What is the current state of the IoT market and where can we expect things to go? Nick talks to Mark Thirman, Global Distributed Cloud and Edge Leader at IBM, about pushing the edge and the future of IoT.
Transcript
Intro:
You’re listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, swings and misses, lessons learned, and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT Leaders be your guide to IoT, digital transformation, and innovation. Let’s get into the show.
Nick Earle:
So Mark, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast.
Mark Thirman:
I’ve been waiting all of my life for this one opportunity to be an IoT Leader. I’ve been an IoT follower for all these years!
Nick Earle:
Yeah. Well, maybe I’ll ask you the question at the end of this, in about 40 minutes or whether it was worth it. And just to explain to our listeners, so Mark, as a new title, so I’m going to read it out here.
Nick Earle:
He is the Global Distributed Cloud and Edge Leader for IBM, which is very impressive Mark. And I know you’re based in the Boston, Massachusetts area, and we’re going to get into all of that: what it means, your role, relationship with Eseye, where you think the market is right now, and where we’re going to go in the future.
Nick Earle:
But before we do that, one thing I always like to do on these podcasts is have the audience get to know the guests. So, here’s the opening opportunity. So can you give us all just a brief potted history of Mark Thirman? Let’s just say-
Mark Thirman:
I mean, I’m the man, the myth, the legend.
Nick Earle:
The man, the myth, the legend, college onwards in a brief period of time.
Mark Thirman:
First of all, thanks very much truly for having me on. I’ve watched several others of these podcasts and as you know, because you’re a guest on my podcast.
Nick Earle:
That’s right.
Mark Thirman:
Podcasts have really taken off. And I think they’re a very valuable way to convey in a conversational manner what’s going on or ideate on the topic. So I think this is a great thing to do and I do appreciate being invited.
Mark Thirman:
My college education was all around being a piano performance major as I think we’ve talked about informally, which was absolutely no use for what I’m doing now.
Mark Thirman:
During and since college, what I’ve been doing is working for a number of, not only startups, but large technology in telco firms, including a startup or two that I’ve done. I managed to… I believe I added up…
Mark Thirman:
I’ve raised about $24-25 million either as the primary or as the secondary contributor for multiple startups back in the day when $22 to $25 million was real money.
Mark Thirman:
So I was the founder and CEO of a company back about 20 years ago called Airprint Networks, which we took from cradle to neutral exit, which was all around… And it was an IoT company. It was all around secure document management, leveraging printers as an endpoint pre-smart phone. We brought on a team of folks ex Polaroid, where I’d also worked.
Mark Thirman:
Following that I worked for GTE Internetworking, which was acquired by Verizon. GTE was, or what was GTE Internetworking was interesting because it was the company that brought in Bolt Beranek and Newman, BB&N, which aside from all the US political jokes around politicians inventing the internet actually was the firm that lit up the first internet connections.
Nick Earle:
Not Al Gore and Dennis-
Mark Thirman:
Not Al Gore.
Nick Earle:
No.
Mark Thirman:
Definitely not Al Gore. It was a bunch of very smart people. And you could read about it in a book from New York Times, author Katie Hafner called Where Wizards Stay Up Late. A lot of those folks literally turned on the first east to west node and I ended up working at that company until its acquisition.
Mark Thirman:
I was at Vodafone where I looked after our Verizon partnership and was given a few other responsibilities to the lead teams in working with the channels and working with other operators like our friends at TELUS in Canada.
Mark Thirman:
Then I did my own consultancy working with Amazon Web Services, and market and data analytics firm, and a few other firms for a number of years doing thought leadership and IoT global strategy, began engaging with IBM and came on full time at the beginning of last year, so January, 2021, looking after Connected Edge strategy in the consulting group.
Mark Thirman:
And as I think you kind of touched on, I’ve just this week moved into the Cloud group looking after, again, Connected Edge and working with industrial and telco and other sectors.
Mark Thirman:
Now, the thing I’ll highlight is that IBM has been in the IoT business for a long time. We’ve had an IoT platform called Watson IoT and other things, but we’ve been categorizing IoT in different ways and we can certainly iterate on this, but Edge is the IBM word. It stands for IoT and other things.
