latoga labs

IoT World 2017 Thoughts

May 22, 2017 Leave a Comment

Last week I was at IoT World 2017 in Santa Clara and while I only stopped in at the vendor expo for a few days, there were a number of changes within the expo floor from last year that I noticed.

We are still very much in Day 1 of IoT. Things are still ebbing and flowing as the underlying vendors within IoT figure out what they want to be.
I noticed a number new (to me at least) smaller platform vendors, though they are at least focusing their platform, or at least their marketing, on specific vertical areas of IoT.
Pivots are still happening; platform vendors are adding devices and turning into solution providers; some solution providers are ditching their devices to focus on their platforms, and some larger firms are realizing that there is little value for them in trying to be their own platform and instead have OEM’d someone else’s platform (though this is sometimes apparent and sometimes not).
A few vendors are understanding the ecosystem needs around IoT and were presenting themselves as the ecosystem hub, Samsung specifically…
…while other ecosystem driven vendors chose not to represent, Amazon Web Services and GE Predix specifically.
I found it still hard to differentiate between vendors as building block providers, integrated platform providers, or vertical solution providers.
Customers are better educated on what IoT means and seemed to be asking more specific question around use cases and projects.

It seems that there still is a need for a IoT Solution reference architecture which can be used to both connect the business and technical as well as gauge vendors offering against. Which is something that I have been working on for a while in the background and look forward to offering up to the community soon.

20170523 Update: I forgot to mention that one of the most interesting enabling technologies that I came across at IoT World was from Matrix Industries. It’s not really the smartwatch they show on their website but the underlying Thermoelectric Technology. Take heat and turn it into power to charge a battery. In the world of IoT, and I’m thinking specifically IIoT, there is heat generation that already happens due to the operation of the device. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG), like the one Matrix Industries has inside their smartwatch, you could power your IoT related sensors and possibly the communication channel (assuming they are both low power enough to be powered by a TEG) as a side effect of the waste energy from your device/equipment. I haven’t dug into this much in depth, but it’s an interesting potential concept to help create longevity and increase the scalability of the sensors within your IoT Solution.

The Right IoT Architecture Enables the Journey

May 2, 2017 Leave a Comment

Over the past year and a half, there have been two common themes running through all the IoT related discussions I’ve had with companies big and small. From global corporations crafting a product or operational IoT strategy to small device manufacturers who knew they needed an IoT strategy to compete in the market to startups creating the latest connected service offering, everyone:

struggled to think big enough with their long term IoT strategy *; they usually couldn’t think past the second stage of the IoT Journey.
lacked a general IoT solution architecture as a reference point **; they struggled to understand and compare all the vendors who latched onto the IoT buzzword or called themselves an IoT Platform…

Almost a year ago I presented my vision of the IoT Journey based upon all the customer and partner conversations I had spanning multiple IoT verticals like Automotive, Transportation, Industrial Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Service Sector, and Smart Cities. What I quickly realized was that IoT architecture decisions were being made based on the early stages of the journey and the people building IoT solutions were going to face an expensive re-architecture in the future to fully realize the potential of IoT.

For the past few months I have used my recent down time to document the IoT Solution architecture that I saw as common across all those discussions and used that as my own IoT Solution Reference Architecture to understand the breadth and depth of the various IoT solutions and vendors in the market. After using both the Journey and the Solution Reference Architecture in all my most recent conversations (and being prodded by a few trusted colleagues), I realized I was way overdue in sharing both in more detail.

The generic high level picture most often shown for an IoT Solution looks like this:

Things connecting into the cloud and sending up their data for storage and analytics with users accessing the Solution via either a web or mobile app (or both) to view data send commands down to the thing. When in reality there is much more complexity that is needed and most IoT Solution (should) have an underlying architecture like this:

First, this is a general IoT Solution Architecture, each specific IoT Solution will be more detailed and varied due to business problem specifics, industry regulations, and technical specifics. There is a lot of details, even at an abstracted level like this, and my next few posts will be exploring those details. I have also converted this architecture diagram into a solution functionality map which I have been using to compare different vendor offerings, I’ll be posting more on that in the future as well.

How does this compare to your IoT Solution reference architecture? This project spun out of some IoT consulting work that I have been doing with various clients recently. Please reach out to discuss any IoT projects you may have going on and how I may be able to help you.

* A friend of mine at GE Digital even mentioned that when they do their training courses around IoT for executives, they purposely don’t have them try to think about IoT for their product/offering. It’s hard for anyone who focuses on the current state of their business to quickly jump to think out of that box.

** Even to this day I’m surprised by how many charts of the IoT Marketplace that you find that don’t differentiate between companies using IoT within their offerings versus those providing the IoT building block technologies used to build those prior offerings.

Weekend Reading on Leadership & People

August 21, 2016 Leave a Comment

Just finished reading the Tim Cook interview in the Washington Post. It was interesting to hear his thoughts on a number of areas of business, technology, and life. One of the threads that struck me the most was his thoughts on running a company and people. Here are a few of the comments that resonated with me the most from across the interview:

“That means the top of the company must work together incredibly well. … It has to be people who have great respect for one another and who work as a team.”

“You have to recognize that you have blind spots. We all do. Blind spots move, and you want to not just have really bright people around you, but people who will push on you and people to bring out the best in you. People that amplify whatever you’re good at. And then also the people who plug the parts that you’re not and may never be.”

“…I put them in three buckets: people, strategy and execution. I sort of move between those on a daily basis as to where I put my time. I always think the most important one of those is people. If you don’t get that one right, it doesn’t matter what kind of energy you have in the other two — it’s not enough.”

(also posted on LinkedIn)