2024: The State of the IoT

Peggy Smedley sits down with Ben Rau, Twisthink’s Director of Digital Platforms, to explore what is preventing industries from reaching the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT). While Ben acknowledges the impressive strides made in technology, he highlights that scaling these innovations often poses a significant challenge.

Their conversation delves into specific IoT applications, examining how this technology can be leveraged to address industry-wide problems. They also emphasize the importance of “going slow to go fast” and maintaining a relentless focus on solving the right challenges.

Listen to the full episode recording below.

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Transcript:

Ben Rau: I think that idea of obsessing over solving the customer’s problem and letting that be the guide to what you build and how you build it. You understand your market. You understand the competitive landscape. Think about your business model, think about your costs, think about the holistic solution, and then really focus on solving for that customer’s problem. Right. And with that is your guide. And that is your North Star.

Peggy Smedley: Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show, your Voice for our connected World with your host, Peggy Smedley. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. I’m your host, Peggy Smedley. My next guest is here to talk IoT. Sharing what he thinks is holding back the full realization of IoT potential. We’re talking the Internet of things. We’ll also share some challenges companies face with IoT and some solutions his organization offers in the space. Please welcome Ben Rau, director of digital platforms at Twisthink. Ben, welcome to the show. 

Ben Rau: Thank you very much, Peggy. It’s great to be here. I appreciate the chance to talk today.

Peggy Smedley: I’m delighted to have you on the show, so let’s get right to it. We’ve heard a lot of things about the Internet of Things over the years. In fact, it’s funny, I’m one that criticizes, that talks about we say, well, it was going to hit 50 billion connected devices. And you and I both know the realization of that actually never really hit its promise of that doesn’t mean that the Internet of Things hasn’t lived up to the promise, but the number of this enormous connected devices by 2020, when everybody was talking about it didn’t really happen. But I guess I would love to hear you talk about, because I think you’re a great person to share. What do you think is holding back the full realization when we talk about the Internet of Things, potential, when we talk about it today?

Ben Rau: That’s a great question, Peggy. And I think to your point around scale, right. When you think about a number like 50 billion, right, certainly that’s a massive number. And it’s very to be safe to say we haven’t seen that level of scale achieved. That’s not to say that there’s no success stories in the IoT space either. Right. There has been incredible advancement in technology. There’s growth in off-the-shelf hardware. There’s growth in platforms, in the cloud. There’s growth in your kind of cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, GCP. And certainly there’s a lot there to celebrate in terms of growth and enablement.

And there have been commercial successes for products, both in the consumer space and in the industrial space. But it isn’t easy. There’s so many moving parts. There’s so many portions of activity that are required for these systems to work smoothly together. And there has to be a value proposition. There has to be a problem that you’re solving for the end customer. Tech for tech’s sake, doesn’t help anyone and certainly has a recipe for a long and winding road if you go down that path.

Not to mention as well that there is a cost to connectivity, a cost to the data transfer, and even with 5G propagating out and other technologies from a wireless perspective, there’s certainly a need for managing things carefully and closely. So it’s complicated as maybe the summary statement, but there’s some factors that are influencing for sure.

Peggy Smedley: I’m going to go with the idea that you said I do agree. I think there’s two problems here. I, number one, believe that IoT solves a lot of problems. I think the data that it’s found, I think it’s just that IoT is one of those things that we have to look at what is the problem it’s solving? And when we look at the massive amounts of data that it retrieves, I think we lost its luster when all of a sudden we say AI is the be all, end all, and I know AI can do a lot. And now when we look at it, AI lets you zoom in. It’s like the magnifying glass of IoT because that’s where we’re getting is AI is doing that. But IoT is all about the data. So maybe we need to talk about the specific applications that IoT does, because when we look at that’s where we’re solving those real world problems. Would you not agree?

Ben Rau: Yeah I think that’s a great way to think about it. Right. What are those applications? What are those spaces. And like any technology, certainly there is a hype curve that can set. And you mentioned AI and certainly we’re in the midst of an AI hype curve right now. And it’s not to say that there isn’t real world application. It is a real, real value. But IoT falls into the same camp. And maybe thinking and applying a few different lenses, right? Certainly there’s commercial and customer grade use cases and applications for off smart home. From an automation perspective and things like that.

As a team, we often work with industrial companies who manufacture products. And when you think about industrial, there’s some business outcomes that can provide tremendous amounts of value, right? Maybe it’s predicting failure in a piece of machinery, equipment and avoiding that downtime that’s going to keep an end operator of that equipment from fulfilling their job and walking through things. Sometimes it’s safety and avoiding incidents, right. Because I’m able to get data and intelligence off a piece of equipment that says this is being used in a way that could harm an operator, or could harm someone around that piece of equipment, maybe optimizing and providing kind of those guardrails of, this is the best and most optimal way to operate something. And this specific individual is using it in a different way, and we can optimize their behaviors. Or maybe it’s providing differentiated kind of feature sets and providing intelligence and experiences that wouldn’t necessarily be there without that connectivity.