Mark Thirman:
And what I’m learning, and again, we can talk about it because a size is all about connecting things at the Edge is that the definition of Edge has expanded, but that’s me.
Mark Thirman:
The other thing I had mentioned is in addition to my work life, I work very closely in the academic world with a number of groups. I am a guest lecturer at Tufts University, which is top university here in the Boston area.
Mark Thirman:
I’ve been the chairman of the Connected Things Conference, which we run annually at MIT, eight, nine years of that. I’ve given guest lectures at MIT as well, at Boston University, at University of Southern California, believe it or not in the medical school because we’re talking about connecting medical devices.
Mark Thirman:
So, this is a topic and a subject area that I enjoy talking about. I find it very valuable. I’m also an IBM speaker, so I get to speak at major conferences. So where you and I saw each other last in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress-
Nick Earle:
At Mobile World Congress, you’re a busy boy as we say over here.
Mark Thirman:
I was very busy, spoke, I think four times.
Nick Earle:
Yeah.
Mark Thirman:
So, I’m a frequent offender on the speakers circuit as well. Oh, lastly, if you’ll allow it. I also host a podcast with my partner called Failure – the Podcast.
Mark Thirman:
And at some point, hopefully soon, the Nick Earle debut on Failure – the Podcast, which is an informal, not technology focused podcast will emerge from editing.
Nick Earle:
Yeah, I was going to say I have already recorded it. I came off the phone and said to my wife… She said, “How was it?” I said, “I have no idea what just happened.”
Nick Earle:
Let me just say, and I mean this in a complimentary way, let me just say, I’m hoping to apply a little more structure to this podcast but it was great fun.
Nick Earle:
With that sort of background, I mean, boy, you did very well to squeeze that into about two minutes. You do have a very varied and sort of going across different parts of the IoT world and computing and et cetera, et cetera.
Nick Earle:
So that leads me into really asking you the first question as we get into this, which is: from an IoT perspective, and we’re going to get into the IBM side of things, but from an IoT perspective, many of us, myself included, have been involved 10, 15, I mean even M2M, I mean-
Mark Thirman:
SCADA.
Nick Earle:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, the factory floor automation. I mean, we can go back 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, and we’ll probably stop there but… Although we could go back further.
Nick Earle:
So where are we? I mean, where do you think the market is right now? Because so many people have said they want to do this, but so few people have succeeded relative to the potential of this that we’ve been aware of for so long.
Mark Thirman:
So first of all, the term IoT, Internet of Things, that actually emerged from the MIT Media Lab where I run my conference. A guy called Kevin Ashton is credited with coining the phrase and it’s worth looking up how he came up with it. But I’ll note and he’s quoted widely on this topic. It was about 22 years ago when he came up with that.
Mark Thirman:
He notes that… He actually came up with it very quickly to put a title on a PowerPoint deck that he was doing. And at that point, the term internet was sexy. So, he thought if I put internet… Okay, Internet of Things, that’s what-
Nick Earle:
No. All right, I never heard that story. So, was that the time Nicholas Negroponte was running the MIT?
Mark Thirman:
It was actually.
Nick Earle:
Yeah. Because I remembered that from back in the day. So he basically wanted a catchy title for… So this whole industry that we’re in, came out of a guy wanting something that was cool and sexy for a title.
Mark Thirman:
Right. And I’m fond of saying that Internet of Things, it doesn’t necessarily mean things on the internet and actually…
Mark Thirman:
I don’t want to back into what a side does, but I recall from our many technical conversations that in many cases, most cases, you don’t want your things on the internet. And I know your technology-
Nick Earle:
We actually say we don’t terminate on the internet because it’s-
Mark Thirman:
That’s right.
Nick Earle:
You need encrypted data, APNs. And so, it’s actually things not on the internet. It’s just not as catchy an acronym, is it?
Mark Thirman:
That’s right. And I know when we were at Vodafone, we switched over from M2M, machine to machine, to IoT because that became sort of the term of art of that era. So I’m talking about eight, nine years ago.
Mark Thirman:
Initially, when I started at Vodafone, we called it Vodafone M2M. Now it’s called Vodafone IoT. So, I think the… And I think a lot of folks have a problem, and I’ll get into your question, with the use of the term IoT because they still think that it’s just a visible thing accessible off the internet.
