person at Microsoft, he'd been there a long time, and I said, "So what level are you? And they were like, "I'm not quite sure." and I'm like, "Are you not even aware of where you're at here?" I mean, so disconnected. Now, interestingly, I worked with this person and within a couple of years, a couple of years of work, they got into a different role, they actually did get promoted, they started to sort of... But I think sometimes we get into this mode where we're just turning the crank. We kinda just lost touch with the fact that we have the ability to be leaders, even if you're an IC and you're doing this thing that seems like a small part of a bigger thing, but you can still be a leader.
13:44 RB: I get asked a lot of times from people, "So when should I do something new? When should I take a new job or leave a company or change organizations?" Or whatever it is. And two of the things that are key on my list of that are: A, are you learning? And B, you really enjoy working with the people around you? Both require real engagement, real awareness, you can't come in and mail it in if you're doing both of those things. And so to me... And then the third thing, which is maybe even more important than the first two in someways is, are you passionate about what you're doing? A combination of being passionate, learning, and enjoying the people you're working with, that defines a great job. And if you can't say yes to all three of those, or you can't say yes to at least two of them, you gotta be thinking, "Hmm, why am I here?"
14:37 PB: Yeah. I think most people that ask like, "Well, should I be doing something different?" They've probably already made up their mind that they should be doing something different, they're looking for some maybe external validation to make that leap.
14:48 RB: Yeah, maybe. Although, I will tell you there's a lot of people early in career, and I think this is a generational thing, I don't like to categorize people in certain generations, but younger workers today think about mobility and changing jobs more frequently than my generation did for sure. And they're trying to find this balance between recognizing that they need to learn and grow, and have some track record with, "Oh my gosh, there's an opportunity in some place else." And in the tech space right now, there's opportunities everywhere. And even in the midst of a recession and a pandemic, there's opportunities everywhere, and some people are constantly looking around, "Oh, am I missing something?" And then giving people the confidence to say, "Hey, if you're passionate, you like the people you work with, and your learning, switching job is not gonna be a big thing for you." If you're missing some of those things, well then, yeah, you should be looking at some of those other things. And so your job doesn't have like an expiration date. Your job should have a natural point in which it becomes time for you to do something.
16:00 PB: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. My dad used to say, "Don't get comfortable." That was his advice. It's like once you start getting comfortable...
16:04 RB: Another Broadway, I get asked a lot, "Well, why did you leave Microsoft?" or "Do you miss it?" And my comment to people is, "Look, I loved... " I didn't love every day at Microsoft, I can't say that. I was there for 22 and a half, and I've had a bad day. But, I say probably I loved every week or month at Microsoft. And yet, I left at a time when I felt like I wasn't learning as much as I wanted to, I had some people issues, and I had other things that I was passionate about. And so I tell people, "I don't miss Microsoft. I've never looked back, I love the company." I think I got 110% out of the experience, but I kinda... I feel like I left at the right time and that could be different for everybody.
16:54 PB: So let me switch gears a little bit on you, so one of the things, and which we have an interesting connection on that I'd like to talk about. One of your experiences at Microsoft is... I was part of the Project Pink Group.
17:06 RB: Yeah.
17:06 PB: Remember that?
17:07 RB: I do.
17:08 PB: And in fact, I think I presented the pitch deck to you off of my laptop back in 2010 or something like that. We were with Ross and...
17:17 RB: You're gonna laugh, if you give me a chance, can I walk away from the screen for a second?
17:22 PB: Sure. Sure, go ahead. Okay.
17:24 RB: This look familiar? Holding up a kiln.
17:28 PB: Nice. Nice. Mint in Box. Mint in Box.
17:34 RB: [chuckle] I have both of them in my office, on my shelf.
17:39 PB: Awesome. Good to hear. Good to hear. Now, that was an experience when you talk about challenging experience, great people to work with, learn a lot of new things. So I am kinda rewinding a little bit back to that experience, what was, from your perspective, interestingly, I know what it was from my perspective, kind of going through that pro... I spent three years on the project. So cradle to grave literally, plug it in, to unplug it, [chuckle] but from your perspective, where did Project Pink fit in to all the stuff that was going on back then 'cause it was a little bit of a maelstrom.
18:14 RB: Yeah. Well I think Pink fit in in a couple of different ways. So Pink was really the first effort to create what, for lack of a better phrase, I'll call a Microsoft phone. And the idea was centered on a really good concept, which is, if you're gonna create these, given our podcast today, I'll call IoT devices, if you're gonna create these devices, they happen at the intersection of hardware and software and service. Those three things have to meld together in a seamless customer experience. And Microsoft, because we didn't do hardware, and we were just starting to do services, would provide software for those experiences and then hope they worked. And unfortunately, what we were discovering in multiple categories is that that wasn't working. The companies who would pick up our firmware or our operating system work or whatever, would inevitably screw it up in the integration with their software and service and produce mediocre devices.
19:13 RB: And our friends down at Cupertino, were getting really good at producing integrated devices that had really nice software, great hardware and a little less on the service at the time, but the service was provided by carriers, and so suddenly we're in this space where Windows Mobile and subsequently, Windows Phone is trying to find its way in the phone space, and the people who we're providing software to are producing mediocre phones. And it was one example, the first of an effort for us to do an integrated experience, and leveraging off some of the work we'd done with Xbox and a little bit, frankly, the work we did with Zune, while we produce integrated experiences. And I talk about Zune a lot, I talk about Pink less because it has less public visibility, but to talk about both of them as having many elements of success and then critical elements of failure, and you have to try to learn from that and then can continue to grow forward.
20:20 PB: Yeah, no, I thought actually too, it was a big service for you. At the time we were trying to do a cloud-powered phone basically, right? If you remember that, it was like a digital twin of the phone in the cloud, and all your stuff was there, and then the phone was just this kind of end point that connected to the cloud that reflected the state of your... From which should be connected to all these social services and whatever, so I love the idea, I mean the idea I feel like we're still executing on the deal with Azure to be honest with you, with digital twins and everything else. We were probably about 10 years ahead of the tech at the time, of course...
20:52 RB: I would say two things. And I think this is really important as you think about consumer and IoT, right? Timing is everything. And in a way, Pink was a project that was both before its time and after its time. When we spec-ed Pink in the beginning, it was timely, social media was catching on on phones, people were starting to use them more aggressively for the beginnings of photo sharing and video sharing and those kinds of things. Still mostly email and text messaging, but things were different. The market was probably the take-off for the pace.
21:35 PB: It like 2007, 2008.
21:36 RB: Unfortunately, for a lot of different reasons, Pink ended up being about 12-18 months late in terms of actually delivering a product to the market, and in that 12-18 months, the market moved. And suddenly you didn't want a special purpose social media device, suddenly every device needed to be a social media device and that left the niche market and that left Pink in a very small niche market, and so in essence, it was too late. Now to your point about replicating everything in the cloud, we were a little early, things... That was starting to happen, you couldn't even talk about the cloud in 2008, people didn't know what you were talking about, and then still timing with these IoT devices is a powerful thing and sort of evolving to match to where the market is, and you wanna be on the cutting edge, but not so far out that you get your head knocked off, and that's a tricky thing, and sometimes we've gotten it right, and sometimes we've gotten it wrong.
22:38 PB: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like Nicholas Negroponte and Being Digital, it's an old book, I think it's from the '80s, maybe it's the '90s, but he said... One of his quotes was, "We tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run." So we get... We just totally imagine everything's gonna change tomorrow about this tech and of course it doesn't...
23:00 RB: Microsoft started it's auto initiative in 1990, so...
23:05 PB: Oh yeah, I used to drive a Ford Flex, by the way, and I have a V1.
23:09 RB: You think about, it's not that anybody miss out the opportunity.
23:16 PB: Yeah, no, I know that's... I guess getting back to leadership topic, how do we provide that leadership internally in our teams, and when you talk about the purpose, principles and priorities, actually, one of the interesting things there too, I wanted to talk about. I really love the part where you talked about leaving things undone, I actually just had a discussion with my team last week about, can we articulate things that we're not going to do? It was kind of an odd email because you always wanna talk about, "Oh, things are gonna get done," but let's be clear about what we're not doing, or I would say de-prioritizing, but maybe you can speak to that, and how important...
23:55 RB: Well, I think human nature is, do more. So if you ask somebody who works for you and say, "Hey, tell me your priorities." You'll inevitably get a list of between five and 10 things. That just sort of the human nature, and people will buy it themselves to more rather than less, that's just fact, but if somebody asks me for priorities, telling them I'm gonna do more must be better, right? And the truth is, the human capacity, our brains don't subdivide tasks that well, and so we only have the ability to do... I always pick five, but four or five things, well, at any given point in time, and even that I think requires real energy and real effort. And so the idea that somebody's gonna do seven things, I just go, "No, you're not going to. So tell me the two things you're gonna leave undone, tell me the two things you're just not gonna focus on, and tell me the five things... " 'Cause the problem is, if I give you seven and allow you to have seven, you'll try to do seven and maybe you'll do two or three pretty well. The rest all get done well unfortunately numbers one, two and three might be the ones that get undone, in the list, until...
25:08 PB: Yeah, exactly.
25:11 RB: And so just getting people to... And sometimes the best way to get people to prioritize is to get them to decide what they're not gonna do. And the experience I've had with people is when they do that, and they ultimately accept that it's okay, there's this giant sigh of relief. Thank God you took that off my plate.
25:33 PB: Yeah. Yeah [chuckle]
25:34 RB: Now, I actually have enough time to do what I know needs to be done.
25:39 PB: Xbox Revisited, so that's the book, I do encourage it, I did read it, it is really good. The other book, by the way, I have been reading, sort of interest versus, I guess you put this one down to read yours, but was the new Andrew Cuomo book, I don't know if you've seen that.
25:52 RB: I have not.
25:52 PB: But it's another... Yeah, and I picked it up. It was about his leadership lessons through this COVID crisis and yeah, and it's really fascinating 'cause he goes it day by day and imbues it with his leadership style and lessons learned and things. So I try to always go through a book, I'm always working on a book, and I went through a whole run of dystopian science fiction, which was a mistake 'cause it was very depressing and then I decide to lighten up, and now I'm looking at leadership books, 'cause that feels a little better right now at this point in time, but no, I really appreciated the book and I thought it was really insightful. So, is there any kind of, I guess, topics or thoughts that we have not gotten to yet that you would like to communicate?
26:41 RB: No, I think... Here's the one thing, when I think about IoT, so this won't be a leadership thing, this is an IoT-specific thing. When I think about IoT, I think a lot of people think about the grand unification of life, and they think somehow there's gonna be like a central nervous system for all IoT devices, and I'm gonna have a control panel that's gonna manage my IoT life. I fundamentally am not a believer in that. I am a believer in the fact that people think about systems in their life separately, and they think about their heating system as their heating system, and their music system as their music system, and their alarm system as their alarm system, and they don't think their home has a system. And so thinking about, again, when we come back to experience, thinking about how if you're experience lead, that's the way people experience. So I have... Yeah, it means I have a bunch of apps on my phone. I have a whole folder on my iPhone that's called The House, and it has a bunch of apps.
27:54 PB: Right. It's got like 30 apps in there. [chuckle]
27:55 RB: Yeah, I have a few less than that, but each of them are a little different. But, I know that Sonos is my music system and Nest manages my cameras and heat, and actually I have a Nest Stand where it goes it turns up, and it works. I have an app for automatic water shut off that detects leaks in our house, right? I don't need that to be integrated with anything else. And so I think there is in our tech minds, there's this, "Hey, let's unify because we can." And instead, we should think the way the human mind thinks, which is, "No, I have compartments. I have ways in which I think about things, let my tools think that way with me." And I would hope that the folks who have IoT in their future would think that.
28:49 PB: Yeah, no, and I think it goes back to the meeting customers where they're at, really thinking about what their problems are, what their experience is as a plant operator or healthcare worker and what they're trying to get done and making sure the tech fits into them, and so they don't have to fit into the tech. Cool. Well, Robbie, thanks a lot again for the time and appreciate the book and maybe I'll see you on a tennis court sometime.
29:16 RB: [chuckle] That's great, I appreciate you taking the time.
29:18 PB: Alright, thanks Robbie. Alright.
29:20 RB: Hey, cheers, take care.
29:21 PB: Bye-bye.
[music]
29:22 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 the IoT unicorn at microsoft.com. Thank you.