There’s a lot of different lenses that you can look at that value from. And maybe one other thing to mention here is the idea of thinking about the types of use cases that might make sense. Maybe it’s a high value asset that needs to be monitored. Maybe it’s the device that’s on a factory floor, and it’s part of kind of an environment. You’re trying to create a digital twin of that entire environment. Maybe it’s a device that’s remote that has a lot of time cost for you to go monitor and check in on, and making that intelligence available. There’s a lot of different paths that could go down, but there are real value propositions at the end of those paths. There’s certainly a lot there.

Peggy Smedley: Ben, I think you raise a really good point when we look at these, because we don’t want to be reactive anymore. We want to use predictive analytics. And I think that’s really an important part of it. We’ve seen it all with our smartwatches. We’ve seen it the way that we can improve our tennis game. On a personal side, we’ve seen in how we can use this to look at our health, whatever it might be or run the play floor that you just described from an HDMI perspective or whatever, you know, when a line is going down. So I think there’s such a value proposition that runs the gamut that we’re looking at. I think the best thing for all of us to look at is we’re solving problems that we started our conversation.

But I guess I want to know Twisthink has been running that gamut. When I look at the products that Twisthink started out with to where you work on now it is all over. There’s not just one type of solution you have. From parking lights. When I first met the group to what you do now, I think there’s from the very beginning from helping swimmers a really it’s been all over. Is that correct?

Ben Rau: Yeah, that’s a great point, Peggy. And certainly there’s a lot of deep experiences we’ve had in this space. And it’s funny you mention tennis and swimming. Perhaps we need to come up with a product that helps me with my golf game. I think I could use some improvement there as well, but coming back to Twisthink. Yeah, I think comments around our heritage in electronics and connectivity and in that space is certainly strong. And when you think about IoT and some just different examples of products that have been in that space and continue to be in that space. I’ll just pick out a few and maybe seeking a bit about a warehouse environment. Right. And you have forklifts and you have equipment and you have pedestrians. And how do you ensure safety in that environment for everyone involved in efficiency in that environment. And we worked with an OEM to build technology that uses connectivity and data to avoid collisions and to make that operator experience optimized by allowing them to operate safely with that piece of equipment and also respect their surroundings.

And so that’s maybe one small example, but also thinking about, for instance, the mining environment. And you have trucks, you have vehicles carrying heavy loads and moving through a very interesting set of environmental circumstances. And how do you ensure safety maybe in that context and thinking about CO2 levels in a truck, or thinking about what are safe operating speeds, and how do we have a leadership management team in that environment out of sight able to understand if vehicles are operating effectively and safely or not? And how do we pull that data off of that piece of equipment has its operating there to provide that intelligence, and maybe an additional example would be thinking about more of a fleet of industrial equipment that’s out in the field.

And perhaps it’s performing specific functions to install fiber or, or install piping or to perform other jobs. And how do you get utilization data off that equipment? So you know what fuel usage looks like in when crews are taking breaks and when crews are maybe operating equipment, but it’s not operating to its fullest potential because of some set of circumstances and being able to pull that intelligence together and knowing there as well when equipment’s moving. Right. Do we have a theft circumstance? There’s some really interesting examples we could speak to there of recent examples where GPS data has helped identify a piece of equipment that was moving in the middle of the night, and then track it to its eventual destination, where the police recovered it from because it had been stolen, and being able to use that IoT data for high value assets like that to know how it’s being utilized.

And maybe a last example, a case study that we often referred to involves a nonprofit called charity: water. And there mission is to work on the water crisis in in Africa. And you think about hand pumps that power the water supplies for villages and these remote regions. What’s critical is that those pumps remain operational. That’s a great example of where release of innovative design work was done to design a device that could operate over the cell networks available in those countries to detect the amount of usage these pumps are getting and also optimized for the environmental conditions. Certainly think about 100 plus degree temperatures in the desert, and being able to have batteries with long lives that can power these devices, can uplink data and can direct to them that time spent on maintenance and on servicing these wells to specifically where actions needed, and make sure that water supply stays in a good spot for these in the individuals. Right. The human impact of stories like that are certainly hard to overlook. So just a few examples, and there’s certainly many more from our years of experience, but I appreciate you picking on that a bit. Peggy.