Mark Thirman:
And if you’ve put your things on the internet, little pro tip, you’ve failed because it will be seen quickly and compromised. So the professional implementations are not accessible on the internet, the so-called internet.
Nick Earle:
That is a really good way of looking at it actually, because I think it helps explain something that we have talked about on previous podcasts. And I know you’ve spoken about as well, is that people think that, “Oh, well, it is the internet of things and I already have a thing that I can connect to the internet, it’s called my cell phone. So, actually it’s just things with a SIM card in, and that are connected to the internet.”
Nick Earle:
And that’s exactly what it isn’t because it just doesn’t work. It’s one of the principal reasons why adoption has been held back because it is nowhere near as just putting a seminar in a device. And anyway, those devices have all had millions of dollars have been spent on them to pre-design them, to certify them, et cetera, et cetera. And most people-
Mark Thirman:
That’s right.
Nick Earle:
… in their own hardware. So you would say from an adoption point of view, does that mean that, as the Americans would say, we’re at the bottom of the first, bottom of the second, which for non Americans is a baseball term?
Mark Thirman:
Well, for some of us Americans, I don’t even know the baseball terms but I will… That’s not my thing but-
Nick Earle:
Three chasm.
Mark Thirman:
Yes. There was a book that came out by a guy called Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm, 91 timeframe. And I actually had the opportunity to meet him a number of years ago at a conference. Actually I met him and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who’s known as a famous TV sex therapist, at the same time-
Nick Earle:
Where are you going here, Mark? There could be children.
Mark Thirman:
This is as far as we’re going to go. Don’t worry. But I do recall-
Nick Earle:
The first parents that are sex therapist on the IoT Leader podcast, by the way, this one.
Mark Thirman:
And he’s about three feet tall and he’s a regular sized human. But I saw him present at a conference and I was fortunate to have dinner with the two of them together. And it was the most interesting dinner. I mean, I recall it 25 years later.
Mark Thirman:
But he wrote a book and several books actually on the topic of the technology adoption cycle and we’ve all seen it. It’s a curve. And then he’s got a little piece cut out after the second segment and he calls that the chasm.
Mark Thirman:
And he’s identified, as I call properly, that chasm is where a lot of products or a lot of offerings sort of stop. They get stuck in the chasm.
Mark Thirman:
He taught me a shortcut, which I’ve remembered also to this day to remembering the technology adoption cycle. Look it up for those listening and watching, but the shortcut is: why, try, buy, fly, and die.
Mark Thirman:
And this is true. I got this from Geoffrey Moore, so I’m sure he’s presented it publicly, but I recall it. I’ve written it down.
Mark Thirman:
So, where are we? Your question is where are we in the IoT adoption cycle? I think we’re in the beginning of the third segment, which I’ve identified as the buy segment.
Nick Earle:
Yes.
Mark Thirman:
I think we’ve had the why, why do I do it?
Nick Earle:
Why, not the why for a while.
Mark Thirman:
Yeah. And I think we’re out of that. I know you’ve written and spoken extensively on whether or not we’re stalled.
Nick Earle:
Yeah.
Mark Thirman:
And I know you’ve referenced, I think it was Cisco’s numbers, that we’re going to have 50 billion devices. And we’re only at 19 or 23, depending on which analysts you look at.
Nick Earle:
Yeah.
Mark Thirman:
I would contend that we’re at the early part of buy. And I would contend that we’ve crossed the chasm for a variety of reasons. The Edge just become prevalent communication, capabilities are now ubiquitous, cellular is probably still the way to go over WiFi or fixed 5G.
Mark Thirman:
And I’ve just returned from a 5G conference last week that Qualcomm hosted. I’m convinced that 5G, which is an umbrella standard that has underneath it fall back to 4G LTE, and support of Narrow Band and even WiFi, I’m convinced that 5G is really going to drive things.
Mark Thirman:
I forget the number right now, but the vast majority of large telcos globally have adopted or begun to adopt 5G as their path forward. And we’ll see that for a number of years. And I think in the IoT world, you’ve got this notion of massive IoT that a lot of the analysts talk about. I think we’re at the-
Nick Earle:
Just for people listening, like little labels, almost like printable labels for devices so you can track a food, a chocolate bar, small or massive. So instead of 50 million, 500 million or a trillion devices and the data from all of those.