[music]
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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Matt Chatterley and Tom Bennett of British Telecom discuss some of the benefits and challenges of implementing 5G.
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 upcoming episode of the IoT Unicorn I have a great conversation with Tom Bennett and Matt Chatterley, both of British Telecom. And they explain to me what the term hospital pass means, we talk about some great British beer and all things 5G, past, present and future, and not just for iPhones. So please join us.
00:44 PB: Thanks, Tom and Matt, I'm gonna... This is actually an interesting milestone for us, this is the first time I've had two guests at once on the IoT Unicorn, and I think when I originally was thinking back about having you guys on the show... I've had lots of conversations with each of you individually, and also some really good conversations together and I thought, "Well, let's just get everybody on the horn here and talk about some things around 5G and stuff like that" so I appreciate you guys both making the time all the way from the UK to pipe in here and join us on the Unicorn, so thank you very much.
01:19 Tom Bennett: Thank you for the invite, yeah.
01:21 PB: Sure, sure. So maybe before we get into lots of acronyms and Telco stuff, well, maybe just give us a little bit of a back story. Maybe Tom and Matt about sort of... We're talking about BT, British Telecom, so that's quite a storied institution, and I know that you had worked at EE before that and stuff, maybe just give us a little bit of background about how did each of you get here to this point in time.
[laughter]
01:47 TB: How far back are we allowed to go?
01:50 PB: Oh, you know.
01:50 TB: 25 years, maybe not. So yeah, I joined this thing called 2G, it was a small company that started, anyway, that was 25 years ago. Matt and I, we started a little bit of history of space to EE. So EE is the largest and best mobile operator in the UK and it was formed 10 years ago from the merger of what was then the third and fourth place operators, so it was Orange and T-Mobile. Now by forming that merger it created not just a company, but great assets, and in fact it is number one by customer number. It also had the opportunity to go on to be the best from a network perspective and we did that, we were... In fact, Matt and I started to meet yourself, Pete, was eight years ago when we launched 4G and we were a year, year and a half ahead of the competition in the UK.
02:44 PB: That's right.
02:44 TB: And the rest is history from there. We launched 4G first in the UK, launched our new brand, EE and the rollout was phenomenal. From there, we hit top 10 cities, and then right now, I think our 4G coverage is just pushing 85%, 86% of the geography of the country, not just people, geography of the country, and that's kind of phenomenal eight years after launch. In fact, our launch anniversary is this November. This first week in November we launched. And yeah, that's where we started and then obviously BT, which has no mobile assets, BT originally was just the fixed operator. I've looked at this new EE upstart with its phenomenal 4G network and said, "Yeah, we want some of that." And four years ago Matt? Four years ago they bought us.
03:39 Matt Chatterley: [03:39] ____.
03:41 TB: We all moved in to BT and really that was very much a both commercially strategic and technologically kind of architecturally strategic decision because...
03:52 PB: Wow, that's cool. Something happened.
03:53 TB: Because as you roll forward, I'm sure you know, really it's about running forward with the best 4G and now 5G network, and it's a converse plate, it's how you leverage both assets together for the fixed and mobile network, and that's a very, very, very brief snapshot of where we started as third and fourth place operator and now we work for the largest Telco in the UK.
04:15 PB: Right. And how long have you and Matt been working together?
04:18 MC: It's far too long...
[laughter]
04:20 TB: Way too long, I mean we have counselling, it's a bit like a marriage.
04:24 PB: Good, good, with an HR benefit.
04:25 TB: [04:25] ____.
[laughter]
04:27 MC: At the start of the JV, I was actually in Deutsche Telekom, working for DT International, and then they wanted someone to go into the JV and the Clean Team where if it didn't work out, you get six months pay not to work and then, unfortunately, it did work out. So I've had [04:40] ____.
[laughter]
04:40 MC: Yeah, so I think we started right at the very beginning, didn't we Tom?
04:45 TB: Yeah, we did.
04:45 MC: When we figured out what the right approach would be to go to make devices work in this space, so yeah, we were right at the very start.
04:51 PB: I see. So, today what is your... For Tom and Matt, just for our customers, and our customers are our listener's edification, what is your current accountabilities or what are you guys working on? [laughter] Or not working on, I don't know.
05:06 TB: Yeah, exactly, we only work as much as we can. No. So I'm accountable for partnerships, external partnerships such as this with Microsoft and innovations, so I pick up anything from a innovation perspective, be that technology, service, solution.
05:21 PB: Okay cool.
05:22 MC: And I look after all things related to devices and identities, which is what we call SIM cards, but it's actually much more overreaching that, and then the partnership as well from a mobile perspective. So the team that we've got looks after pretty much... If it goes onto the network we've tested and approved it and made sure it works.
05:40 PB: Right. Right. Cool. Yeah, actually before we got into the official podcast here, I was mentioning to Tom about... I remember going to the Great British Beer Festival with Tom a few years ago. [laughter] Which was a lot of fun. That was pretty cool. That was serious beer culture going on, and I know they didn't have it this past year, but...
06:00 MC: There's some very bizarre beers there though.
06:02 TB: Hell yeah, there is.
06:03 PB: Yeah, wild stuff. I saw some controversy where they were gonna... This year, I think when they were gonna have it, they put out some sort of glass or something and it had Coronavirus little logos on it, and I think they got a lot of pushback on that...
[laughter]
06:15 TB: Yeah, I can imagine they did.
06:17 PB: Way too soon, way too soon, but if you're gonna go to the UK, beer has gotta be part of the... Part of the experience.
06:23 TB: Oh absolutely. Yeah. Very, very much. Yeah. Beer's absolutely part of the culture here and it's a very big microbrewery ecosystem that this is... And to Matt's point far too many people you know had to brew beer and go "Oh, wonder what that tastes like?"
[laughter]
06:42 MC: Let's throw this in there and then call it something crazy.
06:45 PB: That's right. That's right. Well, you know, it doesn't take much, but that's good. So let's talk about 5G a little bit, 'cause I know you guys were really on the front edge of a lot of 5G development and deployment in the UK. And I know that BT's made a lot of noise about the 5G deployments. Maybe can you share with us what surprised you about that or how is it going? What was the learnings from that early, early rollout of 5G?
07:18 TB: Yeah. Should I start with the network, Matt, and you can talk to the devices.
07:23 MC: Yeah, cool.
07:25 TB: So I suppose when we launched 4G, we were in a unique position. We had quite a significant amount of what was then 2G spectrum, so 1800Mhz, and that gave us a great opportunity because we could reuse the existing antennas. Basically what we didn't need to do is organize a crane, a lift crew and install brand-new equipment up the tower or on the rooftop. So our 4G rollout was phenomenally fast. 5G, we didn't have that luxury. Let's be frank. 5G, even though last year, what we launched was 5 GB radio so we haven't launched standalone yet. I thought that these are on the record. Last year was very much a 5G non-standalone, but that still comes with significant logistical challenges because it's a new spectrum band so it's 3.4, 3.5. And that requires brand new antennas. It requires new equipment in the base station and it required upgrade to the transmission to the site, so the backhaul for 10 gig in most cases.
08:32 TB: So, yeah, logistically a much slower rollout. You are talking about good old-fashioned concrete and steel rollout, and therefore that was probably one of the key challenges for us, was the sheer volume of change physically on a per-site basis. Whereas previously, as I said, with 4G, relatively simple. Not massively simple but relatively simple being you weren't changing the antenna. Now we're installing brand-new antennas. And then the complication that brings in terms of the integration and the assurance of the service, because now we're installing new software, new hardware, active antennas, active equipment at the base, and we've gotta get the 4G and the 5G working together for the best service experience. And that's the point at which traditionally I will come to that because as a customer what you care about is what's on the device.
09:24 MC: Yeah, and I think that's what we tried to focus on as well, was the it's all well and good what we do from a network point of view, but if the customer doesn't get a good experience on the device side, then it's irrelevant. And I think some of the things we were talking about earlier on, where I think 2G went from standards complete to devices launching in around three years.
09:43 TB: Yeah, it was.
09:44 MC: I remember being involved in 3G when I was a an [09:46] ____ operator, that was around 18 months, maybe a bit shorter or a bit longer but that sort of time period. 4G again we were quite fortunate from a network point of view, that it had been live in other countries beforehand, so there was quite a decent device base out there that we could use. 5G, we went from standard to complete to launching in crazy amounts. I think it was around three months in total, and even then we were shaving things off in the last minute about, "Let's do another base-band update and make sure this works." So, on the whole though, the launch has gone fine. We've had from a device point of view, the customer experience has been, been really good, and I think what we're seeing with 5G though, with the works and the [10:27] ____ our partners are doing, the ramp down in terms of price of equipment is much faster than 4G. We were targeting super low price of the 4G phones in probably 2014, 2015. We were already getting those from a 5G point of view now. So we really are going [10:44] ____.
10:44 PB: I noticed that. I think Qualcomm has been just working overtime, triple overtime to bring...
10:50 MC: We've both worked closely with them, yeah.
10:51 PB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's hard to keep track of all...
10:54 MC: It is. I get confused. [10:54] ____.
10:57 PB: Yeah, Their 5G summit's going on this week too, I think...
11:00 TB: Yeah, it is.
11:01 PB: [11:01] ____ have registered for that. We actually have Jason Xander who is our EVP speaking at that. He's doing a walk-on, so he'll say some cool stuff on that but... Yeah, no, it's been... I think the whole ecosystem has been on overdrive around 5G, and as you mentioned before, it's like there is a lot of complexity there. You mentioned you're at 3.5, there's different frequencies that people are rolling out at. It gets a little confusing. Like in the US, we've got people at millimetre wave, some at telcos and some at like sub six, and some standalone or non-standalone, and depending on whether you have a Samsung or not, or blah, blah, blah. It's like super challenging. I think they're trying to make it simple for customers, consumers and businesses, but there's so many different ways to slice and dice the network in terms of what's virtualized and what's on-prem and all these other things, and it's gonna be...
11:51 MC: I think the important thing is you focus on what's the benefit to the customer.
11:54 TB: Yeah, exactly.
11:55 PB: Right.
11:55 MC: It's our job to hide all that stuff from them [11:58] ____ just works.
12:00 PB: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I have a Samsung Note 20 ultra 5G. I don't know if I got that name right. It keeps going. It's a big long name, but whatever. It's the whole thing. Yeah, there you go. I got one of those things.
12:12 MC: [12:12] ____.
12:12 PB: Oh no. [12:13] ____ right. You guys can't see the video here, but he's [12:17] ____.
[laughter]
12:18 PB: Very nice. Very nice. So my understanding was that in T-Mobile in the US, that's running on standalone 5G.
12:25 TB: Wow. Excellent.
12:27 PB: Yeah, that's kinda cool. And it's been great so far. It's a great phone. It's a nice upgrade. I had an S8 plus before that so... But you're right. But the other thing is like people think about 5G as... I had a little bit of a pushback this week. Apple introduced new iPhones and they have 5G, and 5G is great in phones. It's a faster connection. Who doesn't want a faster connection, right?
12:52 TB: Exactly.
12:53 PB: But one of the interesting things is so what does 5G do beyond phones, right? 'Cause everyone has a phone, okay we get it, and they're faster, okay. But the other thing is how are other things getting connected beyond just phones, and that's kind of... For me, and especially maybe the audience, it's called the IoT Unicorn, that's the name of the podcast, but things that get connected to the cloud over cellular to me is kind of like this incredible opportunity for folks to sort of can see that these scenarios that just weren't possible before.
13:25 MC: Yeah. And I think there's also a lot of hype around 5G being super fast speeds, and we spoke about this earlier on, but it's also low power, and I think that's where the big opportunities for us are. Because that you can in theory connect things that could last considerably longer than a smartphone would doing IoT type things.
13:44 PB: Right, right. Yeah, it's just more power-efficient.
13:46 MC: Yeah.
13:46 TB: Yeah.
13:47 PB: Yeah, which is good. Although, you know UK, unfortunately, is a little bit famous for folks like burning down 5G towers and stuff, I don't know what reason but... [laughter] I just...
13:56 TB: Yes.
13:58 PB: I thought the US was nuts, but you guys top...
14:01 TB: Unfortunately, that's one that's a bit of a homegrown madness. I mean I have seen some of that across some of the other towers.
14:08 PB: Yeah.
14:08 TB: Anglo states so, you know, Australia or New Zealand have had their own, but I don't think anywhere near as bad as unfortunately [14:14] ____. Yeah, exactly [14:20] ____ it'd be terrifying. I don't know how to put it very, very politely other than using quite harsh words about the intentions of some people.