Peggy Smedley: Ben, where we look at the positive with IoT we’ve all seen the challenges. There are many companies who’ve never seen the real benefits come out of IoT like they shouldn’t. What happened? Why were those hurdles and companies spent millions and failed? I want to say it’s industry 1.0 versus industry 4.0 that we’re talking about the second round of IoT. What happened? What were those big mistakes that unfortunately money was, I don’t want to say wasted, but wasn’t as effective as it should’ve been.

Ben Rau: Yeah, that’s a great point in terms of how you approach an IoT project. I think Peggy, there may be a few thoughts in terms of those challenges in the approach. There are times where you can get fixated on the wrong parts of a problem when you start, and I think it’s key to remember, what’s the epicenter of the product, or of the solution that’s going to solve for the customer need. How do you as quickly as possible validate that’s the case, right. So think of a hypothetical example where you need to have a specific kind of sensor that gets a certain reading or threshold. And the whole kind of success of the product hinges on whether that’s going to be able to accurately and predictably sense. Well, you got to start there, get that core of the problem solved. Make sure that works. Iterate your solution. Scope out where from there, right. Don’t start with we need the shell of a mobile app and we need notifications. Start with that core hard part of the problem and then think holistically into the entire solution.

Certainly, things that help companies move quicker along the path. We’d say go slow to go fast mentality as well of having a strong foundation of automation in your dev work and in your least processes and in your testing. And maybe the last point is not overlooking the key importance of kind of the field operations and support side of things. Great. We’ve created a connected device. We’ve sold devices to customers. What about when there’s an issue in the field? How does that support process wake up? How do you correctly give tools to manage and operate the device fleet as it’s pushed out into production? That’s also a key consideration that sometimes is overlooked and can really be a pain point for companies and for organizations. I would add to that, Ben, what do you do when you have less in the team that you’re used to that you had 2 or 3 years ago? Now you’ve cut your staff, you’ve cut your skilled workers, and now you’re down to a skeleton of a team that you need to rely on.

Peggy Smedley: I would add to that, Ben, what do you do when you have less in the team that you’re used to that you had 2 or 3 years ago? Now you’ve cut your staff, you’ve cut your skilled workers, and now you’re down to a skeleton of a team that you need to rely on the right devices to make the right answer so you don’t shut down the line and now you’re wasting millions.

Ben Rau: Yeah, that’s a common scenario, unfortunately. Right where you do see companies with constrained resources and trying to make the most of that. And certainly the complexity and the complication, as I briefly mentioned earlier, is a real constraint. It’s a real concern in these environments because you have the hardware element, you have connectivity, perhaps over Wi-Fi, over cell, over some other technology. You have often a cloud platform and data and an experience that you’re driving for a customer, whether that’s a web portal or a mobile app, or notifications that are sent or data that’s produced in.

Getting your arms around that full picture is certainly a key process. And that’s an area where often we are engaged with companies, right? Is that kind of assessment phase of looking at that big picture, trying to get out in front of any of those scale issues, helping them use their resources as effectively as possible along that journey. So certainly a common area where we love to engage in play.

Peggy Smedley: So we’re running out of time, Ben. But what one piece of advice now would you like to give our listeners to get started with IoT? What would that be?

Ben Rau: I’m going to come back to something I said and maybe stated a little bit differently, but I think that a year of obsessing over solving the customer’s problem, letting that be the guide to what you build and how you build it. You understand your market. You understand the competitive landscape. Think about your business model, think about your costs, think about the holistic solution, and then really focus on solving for that customer’s problem. Right. And with that is your guide and that is your North Star. Certainly our experiences that you can’t go wrong there.

Peggy Smedley: Ben Rau, director of digital platforms from Twisthink. Thank you for your time today. I really do believe you gave some very good advice, because I think when we look to the IoT, we have to think a little differently, but yet we have to think about the data in the same way we did in the past, going back to the basics, but in a way that says we’ve got to rely on our partners who are the best partners to understand how to implement, to get the right products. And I think you described that today. So what’s your URL to our listeners can learn more about what you guys are doing and get in touch with you.

Ben Rau: Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s been a pleasure, Peggy. Folks want to reach out. You can go to twisthink.com that’s twisthink.com and you can reach out there. Certainly can find me on LinkedIn as well. And we’ll make sure to to get that link to the show details.

Peggy Smedley: Okay, listeners, that’s all the time we have for today’s show. Make sure to share and subscribe to our episodes each week. As always, you can share your thoughts with me on a connected world, or follow me on LinkedIn and continue the conversation there. Remember, we broadcast live every Tuesday at 12 p.m. central. Please check out our website to connectedworld.com. Our show comes in at the PeggySmedleyShow.com and if you haven’t gotten enough of me yet, check out my Substack page, Peggy’s Connected World. There you can go back and read my back to basics content or subscribe to my new podcast, which is an unfiltered podcast. This is the Peggy Smedley Show, your voice for our connected world. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have an awesome week.