Mark Thirman:
That’s right. And it is all about the data.
Nick Earle:
Graphic behind my head for those of you watching doesn’t mean much for those of you listening. But the idea, for those of you watching is of data from everything in one huge network.
Mark Thirman:
That’s right. So this notion of a temporary device rather than a permanent device, so a printable, flexible device that can go on vaccines to monitor a cold chain type applications.
Mark Thirman:
I mean, the cost of the sensors, the cost of the network, the cost of the underlying nuts and bolts has gone down significantly. Also, there’s a greater understanding out there in the systems’ integration world and the application world that connecting things in order to get interesting data is very important.
Mark Thirman:
I think I just saw a Gartner statistic that’s a year or so old, that says something like 75% of all data will now be processed at the Edge.
Nick Earle:
Edge, yeah.
Mark Thirman:
So you’ve got this migration from all these things that are just blasting data up to the cloud. Now, the clouds come to the Edge and only the things that need to be sent up, the deltas, if you will, I think are being looked at as being sent up to the cloud.
Mark Thirman:
So, this is the shift that we’re seeing. We’re seeing industrial clients and enterprise clients actually get on board and get on board in a big way, which is sort of IBM’s sweet spot is industrial and enterprise. So as a result, we’re teaming up, Nick, with your firm as you know to find ways to help connect things at the Edge.
Nick Earle:
Right. And so, that leads us nicely onto the next big subject, and perhaps I can just comment on the previous one before we go there. There’s nothing new under the sun, as the Italians… What’s an Italian tour guide…
Mark Thirman:
Was that the Italians?
Nick Earle:
Yeah. Nothing new under the sun, nothing new under the sun. And in IoT there’s nothing new because we went from mainframe to mainframes and minis, and then mainframes to minis, to mainframe minis and PCs, and then we added the internet, then we added the mobile phone.
Nick Earle:
All we’ve done is we’ve pushed the definition of the Edge further out, now it’s stings. But each iteration was at least one order of magnitude, greater number of things. And with IoT and massive IoT, it’s arguably two orders, if not three orders of magnitude greater.
Nick Earle:
And at the same time, as you say, the applications move outwards, which means Edge processing and managing applications at the Edge is crucial, where the processing meets the sensors, is absolutely critical.
Nick Earle:
And before we get onto the relationship between IBM and Eseye, you mentioned 5G and you covered a lot of stuff very quickly there, but there’s the whole thing of, everything in a factory will be connected. I mean, literally, oil mine or oil refinery, there could be-
Mark Thirman:
That’s right.
Nick Earle:
There could be 10 million things connected on an oil rig, and there are thousand oil rigs.
Mark Thirman:
Anything and everything, that’s right.
Nick Earle:
Anything and everything. And 5G also means that what today… And I think people get the factory tip, but then you say to them, “Well, but everything that’s in your office could come off WiFi,” and people say I don’t think that’s as well understood that 5G, private 5G networks, will be implemented by large companies.
Mark Thirman:
Yes.
Nick Earle:
And by mobile network operators. But today you’re using a Cisco wireless access point, say, as I am right now for my laptop here in our office, but that’s going over your corporate network.
Nick Earle:
But with 5G, you could well be using a private or public 5G capability for your office so that… Actually, things are going to move from the corporate network into a 5G environment. So it’s not just new deployments at the Edge, it’s existing things like your printer or your laptop could well move.
Nick Earle:
And so orchestrating connectivity between WiFi, private 5G, public 5G, going to the Edge, is going to be a big architectural challenge. And I guess that’s leads to the opportunity for IBM because what we’re talking about here is a, and I’d like your view on this, interested in that; a massive opportunity for companies to re-engineer their business processes, their manufacturing, their supply chain, their warranty process, their data architecture, just a massive opportunity.
Nick Earle:
And I guess from a IBM and particularly IBM consulting, IBM software products, this represents a huge opportunity for IBM, doesn’t it?
Mark Thirman:
Well, I think it does. If you look at factories, factory equipment for decades have been connected within the four walls of a factory, primarily fixed. So cables, ethernet cables, then WiFi, which gave some added flexibility to reconfigure a production line or move equipment around.