14:32 PB: Yeah.
14:32 TB: I will say this much, it comes with significant cost. [14:39] ____ I have these two points to make, one is a very serious one which is when somebody burns down a mast, in all seriousness, that's the mast that often we share our masts with our [14:50] ____ one of the masts that was burned in Wales that covers three valleys and was the only mast in that area, so those three valleys and the people in those towns and villages they could not make [15:02] ____ until we rebuilt it.
15:04 PB: Yeah.
15:05 TB: So, it's not great, and unfortunately the, well, for want of a better phrase, morons involved here really aren't thinking that through. The other thing to note by the way is, unfortunately, we've had just over 100 incidents involving these towers, involving we've had more instances where engineers who, for instance, have been working on fibre have been threatened, and they're not even working on 5G.
15:29 PB: Yeah.
15:30 TB: And of those 100 towers, not one of them was 5G.
15:37 PB: Wow.
15:37 MC: That's the bad part. Yeah.
15:37 PB: Yeah, yeah. It's really... It's, yeah, it's really unfortunate. I mean we're at... In all seriousness, it is very unfortunate. We are at, you know, we're recording this actually about two weeks before the US Elections so we're almost at full tilt boogie here.
[laughter]
15:50 PB: In terms of crazy, crazy town but...
15:54 TB: Yeah.
15:54 PB: I think this is going to be published like the day before election day. So, you know, hopefully yeah, cooler heads prevail and people, you know, kind of dial it all down a little bit and kinda think it through but 'cause it's not... It's just not productive for people to just go off and...
16:10 MC: No, and the impact done also. And if you...
16:13 PB: Yeah, of course.
16:14 MC: And again if we talk about IoT if you've got a bunch of sensors in a factory that's had the mast burnt down then so we need to, we need to look at how we secure this a bit more.
16:23 PB: Yeah, that's too bad. But yeah so getting back...
16:25 TB: There's an education piece to go with it as well. Sorry, go on Pete...
16:30 PB: Yeah sure. Yeah, for sure. And so just getting back to the IoT parts, so yeah, the... You mentioned about low power. I mean, 5G provides high density, low latency, in addition to high performance, low power, where are you guys seeing things heading in terms of interesting things connected over the 5G network beyond phones? [chuckle]
16:53 TB: Yeah, thanks for that, thanks for the... That's the hospital... Have you got the phrase hospital pass? Is that scanned across to America?
17:01 PB: I don't think we know what that means, what does that mean?
17:03 TB: Yeah, so the game rugby if you're familiar with it.
17:06 PB: Okay.
17:07 TB: It's obviously all about physical tackling much like American football.
17:09 PB: Okay. Got it.
17:10 TB: And a hospital pass is when you're being attacked by the enemy... The other side and you give the ball to your mate just as they [17:16] ____.
17:16 PB: Ah, I see. And that's a hospital pass.
[laughter]
17:17 TB: Now so he gets the hospital pass.
17:19 PB: Good one. That's a good phrase. I'm gonna use it.
[laughter]
17:23 TB: So, thanks for the hospital pass.
[laughter]
17:27 TB: So, I think as you've already discussed, look, the consumer and having a faster iPhone, a faster smartphone, brilliant and you obviously see the growth in form factors as Matt ably demonstrated with an affordable phone. We do see a great in B2B and B2C as well, so businesses selling different services to consumer requiring that bandwidth, and requiring let's remember low-latency so an absolute requirement for information now, not necessarily in 10 to 20 seconds' time but you know 50 to 100 milliseconds' time. So, we're starting to see some interesting... Just testing the water. So, some services that are very, very distinctly kind of looking to integrate heavily between what would traditionally be an [18:12] ____ OTT play, actually they're starting to talk to us about, well, how could they guarantee the latency? And maybe isn't the fastest possible latency... I mean if you take the example of gaming and gamers that just want everything instantly in zero milliseconds.
18:25 PB: Sure, sure.
18:26 TB: But how could we guarantee a consistency of latency?
18:29 PB: Right, right.
18:30 TB: And then finally we are seeing a great deal of research, so we work as the department accountable for this, and government in the UK it's called DCMS and they're doing a lot of investment and we work hand-in-glove with them on some of the trials they're doing, and that covers everything from connecting it to factories, so B2B including drones as well, so there's an example drones. We're investigating how and where and when we can develop a drone use service and that's as a vertical, so that's not just us the telecoms operator, that's working with partners, working with who would be the new traffic control system for that, so on and so forth. So I think across consumer and across business to consumer, and then across business to business you're seeing a growth across all those areas and I say you're still at the... You've gone beyond technology experimentation. We're into commercial experimentation now. We're trying to work out what the right commercial models.
19:28 PB: Yeah, exactly, and also...
19:28 MC: And when you said...
19:30 PB: Oh, sorry go ahead, go ahead.
19:31 MC: I'd say, yeah, from a device point of view what we're trying to do is abstract that out so it's not a random selection of bits of equipment, we're trying to go what do each of these verticals need from a connectivity point of view, so doing an ultra fast, low-latency 5G. Therefore, we'll go and build some solutions with our partners that can do that but also the super low power, and it sends a few kilobytes of data a day, products as well with different sense of that. So, we're trying to create a portfolio of products that can go into all of these different solutions.
20:00 PB: Right, right.
20:01 MC: But it's... Yeah.
20:02 PB: So, that's everything from LPWA up to 5G.
20:04 MC: Pretty much, yeah. And an awful lot of being in 4G as well still. There's still an awful lot of legs in 4G stuff as well. So yeah, it's trying to make sure that if you want to build a factory solution that's probably more going to be millimetre wave. If you're going to go and put a center in a field that's more going to be LPWA.
20:18 PB: Exactly. You mentioned, Tom, the guaranteed costs, early predictable costs, network, are you talking about things like network slicing and like virtualized networks something like that?
20:28 TB: Yeah, I mean yes there tends to be... We're about to both go Bingo.
20:38 PB: Okay, yeah, here you go. [chuckle]
20:38 TB: Do you need a full end-to-end slice for a lot of these services, [20:42] ____ you want? There's a lot of these services where you can, as I say, develop and deliver on a straightforward APN calls basis. I think one of the other things we're finding, as I say, particularly as we're now looking beyond the technology, we're looking commercially, what can we go to market with and the people we collaborate with. We need to be very sensible here. Any proposition, any product that goes to market in the course of the next five, six years, it's gonna have 4G as an integral part of its service offering, because it's going to take that long to roll out a nationwide 5G network.
21:20 TB: So if you and I are gonna go bring a proposition to market in the course of the next, say, four or five years, well it's gonna be a mix of 4G and 5G, and therefore we've gotta look at the available technologies. Now, there is a lot that's available from the 4G perspective. It's still got a lot of wind left in the sails. So, yes, in a purest sense, to come back to your question, of course network slicing, but I don't think you need that as a key enabler to still get to market in the course of the next few years.
21:50 PB: Right, right, yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think it's a sort of longer term... One of the interesting things we're seeing obviously at Microsoft, being pretty software-oriented, is how a lot of the network capabilities are becoming software-focused and virtualized, right? And a lot of things that have been bespoke in silicone or hardware are now becoming more software-driven, and those could be cloud-powered or edge-powered or somewhere in between. So that's giving people lots of different ways of thinking about deploying services very quickly and being much more agile with the networks that they have developed. So that's interesting.
22:31 MC: One of the things that we need to make sure we also look at as well is how we secure it. The data that you get at the end of the chain is only as good as the data that you can prove was there viable at the start. So we've been talking a lot about this from the software point of view, is what do put on the end device, how do you make sure that the data that's generating is reliable, trusted, secure, so that by the time it gets back to whatever platform it's using, it can be trusted. And that's a lot of what we've been talking about over the last year...
23:01 PB: Yeah, yeah, and I think we've done a lot of work with Azure Sphere and hardware attestation, and how do you just... You're authenticating the data all the way through from beginning to end so you know what you're working with, but yeah, it sounds like there's no shortage of work to do, that's what I like to tell people.
23:19 TB: That is very true. It's one thing, I think I'm very conscious of us having this conversation in the middle of a pandemic, but I don't know about you guys, but I'm as busy as I've ever been. It's interesting in that so many people... I think what the pandemic has absolutely done is accelerated everybody's digital adoption.
23:41 PB: Yes, it's true, it's like... I think we've said we've done two years worth of acceleration in a couple of months or something like that, it's been... The idea of remote everything and all these other scenarios that we have had on paper, that people all of a sudden were like, "Yeah, I think I'll get to start using Teams at some point for a few meetings," and it's like "24/7, I'm on Teams." There you go and we're figuring that out. Actually, I'll tell our listeners, we're actually using a platform today called Squadcast because I'd been using Teams to record these shows, and just like anything else, you kind of find your weakest link, and Teams is just not designed to be a high-quality audio platform for things like podcasting. So Squadcast is designed... So we're capturing three wav file broadcasts now simultaneously in this recording, and then it'll all get munged up into the Cloud. So we'll see, I guess we'll get some feedback whether this sounds a lot better.
24:41 MC: So you just mute me for the whole time. That's fine. [chuckle]
24:42 PB: Well, the other thing, what's nice is a lot of podcasts used to be in the studio, right? And now it's like, why would I go to a studio to do a podcast? Especially, I've talked to you guys in the UK. I've talked to folks from Telstra in Australia, I can have lots of different really interesting conversations with people here, and I wouldn't have you fly to Redmond to sit in a studio, makes no sense. [laughter] So a lot of these scenarios about remote, telehealth and all these things that we were sort of like inching toward, and obviously education, I mean, we've had these conversations before. Everything is just sort of hyper-accelerated through the pandemic, and it'll be interesting to see which of these stick.
25:22 MC: I think health is a very big opportunity, and we're doing an awful lot in that space as well, because there's just an awful lot of activity going on in there that's been recognized that the pandemic's really helped with, well, not helped with...
25:33 PB: Well, yeah, and getting the right expertise in the room shouldn't be bound by your geographical location. You gotta bring the knowledge to the table as quickly as possible, especially in the health scenario, so that's exciting to see how that works out. We had a conversation with David Rhew, who's our Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft a few shows ago. And he was talking about the intersection of health and technology, and that's just such a game-changer that I think we're just tip of the iceberg, trying to figure that out.
26:04 MC: Big time.
26:06 TB: Yeah.
26:07 PB: Cool. Yeah. So what else is keeping you guys busy over in the UK, other than just surviving?
[laughter]
26:16 TB: The usual pandemic... Do the Americans have the same run on toilet rolls?
26:23 PB: We did but that was a long time ago. I think we're good. I think we're good with the toilet paper. [laughter] Yeah, we got over that. I notice, Tom, that we don't have our cameras on, but Tom is actually growing out the beard too, which is good, [laughter] I like to see that [26:35] ____.
26:36 TB: Oh, yeah, don't... We could have a pandemic beard.
26:37 MC: Alright, alright, okay, [26:38] ____.
26:38 PB: You didn't catch up. We're all doing the Rumpelstiltskin thing here. So hopefully at some point we'll be able to see each other again and in person. I can't remember the last time we actually... Where was it, at Barcelona or is it?
26:54 MC: I think we're out in...
26:56 PB: What's it? No, you were out in Redmond at some point, late last...
26:57 TB: Last November or October.
27:00 MC: Is that the last flight I took and...
27:04 TB: Matter of fact, yeah, you took us to a real hell place, I think you took us to...
27:08 PB: Where was that? Was that Black Raven maybe?
27:10 TB: Yeah I think so.
27:11 PB: Yeah, that's a good place. Yeah, the thing is, hopefully all these places stay in business and...
27:18 TB: Yeah, absolutely.
27:22 PB: Support your local restaurants, that's all I can say. And breweries, I guess, in your case.
[laughter]
27:28 TB: Food is optional.
27:31 PB: That's right, that's right. Cool. Well, it's good spending some time with you both, and appreciate it, and best luck in everything that's going on over there and I'm sure we'll see each other soon.
27:42 MC: Thanks Pete, thanks for the time-speak.
27:43 PB: Alright.
27:44 TB: Really appreciate it.
27:45 PB: Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Matt. Take care.
27:45 TB: Cheers.
27:47 MC: Bye.
27:47 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 the [email protected]. Thank you.
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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 [email protected]. Thank you.
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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rene Haas, President Intellectual Property Group at Arm, discusses the development of edge devices and the 5G wave.