Mark Thirman:
What 5G I think is providing is greater flexibility, coupled with greater security. I know from working with and for several telcos, the notion of a managed service offering from telcos is what they do.
Mark Thirman:
I mean, telcos do two or three things really well. And by extension folks like your firm, you provide connectivity, you handle billing, billing is very complex, so you can account for what’s being done, and you provide security.
Mark Thirman:
I can tell you having been at the network operation centers of several large telcos, there are people 7/24/365, making sure that the network is always operational and is as secure as possibly can be.
Mark Thirman:
So I think what’s happening now with 5G is you’ve got this secure, managed capability with massive capacity and faster throughput, lower latency, and lots of flexibility. Not everything has to be full on, let me open the pipe and throw tons of bits at an application.
Mark Thirman:
Some of the massive applications are low data rate applications. Think agriculture, think some light asset tracking work. Every now and then you just need to check in, and that can be accommodated, I think, quite easily with all forms of 5G. Narrow Band or Cat M1 is now part of that as well.
Mark Thirman:
So I think we’ve got some interesting opportunities in the enterprise and in the industrial world. And again, IBM’s sweet spot has been the largest corporations and governmental organizations and industrial clients, all the major factories.
Mark Thirman:
I think all the major corporations, we tend to have some footprint whether it’s just on our IT side where we might be helping with Salesforce or some of the other SAP deployments.
Mark Thirman:
From there to actually helping on the Industry 4.0 side where we’ve got quite a presence.
Nick Earle:
Right. And from our perspective, and as you mentioned at the beginning, the two firms have a pretty close relationship around… go to market in front of clients.
Nick Earle:
And you brought the two areas into it there. You talked about IT and the industrial IT, IoT, and the idea of saying, well, people, large companies in particular, they want a single architecture that takes all this data from the millions of things in the factory, or whatever, the Edge aggregation, so that’s the outside layer, then you’ve got the Edge aggregation. So you may have lower BLE, Bluetooth.
Mark Thirman:
Right.
Nick Earle:
Satellite, lowered satellite, whatever. And you’ve got the sensor information coming into the aggregation device. You’ve got 80% of the applications being processed at the Edge. So you need to manage those applications, which comes back to IBM capabilities, such as extension of Red Hat to the Edge and Docker, Kubernetes, application management at the Edge; network function virtualization at the Edge.
Nick Earle:
And then you’ve got the back wall of it over cellular into the IoT architecture. But before you get there, you’ve got the hybrid cloud interface where people will have a world of many clouds.
Mark Thirman:
Well, and we have something called cloud satellite, which is not satellite like the things in the sky, that help manage and orchestrate workloads between on-premise workloads and the hyperscalers and IBM’s zone cloud.
Mark Thirman:
So we have some interesting capabilities to containerize everything, leveraging a lot of cool IBM technology. And I’m not even sure if people realizes that IBM continues to be a very innovative company that is really at the forefront, especially we own Red Hat. We’ve been doing quite a lot with them, even though they run as an independent enterprise.
Mark Thirman:
But all those technologies are available to us to help solve problems. And that’s what we’re here to do is to be essential and solve client problems, ultimately.
Nick Earle:
Yeah. And that’s what I was getting at because just describing it at a very high level, the way I described that network architecture, on the one hand it’s complex, because it’s fragmenting and it’s sort of like the big bang theory. I mean, it’s the universe expanding and new planets forming, and you have to have an architecture model and policy from the center to the Edge. You have to have network level SDN, Software-Defined Networking capabilities.
Nick Earle:
On the one hand, it’s really complex and you can see people say, “Oh, my word, it’s too complex. I won’t cross the chasm. I’ll wait on the left bank if you like.”
Nick Earle:
On the other hand, if you have a partner that can put an architecture together, end to end, that says, “Look, this is how you can take advantage of this,” the opportunities for efficiency in creating new experiences for customers are absolutely huge.
Nick Earle:
And our own view is that we’re an enabler of that. But actually from a customer point of view, a lot of the big projects will be driven by global systems integrators and especially people who have deep technical knowledge as you’re pointing out that you have.
Nick Earle:
I mean, it’s not just Red Hat, but the software portfolio, and the tens of billions of dollars that you do as a company with the largest corporations in the world are tremendous assets to enable people to move and embrace this world, which is part of the, what did he call it? The “buy” phase.