Download Transcript Here
00:00 PETE BERNARD: Rene, thanks again for joining us here on the IoT Unicorn. I was trying to remember the last time actually we saw each other face-to-face. That's something that we do these days. I think it was Barcelona 2019 or something. It was a while ago. But again, thanks for joining us today.
00:23 RENE HAAS: You are welcome. I wasn't sure if it was CES of 2020, but...
00:28 PETE BERNARD: It could be.
00:28 RENE HAAS: Gosh, you might be right. Barcelona, 2019. My gosh, over 18 months ago.
00:32 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, that was a long time ago. Well, CES 2020 was our last... It was kind of the last hurrah for events, although going to Vegas always has its potential infection rates of all sorts of things going on there, but... Not in that case, but... Cool, yeah, no, it's good to see you again, and we've known each other for a little while and worked on some interesting projects, so it was great to have you on the show, and obviously very timely with the DevSummit coming up and some recent news that we'll talk about as well. But maybe you can give us and the listeners a little background on your journey to where you're at as President of Arm IP.
02:07 RENE HAAS: So my role at Arm is I run the IP products group. Our acronym is IPG, Intellectual Property Products Group, and that's the sales marketing development of all of our products, GPUs, CPUs, NPUs for the markets that we serve, the client market, infrastructure market, automotive autonomous and IoT. I am in the Bay Area now, but I've had a fun journey at Arm. I have spent seven years at Arm, but only a few years in the Bay Area. I was in Shanghai, China for two years, and I was in the UK for three, living in London, commuting to Cambridge. And I just came back to the Bay Area at the beginning of 2020, and...
02:50 PETE BERNARD: Are you an original California person or what's your... Where is your home base?
02:54 RENE HAAS: I'm originally from Upstate New York. Yeah, I'm, originally from Upstate New York.
02:58 PETE BERNARD: Wow, cool.
02:58 RENE HAAS: My dad was a Xerox guy, so I was a son of a Xerox guy working in... He was working in Rochester, New York, which is where I grew up. And then I came out to California in the mid-1990s, and I've been here ever since.
03:12 PETE BERNARD: I'm a New Jersey person myself, so that's something we have in common, the Tri-state area. Although Rochester is pretty far up state there.
03:21 RENE HAAS: Serious snow country.
03:22 PETE BERNARD: Serious, yes. Good, good. Excellent. So you've been at Arm for a while then, and you also spent a little bit of time at Nvidia.
03:31 RENE HAAS: I did, I did. I'm gonna pre-fetch probably your next set of questions, but before I spent...
03:37 PETE BERNARD: No pun intended.
03:38 RENE HAAS: Seven years at Arm I was with Nvidia for seven years doing a number of different roles there, but primarily in the notebook graphics space, GPUs, as well as Arm-based CPUs that went into all different types of laptops including the very first Surface that was running Windows 8 on Arm.
04:00 PETE BERNARD: Yes, those were the days. I had one of those. A lot of us up in Redmond had one of those. [chuckle] Unfortunately, not a lot of the other people had them. That was the problem. [chuckle] But, so cool. So now sort of full circle, just to touch upon that topic, Nvidia and Arm. For you, it's kind of break out the old badge, I guess...
04:20 RENE HAAS: Yeah. It's something that came live last Monday. Obviously, the rumors had been out for a number of weeks, so some people were surprised, but some people were not so surprised when it finally was announced to everyone actually last Sunday. It was supposed to be on Monday, and then we pulled it forward to Sunday. We're actually very excited about it at Arm, we think it's a really, really amazing opportunity. Nvidia is an amazing company, has done some fantastic things over the years obviously. And Arm efforts around client and data center, autonomous and such. When we think about what's going on in the next wave of computing where everything is gonna be touching something that is around artificial intelligence, I think the opportunities for the two companies to be a combined entity in this new area of computing, the opportunities are somewhat limitless.
05:17 RENE HAAS: So we're quite excited. Me, on a personal level, sometimes when these M&A things [05:21] ____ talking to the company on either side, there's a lot of questions of, "Do I know these folks? And can we really understand what their language is?" But for me, having spent equal amount of time in both places, I feel very fortunate to be in a position to be where we are on this, and it should be very exciting. And someone over there even pinged me not long after the announcement and said, "Hey, your email address is still available." So it's interesting how things circle back.
05:55 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, yeah, I wonder if you get credited those seven years at Nvidia as part of your Arm tenure. So how that works I'm not sure.
06:00 RENE HAAS: You know what, that's a really good question. I haven't...
06:03 PETE BERNARD: You might get a double hit on that one.
06:06 RENE HAAS: Yeah. In fact [06:08] ____ Pete, that was not on the FAQ. That's a good one. I'm gonna go check on that.
06:14 PETE BERNARD: Well, one of the things that's happened over the past number of years, what's been super exciting working with Arm is kind of the proliferation of where Arm is, the Arm silicon showing up. And you mentioned the early experiments, early efforts I should say, on Windows on Arm, but we had kind of a relaunch or a re-emergence of that tech a couple years ago, and I know I had the pleasure of working with you guys on that. So Windows on Arm, Windows on Snapdragon and all that stuff, it seems to be kind of a resurgence now on that as well. So what are your thoughts there?
06:50 RENE HAAS: Oh gosh. And as I mentioned, the history with working with Nvidia and Arm and Microsoft for me goes way back. And having worked on the original Surface product, that was basically what we called [07:06] ____ back in the day. And if I just think back to the value proposition we were hoping to get from those systems, it was really around extended battery life, always on, always connected, things like that. But you go back those years, there was no connectivity story, so those were just obviously purely WiFi devices. And the app story was really, really incomplete. I remember meeting with analysts early on and one of the biggest questions that I got asked when we were going to press reviews was, "Will it run iTunes?" And the answer to that question at the time was, "No." And that was a bit of a killer, if you just think about how people were getting access to music back and when these products came out. Fast-forward to now, the landscape is so different when you just think about, A, how many of our applications exist in the Cloud? B, the devices that have been introduced by third-party OEMs and as well as Microsoft. You have these amazing connectivity type of solutions that are brought forward by Snapdragon, so there's a great story in terms of connectivity. There's a great story in terms of app compatibilities on Windows 10 with everything running across. So we...
08:19 PETE BERNARD: Including iTunes, by the way. So iTunes now runs on that.
08:23 RENE HAAS: ITunes runs. And I bet you if I went through and asked that analyst and told them that iTunes ran successfully on these Windows devices, he would not care. But yeah, the experience is great. We use a lot of them inside of Arm. In fact, when I was living in the UK, I used to use it all the time on the train because the WiFi was actually spotty on the train and the cellular worked pretty good, and it was a great device to use. And not the least of which, I would literally leave my power supply back in the flat during the day. I wouldn't bring it with me, wouldn't need it. And so the devices have really, really advanced, and then there's just more great things to come.
09:04 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, fantastic. I use the Galaxy Book as my main PC and yeah, it's a game changer. When you don't have to worry about power and connectivity, all of a sudden, it's like a behavioral change in how you use a PC, so it's pretty cool stuff. And then I guess the other big thing where you're making a lot of headway with partners is in the Cloud and sort of bringing a lot of low-power. A lot of times, people think of low-power as battery life, but it's not just battery life, it's just low-power, a greener, more smarter consumption of power, overall, especially in a big data center.
09:42 RENE HAAS: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Arm has been working on products for the data center for actually a long time. Even from back in the time when I was at Nvidia, Arm was working with early partners around SSEs for the data center and such. Like everything else, over 10 years a lot of things have changed. Confluence of a lot of work being done on the engineering side to get great products. We've gone from 32-bit to 64-bit. The performance has increased. Geometries have also gone in such a way that you've gone from 10 to seven to five nanometre type of technologies now, so you can get some really, really powerful type of processing. And then just again, like any technology trend, you need a confluence of a number of things to take place.
10:32 RENE HAAS: 10 years ago, we were thinking largely about the enterprise; we weren't thinking as much about the Cloud. And what has happened with everything moving towards the Cloud, to your point, it's put such a premium on data efficiency, on power. These Cloud data centers typically have a very, very fixed power budget and a very fixed area where they put the compute capacity. So efficiency really, really matters, it's really, really important. And we continue to innovate in this area. We've introduced some new products. Our Neoverse V1, which has scalar vector processing for HPC and high-end computing. Our N2 platform, which is 40% more efficient than our N1 platforms. And we've seen some of the large hyperscalers including AWS who have announced products based upon our N1 with their Graviton2 processor. And they've talked very publicly about a 40% power advantage at the same performance level versus the competition. So yeah, it's very real and people might think, "Oh, my gosh, it's happened overnight." And you've been in this industry a long time, you know it doesn't.
11:46 PETE BERNARD: That's right.
11:47 RENE HAAS: It's a long, long effort by a lot of partners and a lot of people inside of Arm. But yeah, now I think confluence of a lot of things in the marketplace, it's really starting to take off.
11:56 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, it's true. For a lot of things, it's a matter of the right time and the right tech and the right need for it to all come together. Actually, interesting anecdote, just to circle back to the PC discussion. We were first working on the Windows on Snapdragon PCs, we had a big beta test inside of Microsoft and we handed them out to all of our engineering managers and stuff. And we started to get bug reports that the battery meter was not working right because it was just always full. And it turned out the battery meter was working fine, it's just people weren't used to the fact that this thing would last for whatever, 20 hours. And so it was an interesting discussion with folks that that's actually how it's supposed to work.
12:38 RENE HAAS: Which is game changer, like you said.
12:41 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, yeah. So let's get to IoT. This is called the IoT Unicorn, so we might as well dig into that. Probably the real fascinating things happening on the edge, the far edge, the near edge. The definition of the edge depends on where you're standing, I guess. But Arm at the edge and things that are happening out there, what do you see as disruptions that we should be expecting beyond the incremental things getting faster and less power, but what's the view there? One of the interesting things for our listeners that aren't aware is an IP license is like pretty far up the food chain. So you get probably one of the best long-term views of what's happening in the business over the next, whatever, five years. But be curious on the IoT and edge side, where do you see things heading?
13:30 RENE HAAS: Yeah, no, it's a great question. And that area is evolving fast. Even over the last number of years, we've seen a real acceleration of activity, innovation in that space. And particularly around the area of that these edge devices are increasingly becoming small computers in of themselves. When IoT kicked off with VIGOR inside of Arm, we were talking to companies about this. It included a small microcontroller with potentially a sensor and a Bluetooth connector that could send the data back somewhere. Now you're talking about a heavy degree of compute power, you're talking about machine learning at the edge. Increasingly, we have partners who are looking to not only use our micro-controllers that have extensions for machine learning, but even tiny MPUs, tiny ML doing some level of inference at the edge.
14:24 RENE HAAS: And with that, you have a much different requirement for security because now these devices are small computers, they're dealing with a tremendous amount of data, the data needs to be protected, you need to ensure that you have an architecture that will keep the data secure. So we've done a lot of work with our partners around an innovation that we call the platform security architecture, which does a number of things. We've done a lot of work over the years around Root of Trust and things at that nature. With this platform security architecture, we actually allow for third parties to certify the devices that will essentially assure a level of data encryption and security going up the line. And with that, I think it just all feeds onto itself relative to... These are small computers, these small computers are doing more and more compute intensive tasks, they're sending more and more data through the Cloud, you then have 5g that is also adding more bandwidth and more compute capability. So what that basically means is you just start pushing from the data center to the edge, the amount of compute capacity is going up exponentially.
15:41 RENE HAAS: And I think over the next number of years, these edge devices are gonna become even more powerful and more sophisticated in terms of their capability. And you'll have a very interesting trade-off between the applications that run with that edge device at the node next to it, things that are cloud-native where the app can be running in a number of different spots. I think also you're gonna see huge innovation. And that's gonna mean certain things like autonomous entities. Not necessarily cars. Obviously cars are the most popular areas that get a lot of attention, but drones and robotics and things that can run at a much more sophisticated way, factory floor robotics, all kinds of things around managing warehousing, things of that nature. All of this is gonna become much more intelligent and much more sophisticated.
16:27 RENE HAAS: And then, back to the Nvidia/Arm potential about the edge of AI, these devices will learn, they'll get smarter. And as they get smarter, that again builds on having the compute capabilities. I know it sounds a bit of a cliche, and I've been around the industry probably to see at least a number of these waves of computing, but we're definitely into another very large one. And 5g, because of the additional bandwidth, is gonna be able to enable a lot of that.
16:55 PETE BERNARD: Yeah. I think I had this discussion with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson on the last episode or two episodes ago, but we were talking about the confluence of 5g, AI and IoT, sort of three, these... It's like peanut butter, chocolate and whatever the third thing is. But I haven't... The metaphor breaks down after that. It's like you get these ultra low latency, high performance networks combined with AI, which you could either do at the edge or the cloud or somewhere in between, with the concept of Internet of Things, which is just things connected to the Cloud and sending intelligent data back and forth and actuating in real-time. And then all of a sudden, you've got some really potential transformative scenarios there, right?
17:34 RENE HAAS: Yeah.
17:36 PETE BERNARD: And so I think... So it's sort of like... And I've had Qualcomm on the show before and other folks, and we talk about IoT being a team sport, that that statement of 5g, AI and IoT is an interesting example 'cause you need lots of different companies to come to the table to work together on behalf of a customer problem, 'cause it all starts with a customer having a problem that they need solved. And, yeah, I agree with you. You mentioned also about the fact that we're bringing AI horsepower into MCU devices or really tiny edge devices that previously were controlling a light switch are now going to be smart, and be able to learn and execute AI models. And I think that's fascinating.
18:22 RENE HAAS: Yeah. And you still have to get into... And by the way, I like that peanut butter and chocolate analogy, which are two of my favorite ingredients on [18:28] ____. You just need a third, but...
18:29 PETE BERNARD: [chuckle] Peanut butter, chocolate and more chocolate, I don't know if that's fair or not.
18:32 RENE HAAS: But similar to... One of the stories I like to talk about is a bit of what these new waves of technology enable. When we went from 3g to 4g, and I know you and I both were around for that, people were not talking about the fact that 3g to 4g was going to enable a brand new ride sharing capability, and it was gonna be able to enable people to rent their homes for vacations and such. Yet Airbnb, and Uber, and location bearing apps and things you can do on a smartphone all came through with that. I think the same thing is true for 5g and IoT. It's a little hard to completely imagine all of the possibilities that can happen. There's a lot of smart people and, as you said it, it takes a village of a combination of chip people and OEMs and software and makers to come up with a lot of ideas to advance this. But it will be there because there's such a profound shift of compute power that's gonna exist in these edge devices that is going to allow for a lot of really, really interesting potential. So it's gonna be really exciting to see.
19:37 PETE BERNARD: Let me kind of cut into one blurb here around AI Toolchain, because I believe one of the things we've done with Arm and I think should be announced for DevSummit, if not, we'll edit it out, but we've come to some agreement with you, I believe, to integrate your AI Toolchain into Azure.
19:56 RENE HAAS: Yeah.
19:56 PETE BERNARD: One of the things is around... ML Ops is a kind of a hot term, but how do you leverage a hyperscaler cloud to develop and train models and then manage those models across the edge to the cloud securely on updating these edge devices with new AI capabilities or models or trainings and tunings? And so your Toolchain's kind of at the core of a lot of that for a lot of Silicon partners, so the ability to sort of integrate that Toolchain into Azure for our customers should be a big deal, right?
20:26 RENE HAAS: Oh, it's a really, really huge opportunity. We're actually quite excited about it. We do a lot of work on the Toolchain with Compute Libraries and frameworks and different things to allow folks to develop solutions for ML at the edge, and I think we probably have as many people in our ML group doing hardware MPUs and also are doing the software libraries and frameworks. So it's really, really large. And you're reaching a brand new set of developers, if you will, and think about a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino-like platform for people who are developing things for the edge. If you can now allow those to integrate, upscale into the Azure cloud framework, because all of this tiny data becomes big data in the cloud, and then ultimately it can get serviced in such a way that end users can benefit. It's actually a really exciting thing and we've been partners with Microsoft for such a long time in a broad set of areas. I'm very excited to be involved here as well.
21:27 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, that'd be great. Hey, so DevSummit. We're on the eve of DevSummit or the day one of DevSummit. I'm not sure what the publication timeline is here, but it's a big deal. It's very exciting. Obviously this year kind of highly virtualized, but still exciting. Do you have any kind of words of wisdom if you're an attendee for DevSummit? What are some of the things you wanna look for or try to get out of? And maybe first time visitors or whoever, how do people really grok the scene?
21:57 RENE HAAS: It's a big change on a couple fronts. Obviously, first off, it's virtual. It's not live. So that's for starters. So go to your favorite search engine and search for DevSummit and you get all the details about registering and such, but we have moved it to a virtual event. For those of who are saying, "Okay, it's virtual, I get it, but I've never heard of DevSummit. Tell me what DevSummit is," DevSummit is the re-branded name of a show we used to call TechCon. And so, TechCon was the show we had every fall. And it used to be in Santa Clara for many years and we moved it to San Jose the last couple of years. So, what's new is old, what's old is new. It's the TechCon show that we're now targeting really more towards... Broadly towards developers, although I would say we think 60% of the folks who have registered are self-proclaimed or self-identified software types, versus about 40% hardware types.
22:54 RENE HAAS: We've got about 4000, 5000 people already pre-registered. We think we'll have a bit more when the time comes. It will be very broad, as Arm typically is in nature. We'll be talking about things like cloud native, chip design, autonomous vehicles. It will run the gamut of all the areas that we're involved in, relative to what it takes to integrate Arm IP and an SoC and what do you need to know about hardware libraries and partners in that space, versus everything around open source software and popular development tools and operating environments that we just talked about on the software space. There will be a lot of emphasis around autonomous, which is a pretty hot area. A lot of areas also around cloud native. You'll see the typical key notes from Simon, myself and some of the other leaders inside of Arm. I would also encourage folks to tune in because there will be some special surprise guests. I won't...
23:56 PETE BERNARD: I can imagine.
23:57 RENE HAAS: Give that away at this point of time, but it should be a very, very interesting and fun event. We have our annual Arm partner meeting every August. I think you've been to it. It's not a public event, it's an NDA event. But I bring that up just in the context of... We've had one rodeo with doing this thing virtually. So I'd like to think we've got some good practice in terms of things that... The dos and don't-'s in terms of doing something from a virtual standpoint. But yeah, it should be very, very good. We're looking forward to it.
24:26 PETE BERNARD: Cool. Yeah, it's interesting, Microsoft's done a number of events now virtual and I don't think we published the data but my understanding is the engagement we get because it's virtualized, we get so much broader engagement, we get so many more people quote, unquote, "attending" and engaged in the content than you would if it was only a... You had to get on a plane and go somewhere. So I think one of the nice by-products, if there is a nice by-product out of all this craziness, is we are all building more muscle about how to enable people to be more engaged regardless of where they are. And especially when you talk about developers, developers everywhere in the world and there should be. And now to be able to enable them to plug in and get educated and learn some new things, that's a fantastic by-product.
25:13 RENE HAAS: Yeah, yeah. No, you're completely right. We'd love to do these events live versus virtual, but when I think about the size of the developer community that exists... Arm is a fairly broad platform, as you know, and it would be really hard to figure out events that could bring all the potential developers who work on Arm... And it's all over the place. There are apps developers, there are kernel developers, there are people who do open source software, it's a broad, broad community. So we're actually kind of excited to do this thing virtually. It'll be a bit of a lab test to see how that works in terms of reaching the development community in a virtual way, but we're looking forward to it.
25:53 PETE BERNARD: Cool, awesome. Well, lots of stuff going on at Arm these days. And so it was great again to connect, Rene. I think hopefully we'll keep in touch here as things transform into Nvidia landscape. Maybe you'll get those extra years on your seniority. [chuckle] But that would be great.
26:14 RENE HAAS: I should get some credit somehow for that. I am going to talk to Jensen about that next time I have our consultation with him.
26:21 PETE BERNARD: Yeah. Cool. Well, good. Any last closing thoughts? It sounds like we've really covered [26:27] ____ here today.
26:29 RENE HAAS: [26:29] ____ I appreciate it and [26:29] ____ as I mentioned, I was listening to some of the podcasts you had done prior and I really enjoyed them and I'm very, very honored on behalf of Arm to join you and be part of what you're building here. It's really cool.
26:43 PETE BERNARD: Sounds good. Alright, Rene. Well, take care and I'm sure our paths will cross again.
26:48 RENE HAAS: Alright, great. Thanks.
26:50 PETE BERNARD: Alright, take care. Thanks.
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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Cory Clarke, VP of Product Management and Strategic Partnerships at RXR Realty, discusses some of the IoT solutions his company is using to facilitate a safer return to the workplace during COVID-19.
Download Transcript Here
00:00 Pete Bernard: Cory, thanks for joining us, appreciate you taking the time. And I've done a little bit of looking at your LinkedIn profile and kind of understanding where RXR is at, but maybe you can kinda give us a little introduction about who you are and what your story is, and then we can talk a little bit about what you're doing.
00:19 Cory Clarke: Sure. I'm Cory Clarke. I lead product at RXR's digital labs. RXR is a New York real estate company, we own around 26 million square feet, 20 or 30 buildings, many really iconic ones like the stair at Lee High or the Helmsley Building. And yeah. Before RXR, I worked at WeWork for a couple of years, leading their Powered by We Group and Powered by We Technology. That was the technology they were building for enterprise clients to improve the experience of the workplace. And always kind of been interested in the overall workplace experience, actually I trained as an architect.
01:03 S1: Yeah, I see that.
01:05 CC: Seven years of architecture school, and then got entranced by technology and started working in software development and never really looked back. I did a lot of work for companies doing intranets and a lot of employee enablement, and really got interested in how technology can transform the employee experience, and that's what led me to WeWork and ultimately to RXR.
01:29 S1: Yeah. Well, it's interesting, you mentioned that... I talk to a lot of folks, and it seems every company is turning into some kind of technology company, or every company needs to have an element of software technology as part of its strategy. There's no such thing as a kind of a pure play, non-tech company anymore.
01:47 CC: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Every financial company is a technology company, I think every real estate company is eventually gonna be a technology company.
01:55 S1: Yeah. I was actually... A kind of a side bar, but I was futzing around with these bluetooth connected water systems over my long weekend made by Orbit. And Orbit makes all these little sprinkler googahs. And... So now they have these Bluetooth connected googahs, and they have an app that you download, and it's pretty cool, but you can tell at Orbit at some point the switch went off to say, "We're not just a sprinkler company, now we need to be a tech company with sprinklers and we need to write apps and we need to do stuff." So I suspect realtors like RXR and other folks are like, "Yeah, we're doing this thing, but now we really need the tech to take it to the next level." And...
02:37 CC: Yeah. I think the real estate world's kind of where I feel like where retail was maybe in the late 90s, early aughts, where like the... Brick-and-mortar was making this huge transition to online and real estate really in the last five, 10 years has gotten a ton of investment in PropTech and trying to make that same transition into a more... Like... Technology enabled services.
03:02 S1: Yeah. No, I can imagine. I asked you this before we started recording, but... You're kind of... You said you were a East Coast, you're an East Coast transplant.
03:14 CC: Yes.
03:15 S1: Or you're a... You've acclimated to become an East Coaster. I'm from New Jersey myself, that's why when I saw the background in New York, I thought maybe you were East Coast-y. You consider yourself now the East Coast person.
03:28 CC: Yeah, I am naturalized... Naturalized.
03:31 S1: Naturalized, yes excellent.
03:32 CC: Yeah. I've been in New York City... There's definitely people that were born and bred here, but there's a lot of people that come here and never leave. And yeah...
03:43 S1: Awesome. Yeah, it's an incredible area. I was actually in Long Island this summer for a little bit and got the New York vibe there, so that was good.
03:52 CC: Yeah, it's definitely been interesting during this time. [chuckle]
03:56 S1: Yeah. Yeah, clearly. And speaking of crazy times... You guys are kind of right in the middle of a lot of big transformations going on, not only technologically from your business transforming, but obviously the world is transforming in the way we are being much more remote in what we're doing. And maybe you can share with us where does RXR see offices and office work sort of transforming and moving post-COVID?
04:29 CC: Yeah, and I think the... The phrase is, the reports of the office demise are greatly exaggerated. I don't see the office going away, but I do think it is gonna fundamentally change whereas... Prior to COVID, people worked in the office and regardless of the type of work there was, with most industries, like an expectation you were gonna come to the office to work. And now, this mass experiment in work from home has proven out that people can do work from home, and particularly do focused work. If I'm gonna sit down and work on a spreadsheet for eight hours, I can do that anywhere. I can do it at home, cafe, co-working, it doesn't matter. And I think companies are now comfortable letting their employees do that. There's trust there that they can get their work done and do it effectively, but the collaboration and teamwork is not as effective remotely.