Nick Earle:
If the big companies can get across that chasm, and we agree, we talked about this in previous podcasts, we agree that we’re into…
Nick Earle:
We’ve said, once you enable interoperability around a common standard, you hit the inflection point of adoption. And I think that’s where we are and that’s eSIM or eUICC that we talked about previously.
Mark Thirman:
That’s right. Well, because Nick, I’ll interject, eSIM gives corporations control.
Nick Earle:
Yes.
Mark Thirman:
And that’s a key element. That’s what they want. That’s what I think the missing piece was, to allow us to cross the chasm was giving an enterprise or an industrial firm control over how they communicate, what providers…
Mark Thirman:
And again, I’m sure you’ve talked about this on many other podcasts but the notion of providing control from trusted partners is really what’s going to get us…
Mark Thirman:
We’re already beyond the chasm, I agree with that, which is, I think the buy phase. Why, try, buy phase; buy, I think Geoffrey Moore called the early majority, if I recall the proper term for this cycle.
Mark Thirman:
That’s going to last us, I think a very long time because we’re beyond experimentation, we’re beyond POCs. I’m sure you’ve talked about POC hell for the technology vendor community. I think we’re beyond POCs.
Mark Thirman:
We’re actually onto deployments. I mean, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it today that we’re now deploying. But the other thing I want to comment on very, very quickly is what IBM’s also good at.
Mark Thirman:
We’re we’ve got systems integration capabilities, fantastic technology, unbelievable research. I forget how many PhD researchers we have in IBM Research. And I know we’re the largest filer of patents globally, but we’re also very good at partnering.
Mark Thirman:
So we’ve got large partnerships, all of which have been announced in the past with very key firms. And IBM I think realizes rightly that, especially in IoT, this is a team sport, no one firm has all of the answers.
Mark Thirman:
For example, we didn’t have a connectivity capability. To me, to get into really scaling up Connected Edge capability… or Connected Edge deployments, you need the connected part.
Nick Earle:
Yeah, exactly. If your TV doesn’t receive the signal, it doesn’t matter. You can’t watch anything.
Mark Thirman:
Well, because we’re waiting for the thing to be connected in order to do all the other wonderful things. So again, I think it’s made some sense for our two companies to team up, to go pursue very large opportunities or IoT opportunities in enterprise and in the industrial segment to kind of move things along quickly, solve the problem; in the cases where firms want to work with their existing commercial arrangement with other operators, we can accommodate that through your platform.
Mark Thirman:
And I think that’s kind of the right messaging. I think the right stuff is, let’s go get this thing done. We’ve got all the capabilities. We give you the control and we’ve got a simplified approach to the market.
Nick Earle:
And that little phrase you just used there, we give you the control, sometimes it’s hard to see the wood from the trees and see what the pattern is because we’re so close to it. Sometimes you miss… I just said…
Nick Earle:
Thinking of the tree, have you seen that video where the guys bouncing the basketball and the gorilla walks across the screen, and then you say to people afterwards, “Did you see the gorilla?” You tell them to count the basketball bounces and the gorilla walks, waves at the camera, and walks after it. It’s a very famous video. And then you say to them, “Did you see the gorilla?” And like 90% of people didn’t see the gorilla.
Nick Earle:
And I use that as an analogy of sometimes you’re so close to things and you’re concentrating on things, you miss the really big thing. And I think-
Mark Thirman:
That’s right.
Nick Earle:
…the really big thing is a technology enabled shift of power in the… For years and years and years the game or the business model, the ecosystem was essentially a series of proprietary stacks.
Nick Earle:
You said you worked for Vodafone, fantastic company. We work very closely with Vodafone, but Vodafone have a proprietary system with the proprietary NZ as does every 820 mobile network operators.
Nick Earle:
And so, the control of the switch, the RSP, the Remote SIM Provisioning was essentially controlled by the person who’s got their SIM into your device first.
Nick Earle:
The gorilla in my analogy is that the moment you then say, what if the enterprise controlled the switch, and what if SIM was agnostic but could connect to anybody? And our model of course is not roaming as you know but is around the ability to currently localize onto 14 mobile network operators by a user control switch.