05:35 CC: And definitely from all of our surveys and research, there are gaps there and that's where I think the office is gonna be... It's gonna be focused on the teamwork. It's gonna move from focused work to teamwork. And I think it's gonna change the nature of the office where it isn't so much that you have a desk and you come into your desk every day, it's your team has a space, you may come in to meet with your team when you need to. It might be that you have a... Team norms and you come in Monday, Wednesday, Friday or it might be that you have tools that you can collaborate across the team and decide, "Hey, we're all coming to work tomorrow for a meeting." But I think it's gonna be focused on that collaboration and move away from individual... Individual...
06:25 S1: Yeah. Well, Microsoft have been on that journey as well in terms of shifting their office layouts from the individual office to more team rooms or team-oriented spaces. And so I think what you're saying is more flexibility around dedicated spaces and more team-oriented spaces and the idea of working from home is gonna be sort of baked into people's protocols, but obviously the personal collaboration still needs to be there at some point.
07:00 CC: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's gonna be an interesting challenge in terms of managing capacity. I think prior to this, most companies kind of allocated a certain amount per person, and it was...
07:11 S1: Sure.
07:12 CC: A couple hundred square feet with the assumption that most people would probably be in and most people would probably need somewhere to work and a desk.
07:19 S1: Sure, yeah.
07:20 CC: But I think all of those standards in terms of allowable square foot per person and overall density are going out the window because, if only half your workforce is gonna come in, or maybe it's a quarter, I don't know, but like, what... Being able to plan for that capacity, make sure you have enough room... You can flex when there's... Times happen when... It's the beginning of the quarter, and everybody wants to get together to collaborate...
07:48 S1: Right, right. Yeah.
07:48 CC: And you're planning, like, "How do you allow for 100%?"
07:51 S1: Right, exactly. Huh, yeah, no, it's interesting. One of the things I like about this kind of remote collaboration is that it tends to normalize the meetings in terms of who's in the room versus who's not. I mean, it used to be where if you were "dialed in", and not in the room, you were sort of in the... You were in the cheap seats.
08:10 CC: Yeah.
08:11 S1: In terms of the conversation. And now everyone's sort of in the same cheap seats, I guess, at the table. And so it'll be interesting to see how some of those norms transfer back into the physical office, you know? And the meeting protocols and things.
08:27 CC: Yeah, it has been interesting. So we've actually come back to our office, full time. Most of the people... I mean, there's still some people that are either higher risk or have... School hasn't opened yet... There's definitely a lot of extenuating circumstances. So it's probably like, 60% have actually come back full time. But it has already created some interesting challenges from like the collaboration standpoint where, yeah, there's... Again like, haves and have nots with like, "Are you in the room? Are you on the screen?" There's definitely more effort to include people on the screen now. Whereas I think beforehand, it was like you... Maybe you forgot to dial them in 'cause it was that one person. Or they're like...
09:08 S1: Exactly. Yeah, how many times does that happen? You start a meeting then half way through it's like, "Oh. We forgot to turn on the thing," you know?
09:10 CC: You can only come one the phone... Yeah. Where now there's much more conscious effort to include people on the line, but it is still hard to include them in the casual ad hoc conversations where you bump into somebody in the hallway or the... Standing six feet away from them in the kitchen, you know?
09:34 S1: Yeah, yeah. We used to have a thing, one of our... We had a, one of our satellite offices down in Palo Alto, and we had a kind of a live feed at the coffee machine, where we had a monitor and a camera, and it was sort of like permanently on and connected to the coffee machine, like the coffee area down in Palo Alto. And so anyone who went in to get a cup of coffee in the kitchen was sort of connected in real-time to the folks in Palo Alto, if they happen to bump into them and they're getting a cup of coffee there. So that was kind of a cool way of connecting spaces. But yeah, no, I'm sure I mean that's... Obviously, this has kind of been a crazy time and in so many ways, but in a lot of discussions I have with folks like yourselves, it's like, "Well, what are some of the things that'll stick? Or how do we... What are we gonna get out of this that will improve long-term the ability to collaborate and connect with other folks?" So that's interesting to hear. I know you guys are doing this thing called RxWell, and maybe you can talk a little bit about that. 'Cause one of the things that I understand about RXR is that you're a realty company and a big one, but also you're becoming more of a technology enabler, or a technology platform for other companies. So maybe you can tell me a little bit about what's the RxWell thinking approach.
10:56 CC: Sure. Yeah, so I think... Actually, before COVID, in the... Those wonderful days before COVID, [chuckle] we'd actually started developing our own technology to do two things. Like, one to perform... Like, improve the operational performance of our spaces and use technology just to have more insights on how the buildings are being run, how our energy's being used, whether we're meeting sustainability goals and have kind of a unified view on all of our buildings in terms of how they perform. And then the other was really changing our relationship to occupants. Most real estate companies are focused on the tenant, which is the person that signs the lease.
11:43 S1: Uh-huh. I see.
11:44 CC: And... So that might be a head of real estate, that might be somebody that's... Never even comes to the building 'cause they might be making these decisions from afar. And then there's the actual occupants, you know? Their employees that come in every day. And we're trying to pivot towards a more user-centric focus and serve those individuals. So making tools and technology to improve the experience for our occupants. So, we kind of started that journey, as I said, pre-COVID, then around February, March did a major pivot. The technology and the underpinnings are the same but focusing a lot more on safety and wellness. So using the same kind of data pipeline and IoT infrastructure to get information about the building and air quality, occupancy, the same stuff we were gonna use for managing operational excellence, now we're able to use that data to make sure that we're managing our humidity to stay within 40% to 60%. Because that reduces transmission of COVID.
12:52 S1: I see.
12:54 CC: And make sure our occupancy is below 50%, because that's been mandated by New York State. We've built a suite of tools that really help us manage the performance of the buildings, and around COVID related factors and give those insights to our property managers as well as our tenants. But then the tools we're working on for the end employees, we've also launched those. And there are features to improve their experience. There's news about the building, and we're able to push alerts to them, there's food and beverage ordering, but a lot of that stuff has become much more critical during COVID, so that...
13:34 S1: Sure.
13:34 CC: Food and beverage, we've made relationships with a lot of different caterers so our... People in our buildings can get food.
13:40 S1: Right. Of course.
13:41 CC: They get it delivered in a touch-less way. We're rolling out touch-less access, but more importantly, taking the data that we're using to manage them and providing that to the end users too. So I can open up my app today and know how many people are in the building right now, but also even what the foot traffic is in the lobby and when the next peak foot traffic is, so that if I wanna go out to lunch, I can avoid the crowd.
14:08 S1: Right, right. Well that makes sense. So like traffic management, that's interesting. So there's kind of the lobby traffic, and this is also interesting, because I think people's attitudes toward data around themselves are also changing in this pandemic and they're more willing to give data about themselves, or have themselves more "monitored." I'm using air quotes here. But so in terms of traffic management, like people counting, do you foresee things like being able to understand occupancy in rooms and things too in terms of monitoring that, or how does that... Does that fit in there somehow?
14:46 CC: Yeah, so we've started at the building level to make sure that we're opening our buildings and managing in the safest way possible, but we've also been developing the tech at the space level and piloting it in our own spaces. So we're able to, with the overhead sensors we've installed, understand how many people are in every single conference room, at every single desk, and it's been invaluable to us in bringing back our own employees, 'cause we know exactly the density levels we have, and we've invited everyone back to the office, but we know only a certain percentage are showing up. We know that it's still safe from a density standpoint. The sensors that we have in place, they use imaging device and computer vision. It's not a camera, it doesn't provide enough resolution to recognize anybody, but...
15:44 S1: Image sensor as opposed to camera, which is different.
15:47 CC: Yeah. But it does provide enough information to know whether everyone's social distancing, and the average social distance in our space has been over seven feet just... By just bringing back 60% of the office. So it's been really helpful in managing towards our goals relative to COVID and managing behavior, but then also is gonna be useful as we re-plan for however we're gonna be managing space going forward, we know...
16:17 S1: That's fascinating. Well, 'cause you're talking about forecasting for capacity and now you're actually building up data to say, "Well, if you have this many employees and they're coming in this often, we can show the data that says, "This is how much space you really need." Especially when... Now, when you're talking about distancing and other density issues, right?
16:35 CC: Yeah, and a lot of the conference rooms that we had for eight, 12, 20 person meetings, or even two-person meetings, a lot of those are happening partially online, so maybe we don't need a two-person meeting room anymore and we need a one person phone booth.
16:51 S1: Right. Yeah, yeah, the phone rooms. We have some cool phone... Well, back when I used to spend time on campus, we had, in the newer buildings, phone rooms, focus rooms, team rooms... They were sort of like Russian nesting dolls of space that you could put yourself into, which I think makes sense. The old school buildings we had were, yeah, you've got the 24-person conference room or the 18-person conference room, and you'd have two people sitting in there which made no sense, but... So that's interesting. And I wonder also, are you doing things around... 'cause I know when I go to the local health club now, which has re-opened, I'm talking about tennis, but I walk up and it does a little temperature scan of me, and... Is that another part of the building access that you guys are thinking about, or is that...
17:39 CC: Yeah, so the RxWell platform, it's a full solution for the building. So it has the hardware and software, so we have installed thermal temperature scanners or elevated body temperature scanners at every single entrance. So that when people walk in, the ones we've deployed, scan fast enough that they catch you at pace so you don't have to pause.
18:03 S1: Wow! Cool.
18:04 CC: You can just walk right past. And then the data from those, we actually, again, push it into our platform, so we are able to watch trends of elevated body temperatures throughout the day. So we don't let you in if you have a fever, but...
18:17 S1: Sure.
18:18 CC: If the number of people trying to enter with a fever keeps going up, it probably means something's going on in the building. And we can also just view average body temperature of the entire population of our buildings, again.
18:34 S1: Wow!
18:35 CC: So that's been interesting, and then the app itself that we've rolled out for the employees also has the New York State's mandated... Basically that we ask three questions of every person...
18:44 S1: Right, you're self attestation... [18:48] ____ and everything there...
18:48 CC: So we get analytics on that as well, and interestingly, we've also made a partnership with a local health provider for telemedicine, because we found as people were taking that questionnaire... The second question we have is, "Do you have any symptoms of COVID? Do you have a headache? Do you have a dry cough?" And you start to read those questions and you're like, "I kinda do have a headache, and [19:15] ____ it's linked to having COVID"
19:16 S1: Yeah. Who doesn't have a headache? [laughter]
19:18 S1: Yeah, so you can actually call a medical professional during that flow, and they'll talk you through it and help you with a diagnosis and even get you testing if you think you have it, 'cause it's... Yeah, it's just... From a user experience standpoint, it's a little daunting the first couple times you take one of those questionnaires and you really...
19:39 S1: Yeah, sure.
19:40 CC: Think about it.
19:42 S1: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. That's gonna become kind of the standard, I think of the kind of stuff that you're looking at, which is cool, especially how it works together. And then... Then you get data, you get history, you get real analysis over time of a real population of people and how they're behaving. You've mentioned actually, the shift from the...
20:04 S1: The rent payer versus the actual occupier, does that also apply in this world where people are gonna be working from home or other places? Does the platform sort of follow the person too? Would that apply maybe to some home use as well? Do you foresee a world where an employer is like, "Hey, we have this platform that's going to help you maintain distance and temperature and health when you're at the office... " but your home office is also technically, it's sort of like, can we consider that a part of the office as well? Does it extend to the person at home, maybe?
20:41 CC: It does in that... The questionnaire, we've definitely had some tenants that require it regardless of whether you're coming to the office or not, 'cause they just wanna use it to understand the overall health of their workforce. And then we have been particularly thinking of the post-COVID use cases, like building and functionality so people can express intent as to whether they're coming in today. 'Cause if we're on the same team, I'm gonna come into the office but I'm not gonna come in unless you're coming in because what's the point in coming in to do team work if my team's not there? So [21:17] ____ ways...
21:18 S1: Right, right.
21:18 CC: For people to know when they should or shouldn't come in or when's the best time to come in? But it's been more focused at the hybrid, the fact that people are gonna be both remote and in the office versus just servicing that kind of remote user... Yeah.
21:40 S1: Yeah, no, that's...
21:41 CC: We're also coming at it from the real estate owner perspective, so... [chuckle]
21:46 S1: Right. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah, and it's kind of a big question mark, we'll see. Even... When things open up, I think there'll be this hybrid experience for people and it also depends on the industry, obviously. So we'll see how people do that. I actually just finished my long weekend. I actually just remodelled this room here in my house to be a more, I would say, semi-permanent work from home office where it was very transitory previously. But it looks like it's gonna be a long haul work from home space. Even though I only live like two blocks from Microsoft campus, I figure I'm gonna probably be... A pretty big chunk of the time.
22:27 S1: But then it's like, how do I extend my work space into this room even though I have another office a few blocks away? And extend the Microsoft work experience here. So I think people will be experimenting with that too, just kind of where they're at, but... Yeah, interesting. And anything, I guess another question, since you're operating in Manhattan, what's that been like in terms of the real estate market in Manhattan and how have you guys navigated that? There's probably just a lot of uncertainty right now, I assume.
23:04 CC: Yes and no. It's interesting, our... Almost every... All of our tenants are... They are coming back to the office. They haven't expressed any intent to abandon. I think what's been shifting is more how they're using the space. And part of it is they're decreasing density because of COVID. So even if they're decreasing the number of people, they still kinda need the same amount of space, 'cause they're also decreasing density. But one of the things we've seen, and it's interesting... RXR is a... We own both urban and suburban real estate, so we have spaces in Westchester and Long Island around New York. We've had a lot of our tenants looking for... To switch to like a hub and a spoke model, where they have a couple anchor offices in the city, but they also wanna have satellite offices that are closer to home for people so they have a kind of third space. Where they... Maybe they don't wanna work at home 'cause you know, whatever, there's kids, dog, distractions, something, they wanna be able to come to a space to work or do their video conferencing, but they don't wanna come to the office, per se.
24:23 S1: Right, right. So sort of deconstructing the office space...
24:27 CC: Yeah.
24:27 S1: Into more atomic elements.
24:29 CC: Yes, so we've had...
24:31 S1: Yeah, and I think Microsoft's starting to do some of that too, in terms of also just making sure we can attract a good, diverse set of talent. One of the issues we had is obviously moving to Redmond, Washington or whatever doesn't really make sense for a lot of folks, and I think one of the benefits maybe of this kind of deconstruction of that office space is that it allows people to be part of the team without necessarily always physically being here. And we can hire from a broader talent pool that doesn't have to necessarily pack up their house and move cross country to Redmond. And maybe this idea of these satellite offices and things where people can go... You're right, you don't have the dog barking and all the other stuff going on, but you can work and be focused. So that could be a really interesting part of the story as well. By the way, I should also mention, just as a nod to our sponsors here that this all runs on Azure, all your stuff, so that's like...
25:31 CC: Yes.
25:32 S1: That's a good thing. Hashtag Azure. Gotta pay the bills, you know. Cool. So yeah, no, this has been great. Any final words you wanna add? Any kind of words of wisdom, prophecy that, [chuckle] you want to give us a heads up on?
25:51 CC: No, other than... I think being in New York has been interesting in that we were, for better or for worse, like the beginning of the outbreak in the United States, and really the hotspot for a while, and it's been... You know, we're knock on wood, kinda through the woods, it's been calm through lockup as well.
26:09 S1: Coming through the other side, yeah.
26:11 CC: But we're, I think, the first suffering the aftermath as well. I know my first day back at work was a little... Made me nervous, you know. It's like...
26:25 S1: Yeah, sure.
26:25 CC: I gotta get on the train, I haven't even left my house in a month, right? I kinda became a xenophobe. But we've come back, it's been... We have not had any outbreaks in our space. We're able to maintain our social distancing. It's...
26:45 S1: Right, right. It's working.
26:48 CC: Yeah, it's working.
26:49 S1: Yeah, yeah. Well.
26:51 CC: And just been... Been nice.
26:52 S1: That's a good thing. That's a good thing. Yeah, it is that confidence of... I think I'd mentioned tennis. I hadn't played for almost six months and played a doubles match the other day, and we were kind of distanced and all that. And kind of... About halfway through we were like, "Is this working? Are we... Is this good?" And we were like, "Yeah, this actually, this works." So I think people are getting confidence that these new things can work. They're getting more comfortable with it, and... Yeah. And just kinda move forward. But yeah you guys have been sort of at the epicentre here so... Sort of good lessons learned. But yeah, no, great. I appreciate the time, Cory. I think the stuff that you're doing is definitely cutting edge and... [27:31] ____ have a big impact for folks in your area and hopefully beyond as well, so... Yeah. Really appreciate the time.
27:39 CC: Oh, thank you, I appreciate you having me on.
27:42 S1: Sounds good. Alright, Corey. Take care.
27:44 CC: Alright, thank you.
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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.
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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.
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In this episode of the IoT Unicorn Podcast, Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer & VP of Healthcare, Worldwide Commercial Business, from Microsoft, shares his experience navigating through today’s pandemic and the digital transformation of healthcare.
Download the Transcript Here
00:00 Pete: Okay, well, we're here with Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft. David, really appreciate your time. We have a lot of things to talk about today, we're gonna try to squeeze it into the allotted time period, but thanks again for joining us.
00:14 Dr. David Rhew: Thanks, Pete, it's a real pleasure to be here.
00:16 Pete: Good, good. Yeah, and full transparency, something happened in the first conversation I had with David where it didn't record properly, so we're actually going through this one again. So it should be nice and well-practiced. So live and die by Teams, I guess. But anyway, David, so we, as I mentioned, chatted a couple times now, and you're actually fairly new to Microsoft. I think before we get into a lot of really interesting topics I think listeners wanna hear about around digital transformation of healthcare and what's going on with COVID-19 and Microsoft, maybe you can give us a little run-up to how did you end up here at Microsoft, and you've been here almost exactly a year now, so you can give us a little bit of background on yourself and your journey to Microsoft.
01:07 DR: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm a physician, I'm a healthcare researcher, and also a technologist. And really the combination of those three have evolved rather organically throughout my career. It's been remarkable how those three have converged to allow us to be able to start thinking about how healthcare can be used to improve health outcomes, or I should say how technology can be used to improve health outcomes, and really excited to be a part of that program here at Microsoft as we start launching technologies, predominantly cloud-based solutions with artificial intelligence to drive that.
01:45 DR: My story, I guess, begins when I was in college. I was thinking quite a bit about different types of ways that I could help people, and I guess my initial thought was helping people would probably be best served if I went to medical school, so did a curriculum, a pre-medical curriculum. And as part of that program, I think I gained a lot of the basic skills needed to be a doctor, but one of the things that I did also was I was curious about other types of activities and other types of skills. Technology was always a fascination. This was around... In the 1980s, and video games were pretty popular then. These are the arcade video games, not the ones that we typically use...
02:28 Pete: Yeah, the good ones.
02:29 DR: The classics, the Space Invaders, the Pac-Man, Mario, and I was fascinated by that. I just felt, what an incredible way for us to be able to start thinking about how we can not only spend our time, but also how we could use technology to create new experiences. And I started doing a lot of programming, in fact, I became a computer science major as well as a cellular and molecular biologist. And then I went to med school, and in med school there's not a whole lot of opportunity to use computers apart from a word processor, so I felt in many ways that that part of my career journey was put on hold. And it was on hold for a while because what I ended up doing is after I graduated from medical school, I went down a path of exploration in healthcare, specifically looking at ways that we could reduce variation and improve access to care and improve the overall quality of care. And it was done predominantly through what we referred to as guidelines. Turns out that if you were to go to a doctor in... Probably your local doctor, and you were to go to maybe survey the same type of... Ask another doctor across the country or even the globe how they would treat the same type of condition, you'll get a lot of different responses.
03:54 DR: And in fact, when they've done analyses, they've found that variation in care is pretty dramatic, even for things that have been proven to be beneficial. And what we learned in some of the investigations that I was a part of and others have been actively looking at is that a lot of that has to do with just the fact that we don't have mechanisms to remind clinicians to provide that right information at the right time. And I started building basically programs that would provide that right information at the right time. It was very manual. In many cases we had nurses and other clinicians run around the hospital, identifying patients, giving pieces of paper to doctors, saying, "Oh, by the way, your patient fulfils low-risk criteria, you could switch him from an IV antibiotic to an oral antibiotic and send them home," when traditionally, they might have stayed for another few days or maybe even longer. And we ran these programs, we found that it was highly effective. And not only did it reduce the length of stay and reduce total cost, but when we followed up with these patients, they actually did quite well and they were quite satisfied, so... The less time you can spend in a hospital's always good.
05:05 Pete: Yeah, for sure.
05:06 DR: People were having a good time just finding that, hey, you know what, this is something that provided value to just the patient, the health system. And that really got me thinking about how do I start scaling this, because you can't have a person run around the hospital with every piece of information. It really has to be automated. So working with some colleagues, we put together some software that ultimately became a company, and this company got acquired by Cerner, which is a large healthcare information technology company, and next thing I know, I'm in the middle of implementing EHRs across the country and even the globe. And so seeing patients half the time and working with technology was my life work for quite a bit of the early part of my career. And I learned a lot, I learned a lot about how technology is an enabler. It really helps us to be able to achieve some of the goals. But it was really predominantly focused on the inpatient and in-clinic experience. And so I started thinking about, what about outside of the hospital? Could we actually start engaging patients and family members in a more effective manner than simply just sending them a text reminder or giving them access to the patient portal?
06:30 DR: And so what we started thinking about as an industry was this whole category called digital health and connected care. And there were many consumer companies that were looking to get into the space, Apple would be a good one, but also Samsung. And I had an opportunity to talk to folks at Samsung, shared a bit about what I was interested, in terms of where I wanted to take technology, and they shared a similar vision, so it was kind of a great match, and they asked me to be their chief medical officer. For six years I was Chief Medical Officer at Samsung. And during those time periods of working at Cerner and the electronic health world and also working at Samsung I kinda got a chance to experience both ends of the spectrum in terms of what clinicians experience and what patients do. And that bridge was something that I was looking to find a way to make it more seamless, more ubiquitous, which really brought me to Microsoft because of the fact that with its enterprise cloud infrastructure ability for us to be able to have those communications, data communicating also now more freely within the electronic health records space into using HO7 fire standards into a common platform. We could do a lot more than what we were currently doing, and that really is the opportunity for all of us to start thinking about how technology can help us achieve some of the outcomes.
07:51 Pete: Yeah, it's fascinating. I think it's... You can imagine healthcare is one of the great data science challenges we have, there's such a massive amount of information and knowledge base, and like you were saying, the knowledge and the way people are treated and the treatment plans kind of vary, and having access to all of the knowledge collectively and having all the data analyzed. I'm a big Fitbit Versa fan myself, and the measure itself is a pretty key part of my regimen. And especially in people that are not doing too well being able to have all of that data accessible from edge devices and being able to basically get to the right outcomes and treatment plans is pretty, pretty critical stuff. You can't think of too many more purpose-driven business outcomes than that. So that's amazing. It must be... And you're... I know when I joined Microsoft, the first two years, people said it takes two years to find the bathroom at Microsoft, 'cause it... There's so much going on.
08:54 Pete: So you're a year into it, and of course, and we'll talk about the obvious elephant in the room here, you've been in the middle of helping us steer through this pandemic, probably halfway through your first year. So that must have been quite a challenge to sort of come on board and then sort of this all happened, right? Can you give us a little insight as to what was that like, how did that sort of ramp up for you?
09:22 DR: Yeah when I joined Microsoft, I guess there are two chapters or two parts to my time at Microsoft. The first six months were essentially spent working very closely with our partners, our clients, implementing the technologies, the cloud-based technologies to help them achieve some of their business goals, and then when COVID hit and it really started in... For us in January, I know December was probably one of the first times we started hearing about this in China, but we have colleagues, we have Microsoft folks that work in China, and we were very concerned about their health and what was going on. And then when it continued to spread throughout the country and then to other parts of South East Asia, we realized that this was something that was gonna require a pretty coordinated effort within Microsoft around this. Turns out that my background as a physician is in infectious disease. I was actually an AIDS physician during the time, during the AIDS epidemic, and I was seeing patients that were fairly young, healthy individuals that would deteriorate in a rather short time period, and then succumb to the illness. Today there are so many parallels, you're seeing this affect so many young, as well as older individuals, we're seeing a need for public health and also a need for us to be able to accelerate the time to research to vaccine and treatments.