Nick Earle:
So it’s a fundamental shift of control or power from a series of proprietary stacks to a model where a user says, “Well, I want to do my own IoT and I want to do 5G, 4G down to Narrow Band. And I actually want control of the switch. Could I have control of the switch?” And so I can set my own rules.”
Mark Thirman:
That’s right.
Nick Earle:
And eSIM in the UICC enables that. And as you rightly say, that is probably… I think when we look back, people will draw these charts and they’ll say, “Oh, it really took off the inflection point.” And they’ll talk about COVID and whatever.
Nick Earle:
But they’ll say from a technology point of view, when we’d enabled true interoperability between operators, agnostic interoperability or federated orchestration, and at the same time gave users the control over the switch, this is the point at which the market really exploded. And certainly that’s our belief and our philosophy.
Nick Earle:
So, we could talk for hours. I wanted to just go to another area, which is… Okay. So let’s assume for the moment that we’ve just crossed the chasm, we’re into the people who are going to main street, the tornado, Geoffrey Moore puts the tornado.
Mark Thirman:
He also talked about gorillas. He had one called I think The Gorilla Game.
Nick Earle:
He did. Yeah. When I was based in the US, I got to know Geoff really, really well. And I think, there were about three of them, brilliant guy still practicing. In fact, one of our shareholders is Eseye runs TCG the chasm group in EMEA.
Mark Thirman:
Well, if you talk to Geoffrey, ask him about the Dr. Ruth dinner. He’ll remember it.
Nick Earle:
Okay. Well, let’s not tell that story on this podcast. I never know where you’re going to go.
Mark Thirman:
There’s nothing incendiary about that. Just she’s an awfully nice lady. I won’t go through the topic.
Nick Earle:
Okay. Dr. Ruth. Well, I’ll ask our shareholder to ask us Geoff. But where I was going to go is around, where’s it going to go? If you assume that there’s a technology enabler, essentially enables the shift of power choice to the user and interoperability, which drives on costs an increased choice. So, around a common standard, eUICC, so that’s great.
Nick Earle:
So finally, finally, after 20-30 years, we got that component. We cross the chasm, and you start to get massive adoption. The question then, the mass option is a long curve. Not just because there’s tens of millions, billions of things that will be connected, but because you then start to be able to do things other than just things as such. So for instance, you mentioned robots, but again, we… And we mentioned-
Mark Thirman:
Drones.
Nick Earle:
Yeah. Well, I was saying, we mentioned candy bar rappers as you call it, sweet rappers, but then you start thinking about, yeah drones, for example. I mean, it literally is everything being connected. So, what’s your view on that
Mark Thirman:
Yeah. So my idea-
Nick Earle:
in a few years time?
Mark Thirman:
Yeah. So, we’ve got new ingest points. Now, the Edge now has legs, if you will. The Edge has wings. Those are kind of two ways to look at. The Edge actually can swim.
Mark Thirman:
I’ve now been working on projects around ingesting data from these new kinds of moving sensors. So underwater you’ll have UAVs, underwater drones that are able to compile data relevant to whatever the industry is that has stuff underwater. We’re seeing quite a lot of…
Mark Thirman:
IBM’s done quite a lot with Boston Dynamics who have this wonderful robot called Spot. You can hear all about it or read all about it. If you come to a major conference in IBM as a stand, you can assume that there’ll be a yellow robot walking around. Because it’s a very big engagement for us or very big pursuit.
Mark Thirman:
And then we’re looking at drones now. One of the panels I was on in Barcelona was a drone panel. And key companies are now wanting to do things like inspect infrastructure, inspect bridges, inspect buildings.
Mark Thirman:
Tragically, here in the US roughly a year ago, they had a large building collapse in Miami, Florida. What if one could inspect the building very quickly and easily with a drone that’s tied into IoT ingest points and is able to build a digital twin of the building so that you can kind of take a look without digging into the building itself?
Mark Thirman:
Where are some possible stress factors, if you will? Where are some points where the building might have failures?
Mark Thirman:
So again, this is an extension from… And again, you go way back. A device was connected on a fixed network inside the four walls of the factory or in a vending machine or whatever; the early, early IoT, M2M use cases were.
Mark Thirman:
We now have relatively inexpensive Edge devices that fly, that swim, that perambulate on their own. And that’s something that’s new. This notion that you can take a connected robot that go where humans can’t because it’s dangerous or it’s tedious. I’m thinking nuclear power plants for inspection. I’m thinking places where there might be noxious gasses.
Nick Earle:
Dangerous war zones.
Mark Thirman:
Exactly.
Nick Earle:
Whatever they are.
Mark Thirman:
Yeah. But I’m even just seeing industrial applications where I can see if the gauge is in the wrong spot and send it in and then do something with. It’s more than just a roving camera.
Mark Thirman:
In the case of the Spot robot, you can have an arm on it that can grasp, and turn, and can look at the gauge, notify the human that this thing’s out of the standard and close the leak, if you will.
Mark Thirman:
So there’s some very, very interesting use cases where, again, the Edge now walks, flies, and swims, which is not something you could have said or would’ve said a while back.
Nick Earle:
I like that phrase. I haven’t heard that. And what was going through my mind as we finish off here is, on the one hand, we talk about getting rid of the siloed proprietary stacks, but that’s really on cellular and you virtualize the switch in the cloud, which is what we do.
Nick Earle:
You make it agnostic across all the world’s operators and you say, “Okay. Well, now, everybody can play together through abstracted federated layer.” But then what you say is, “Well, hang on a second. That’s only cellular, Nick. So, that’s public cellular RAP types.” And then you’ve got private, people buying their own spectrum.
Mark Thirman:
Right.
Nick Earle:
Independent companies offering services out with bypassing the mobile network operators. And then you say, “Well, even then that’s only a fraction because you’ve got BLE, you’ve got LoRa.” I would say Sigfox but I think that’s probably faded away, although-
Mark Thirman:
Not so much.
Nick Earle:
Yeah. Not so much, but anyway, you’ve definitely got satellite and there’ll be a lot more of that. And you’ve got things like what Amazon are doing with Sidewalk. And I mean, there’s a whole series of-
Mark Thirman:
Helium is another one.
Nick Earle:
Helium, yeah, which is linked to-
Mark Thirman:
Blockchain, yeah.
Nick Earle:
Blockchain, crypto. So the point is there’s going to be new types of proliferation. And our view is that makes the case even more that you need an abstracted, not just MNO agnostic, but radio access type agnostic-
Mark Thirman:
Yep, absolutely.
Nick Earle:
…in the cloud. Because without that capability, then you’re going to have to, as a user, plug all this stuff in and monitor it and be almost like your own telco because this stuff changes and it doesn’t link together.
Nick Earle:
And so it is going to create new complexities, but new opportunities. But I really… I like that phrase, maybe we should finish on that phrase. So, what did you say? That the Edge… What was the three-
Mark Thirman:
Swim, can walk, and can fly.
Nick Earle:
The Edge can swim, walk and fly. Okay.
Nick Earle:
You heard it here first.
Mark Thirman:
Yeah. Well, it’s the first time I’ve used it, but it occurred to me that that’s the right way to look at it. And again, and I know you want to wrap up, but the state of the art has been around a thing with a connected sensor on it, a pipe, a gauge, a car or whatever, but now these things have grown legs or fins or wings.
Mark Thirman:
And if you want to talk about what is the future right now for IoT, it’s accommodating these moveable Edge sensors that provide even a greater view into the enterprise or into the industrial environments.
Mark Thirman:
And again, it’s shipping tons of data and it’s providing greater insights, which ideally help people offset costs, save money, increase efficiency. And that’s, I think…
Mark Thirman:
What have we been doing during the COVID era? We’ve been coming up with additional ways to make companies more efficient. So, that’s where I think things are headed in the near term.
Nick Earle:
And to put a bow around it. One of the other things that Geoffrey Moore proved, as did lots of people like Jim Collins, Good to Great; and Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, as we’re talking business books, is that every wave of technology enabled business model disruption…
Nick Earle:
So not the technology, but the ability for technology to enable disruption, not only created new opportunity but actually it created a new sets of winners and losers.
Nick Earle:
And I think that’s the tricky thing is that it is not automatic that the leaders of today will be the leaders of tomorrow as these capabilities suddenly become easier, cheaper, faster, smaller.