11:00 DR: We never developed a vaccine for AIDS, but we did come up with a treatment that in many ways has allowed us to be able to better control that. And so with that as sort of a backdrop, I was asked to serve as the international coordinator for Microsoft's COVID-19 response, and that was an incredible opportunity to understand really all the different groups within Microsoft that touch the different countries that interface with the governments and the non-government agencies, and what we as a large technology company can do to lean in. That involves providing software cloud services, AI skills and resources, and in many ways, that was our first response to how we could address the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, or I should say when the infections started appearing in the States, particularly in the Kirkland area, near Seattle, that really hit home for many of us in the Microsoft family, because that's where our offices are, our main headquarters are. So yeah. You remember very well.
12:08 DR: And that, during that time, we were recognizing that we needed to do more than just simply provide our technologies, we needed to innovate, we needed to solve some of these problems. So in working with organizations like Providence Health System, we customized our chatbots and made them COVID-19 specific screening and triage tools. We tied it directly to portals that could allow for virtual care assessments, and then tied it into lab testing, we built out mechanisms to provide food services and other types of critical supplies to people that were quarantined at home. We started investigating how we could work through collaboratives to better enable exchange of data and promote the development of a variety of different types of solutions, or I should say ways for us to be able to procure critical supplies such as personal protective equipment.
13:05 DR: And so that process was an extraordinary time. We partnered with companies like GE Healthcare to create virtual ICUs to enable multiple patients to be managed by a single trained clinician. And we started spending a lot of time thinking about treatment. We were thinking about how AI and a variety of other tools can be used to help accelerate the pace of discovery both from a scientific R&D perspective as well as clinical trial recruitment. And so, this has been an incredible journey for us.
13:36 Pete: Yeah, I think, I was looking at the recent Inspire conference and some of the talks there going on and Satya was saying that we've sort of advanced... In two months, we sort of advanced about two years worth of innovation in the time of great crisis. Throughout history, it's sort of a potential real accelerant for a lot of historic inevitables, so we were on the certain trajectory. A separate topic, but online learning and other things, that was sort of a thing that was nascent to be experimented with, and then all of a sudden, it was sort of like, we're all gonna do it now at the same time.
14:14 DR: Yup.
14:14 Pete: Same with a lot of the, obviously, remote collaboration that we're doing. So I can imagine in the healthcare space, you had been working for a long time on the whole digital transformation of healthcare. And now because of the pandemic, we've had to really accelerate a lot of that stuff and really bring to bear a lot of the technologies we were kind of trying out and really sort of making them much more mainstream a lot more quickly. And I know before this particular chat, I was mentioning to you about where... We've been involved recently in how do we take some of the techniques we've done for retail in terms of supply chain management in a typical store, and how do we apply that to healthcare facilities so they can understand their supply of PPE and other things and how can we automate that using a lot of the edge AI as well as cloud capabilities that we would have in a typical grocery store.
15:09 Pete: And so, we're seeing all of this stuff just sort of happen, and obviously, because of the pandemic, there's obviously an underlying urgency that we need to cooperate and innovate as fast as possible. So that must be... I can imagine, I always ask people when they say like, "You come in the morning, you have a cup of coffee. And then what happens?" I can imagine in your job, you have a cup of coffee and then there's probably about 2000 emails in your inbox.
15:38 DR: A lot of times these emails are things that have a direct relevance to what we're seeing and living today. So for instance, much of what I've been focusing on recently have been things that just return to work and return to school. These are topics that we know are of high importance to many individuals, technology can play an important role. But in the setting of a pandemic, almost everything has to be done with health and public safety and mechanisms that will allow us to be able to suppress and/or make sure that the infection doesn't get out of control. So there's just an interesting... I guess, a collision course between how healthcare has now touched every single vertical, whether it's retail like you're describing, whether it's manufacturing.
16:28 Pete: Yeah, hospitality.
16:29 DR: And now education, hospitality. And it's been, I think, a learning experience for all of us 'cause we're now starting to realize that this pandemic isn't gonna go away simply by providing some of the existing technology. We're gonna have to sort of out-think it, build the strategies to get faster delivery of or the maturation of our R&D so we learn what works. A great example would be convalescent plasma. We knew that this work for other types of conditions, but to enable this to be something that we could use more widely, there are two factors, and it all boiled down to one, really. We need more convalescent plasma. We need more donors. More donors for the studies and more donors for the actual... I guess, the convalescent plasma that could potentially be delivered and transfused into patients. And that has gotten us refocused on what can technology do to help clinical trial recruitment or donor recruitment.
17:39 DR: It's funny, because I don't think that in the past, if I would have thought, what is it that will accelerate the research and the ability, that I would have landed on that being sort of one of the critical pieces, but it is. And that's one of the things that we're starting to recognize that sometimes, we're surprised in what is actually the critical piece.
18:00 Pete: Yeah. And one of the other interesting by-products, I think, of this, and I know when we sit down at dinner every night with my teenage kids, we talk about the news of the day and this is inevitably is a topic. And at least one of the things I think that's been, I guess, positive out of this is we're not only innovating like crazy to out-think this, as you said, but we're also becoming a lot more educated around data science. And people are now able to talk about numbers and analyze data and talk about our values and really be a lot more analytical in understanding data. And I think that's just good, that's just good for everything moving forward. And again, sort of accelerating that trend where now, everyone has to become pretty fluent in understanding statistics and data and be able to talk about it in a rational way, regardless of whether you're a high school student or a technology professional. So I think it'll be fascinating to see down the road how much of the accelerations stick, some of the new habits and practices and skills that we're building and things that we're doing together stick as more permanent. So yeah, it's fascinating.
19:18 DR: Yeah, absolutely.
19:19 Pete: I saw Bill Gates on CNN last night. It's always great to see Bill G., as we like to call him around here, talking about vaccines, hot topic, and I think it's going to be... It's gonna become kind of the next chapter of the story at some point as we get into that phase. And there's a couple of factors there, obviously, there is the development and the new techniques to develop vaccines that are being pioneered right now. Obviously then the logistics of manufacture and distribution, right? Which is gonna be interesting. And I think the last time we talked, when we didn't record, but it was fascinating, 'cause you were talking about the paradox of supply and demand with vaccines, right? Like how to make sure we make enough. Make sure there's enough demand to take the vaccine, but also make sure we have enough supply to get it out.
20:14 DR: Well, one of the strange things that we've realized is that, and it ties into what your earlier statement around how we're becoming far more educated, but at the same time, we're also recognizing that not everyone believes the facts. And because of that, education and our ability for us to engage people to help them understand their concerns and to be able to then create greater awareness programs, adoption programs is so critical. So with regards to vaccines, it's very possible that we may have folks that need it that will refuse it. And what we wanna do is we wanna get ahead of that, we know that there's certain groups that this would be of highest importance, these are age groups, demographics such as ethnicity, comorbidities, those are individuals for whom this should be in all likelihood, be prioritized first. Just given the fact that they're the ones who actually probably will need it the most to prevent the biggest... To have the biggest impact, which is death. At the same time they may be the ones least likely to respond to it.
21:24 DR: So we're kind of like in this... It's always a double-edged sword. We're kinda recognizing who needs it, but they may not want it, they may not respond to it, we may need to actually do a second booster, how do we actually do proper and fair allocation of this? Many of these things, hopefully, it'll be a problem that we can address soon because to have a vaccine would be so important, but again, with every step along the way, we're realizing that there's some challenges.
21:56 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I recall actually, when I was very young, we had the swine flu vaccines and we had to... I don't know how old I was, but I do remember going with my family and a big, big crowd, I don't know, it was big gymnasiums or something like that, and there was a huge long line. And we all lined up for our swine flu vaccines in the arm. And yeah, I mean, there's obviously a double-edged sword of the information distribution, which is fantastic, and everyone has the opportunity to be informed; at the same time with social media and other things, people have the opportunity to be misinformed, and so there's a lot of challenges out there. I'd heard some statistic, something like the seasonal flu vaccine only has about an uptake of about in the 40% range. Even though it's pretty well established that that is a really good way to prevent the flu and we've all had the flu. It's pretty nasty.
22:48 Pete: And for some people it can be deadly. So I think that'll be another thing is like how do we use technology to help people, like you said, kind of understand what's gonna be healthy for them and also help them feel comfortable taking that step forward to invest in their health, which ultimately is all of our healths, it's the kind of the fact that we all need to protect each other from this virus and getting people educated on that. So that'll be sort of the next wave and like you said, it can't come soon enough, I guess, as we see this thing unfolding.
23:25 DR: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's the one key lesson learned from this pandemic, is that this is not anything that one individual or one organization can solve, it's gonna require a coordinated community effort around this to both protect us as well as to get through it.
23:42 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Definitely. Well, we always say IoT is a team sport, but in the case of the COVID-19, it kinda takes it to a whole other level. Right?
23:51 DR: Right. Absolutely.
23:53 Pete: Fantastic. Well, David, I don't wanna take up too much of your time, like I said, this is the second time we've had this conversation. So but I really appreciate... Any kind of final thoughts or things that our listeners should be aware of in terms of what you're working on here at Microsoft or what they should be doing to help themselves?
24:12 DR: Well, one of the things that I'm most proud about is that Microsoft is taking a very... I'd say a very important position of their role and responsibility in the community and the world. We look at us as responsible corporate citizens, we have to do what we can lean in to help address the COVID-19 crisis. Innovate as quickly as possible through partnerships, but also address other issues that we face today. This could be everything from racial injustice, societal issues, such as... And also environmental issues. And what we have found is that these are all interconnected, where healthcare used to be about just simply a medical condition and treating it, what we realized that the most significant factors in many cases, have to do with what we'll refer to as social determinants of health. Your income, your education, where you live, the foods that you eat, and your ability to afford those foods. The people that you are socializing with or not socializing with, these are all... It's an interconnected world, and healthcare is becoming interconnected in so many different ways, so as we think holistically about how we improve one's health and well-being, it'll probably touch on things that we never even envisioned in the past.
25:39 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. You're right, it is a holistic approach that we need to take and we are much more connected probably than we ever imagined. So good. Good stuff. Well, David, again, thank you so much for your time, appreciate it. And I'll see you around.
25:55 DR: Thanks, Pete.
25:56 Pete: Okay, thanks.
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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, we speak with Lilac Ilan and have an interesting conversation about her journey from the Federal Reserve to AT&T where she is the Assistant Vice President of IoT. We talk about how finding the right mix in a team helps diversify ideas and how that can make you successful in any environment but especially IoT. Then we delve into AT&T's work in the 5G space. We find out how combining the efficiency and power of 5G with AI and edge computing means lower cost, improved safety, and higher ROI through digital transformation.
Tune in and hear about all that, and more, on this latest episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast.
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In this second of our two-part interview with Jeff Torrance, VP of IoT at Qualcomm, we imagine what Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connectivity means for the future of the IoT space. Can you do more with less power? Can you use it to reduce your total cost of ownership because your devices can still perform, but while consuming less? And how might you leverage these advancements for the next couple of decades in the space? Tune in and we'll answer those questions, and more, on this latest episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast.
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In this first part of our two-parter with Jeff Torrance, VP of IoT at Qualcomm, we learn that 5G and IoT go together like peanut butter and chocolate and take some time to talk about what it’s going to look like when they meet in the marketplace. This episode is loaded with learnings on how Qualcomm is gearing up to leverage and expand 5G from mobile phone tech to all types of adjacent IoT spaces. We also have an interesting discussion about how 5G will enable a much broader interface with the real world.
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Hot on the heels of the Project Bonsai announcement at Microsoft //build recently, I am joined by Autonomous Drone expert Guada Casuso from Microsoft. We explore her journey from Argentina to Japan to Seattle, the use of drone technology (including chicken teriyaki delivery), and how her team is positioned to develop AI to empower and enable autonomous systems.
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In Part 2 of this 2-parter from The IoT Unicorn Podcast I finish my conversation with Gerhard Loots, who runs Global IoT Solutions at Telstra. In this episode we talk about the use of robots in everyday life, and how 5G IoT is positioned to open doors for its more widespread use by crushing latency, being optimized for machine to machine communication, and leveraging massive bandwidth to operate smoothly.
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In Part 1 of this two-part episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, I talk to Gerhard Loots, who runs Global IoT Solutions at Telstra, about our earliest IoT experiences back in the 70's and 80's, why Black-screen monitoring might be the future of asset tracking, and friction driving IoT innovation in Australia.
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