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My IoT Solution Framework

September 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

[ February 2018 Update: The IoT Scorecards add on to my IoT Solution Framework has been discontinued.  Lack of time to dedicate to this endeavor and the speed at which the IoT market has been evolving makes my initial work obsolete.  ]

Over the past 2 years I’ve developed a picture of what almost any IoT Solution, or IoT Application, must have as the various technology bits and pieces.  I first created this IoT Solution Framework while working with potential partners as a way to set a foundation for exploring IoT partnerships and explaining where their stuff fit and where my stuff fit. Eventually, I started to use this framework to compare IoT vendors and understand where they fit in the bigger picture of the IoT market.

By IoT Vendors I’m referring to companies that are selling technology that is used to build an IoT Solution, like a smart thermostat, or a connected machine.  I’m not referring to companies that are selling the smart thermostat or the connected machine, though they are building an IoT Solution which is will match some or all of my framework.

After sharing this general framework with a few people from my network, it appeared that my framework filled a gap in the IoT market.  I’ve refined the framework a bit more and recorded this video presentation to be able to share it publicly.  So, as a way of launching the latoga labs YouTube channel, here is my Anatomy of an IoT Solution:

I’ve taken this framework and applied it to various IoT Vendors that I’ve been talking to over the past few months.  That developed into the IoT Vendor Scorecards that I have started to share in the IoT Lab. The scorecards are designed to give you a quick view of how different IoT Vendors compare based on the seven areas of my IoT Solution Framework. This is not a deep technical overview of these vendors, but a higher level abstraction that allows business and technology executives to discuss their IoT Solution within a common framework.

The 7 Areas of the latoga labs IoT Solution Framework.
The 7 Areas of the latoga labs IoT Solution Framework

The current list of IoT Vendors is just a sample based on my recent activity and I expect this list to grow (it has been highly focused on the software side of IoT to date).  I’m working through a more detailed scorecard for each as my time allows.  I’ll be updating the list as I publish those scorecards and post updates on the blog.

What part of the framework do you like the most? What part do you disagree with the most? What areas need further explanation? Who are the important vendors that you think are currently missing from the scorecard list? Please let me know by sharing a comment.

If you represent an IoT vendors, on my list or not, and want to chat please contact me directly.

Borrowing a line:

If you like my scorecard concept…please share them with your friends and colleagues.
If you hate my scorecard concept…please share them with your enemies and competition.

Filed Under: Announcements, Internet of Things Tagged With: IOT, IoT Architecture, IoT Solution Framework, IoT Vendor Scorecard

Shifting of Focus

November 30, 2015 Leave a Comment

The past week was a nice period of downtime to try and catch up on the personal “not done yet” pile, spend some time with family and prepare for changes.  The first change you should notice is a new look and feel here on the blog.  I appreciate your patience as the last few tweaks are made to the site.  The reason for this public change is to signal a personal shifting of focus.

Shifting away from Virtualization and VMware

After an amazing seven and a half years at VMware as part of their Global Accounts team, a new area of focus has been building for me personally and a new career opportunity came my way that enhances that focus.  After today I will no longer be employed by VMware.  My experience at VMware was career defining in many ways and I look forward to still keeping an eye on VMware as one of the cornerstones of IT infrastructure as well as a stock holder.  Leaving all the friends and colleagues that I’ve built at VMware over the years is hard, but I know that the teams within VMware will successfully execute on the many opportunities that lay ahead.

As a parting gift to my VMware related readers, make sure you bookmark the Getting More Out of VMware webcast series. This has been a critical learning resource for all my previous clients who were heavily leveraging VRA and VROPS within their enterprises.  You can also reference the historical webcasts on virtSanity’s page, thanks to Ryan Cartwright for maintaining this!

Speaking of maintaining, my VMW Launchpad will now be moving into historical snapshot mode.  The Launchpad was a means of sharing the most critical VMware related links for my clients.  Under it was the VMware Network Port List, listing all the ports used across all the VMware Products (a public resource that was built by many individuals across VMware); and my VMware Acronym page, helping to decipher the acronym soup that developed around VMware over the years.   All these pages will not be updated moving forward but will be left in place for historical reference and existing links.

This also marks an end to my Virtualization Roundup (#VRU) tweets.  This was a habit I got into, leveraging that tag when I shared Virtualization or VMware related items on twitter.  And for my previous VMware clients, this will likely mark an end to the account newsletters that I published on a rough quarterly basis.

Shifting Toward Internet of Things (IoT) via Covisint

The new area of focus that I have been working on personally for over a year now has been the Internet of Things.  Initially from a personal perspective as a user of consumer IoT solutions. Evolving to exploring how IoT could be leveraged to help members of the sandwich generation, like myself, assist our aging parents and ourselves with the challenges associated with aging, the needs of maintaining privacy, and the complexity of family being geographically spread.  And eventually leading me to Covisint, a IoT Platform as a Service.

Internet of Things, sometimes referred to as Internet of Everything (IoE), is a term that has been around for at least 4-5 years (if personal memory serves me right).  Over my tenure supporting Cisco as one of my Global Accounts at VMware, I heard that term often from Cisco leadership during internal vendor meetings and quarterly earnings calls.  The simplistic way of thinking about it was devices, billions of them, connecting to the Internet requiring more IP’s and generating more traffic (and cynically requiring more networking infrastructure).  But as this idea has been explored more over the years by many that physical connection becomes just the first step of a much longer journey around disruption of existing business models and customer’s expectations from the devices they own, evolving into a continual ownership experience through device augmented experiences.

Whether that device is a smart phone, watch, thermostat, sprinkler controller, automobile, tractor, or airplane the expectations of the user of that device have changed and that drives a whole new set of business opportunities for companies. Companies that have realized this shift of expectation are disrupting larger established competitors, disrupting themselves, or are on track to become part of the 50% of the S&P500 that won’t be on that list in 10 years.  These opportunities are focused around data collection from the device, a cloud based platform to securely communicate with the device and the user, and true joint value add services for the device producer and owner.  Covisint provides the cloud based platform that any IoT based services would need as part of their software infrastructure, allowing businesses to focus on quickly iterating on providing a new customer experience.

Personally, I feel we are entering the slope of enlightenment around IoT and the eventual plateau of productivity will change the world that we all live in and that my children will see as normal.  Like any paradigm shift of this nature, there are risks involved.  Not just around security but the large impact some of this change will have on business, laws, and society.

That is the focus shift that you will see here at latoga labs.  I have joined Covisint as Director of Strategic Alliances and will be writing more about IoT, touching on the technology of an IoT PaaS, but focusing more on the business impacts of IoT and challenges associated with those impacts.  And there will continue to be the occasional flotsam of other items that catch my interest.  I hope that long time readers of the blog will continue with me on this journey and I look forward to the new readers and their participation.

Filed Under: Announcements, Internet of Things Tagged With: Disruption, IOT, PaaS

Say Hello to My VMware (Portal)

April 15, 2012 4 Comments

…or maybe it should be “Say Hello to Your VMware (Portal)”.  The new portal for you to interact with (just about) all things VMware.

My VMware Home Screen

This past weekend VMware decommissioned a number of customer facing portals and consolidated all that functionality into one portal…My VMware. One place where you can manage your software licenses, open Support Request, manage your Orders/Contracts, and be one click away from a lot of other VMware goodness…

The Launch of My VMware was the culmination of a 2 year long project that involved hundreds of VMware staff.  Huge congratulations and thank you’s go out to everyone involved!  Double kudo’s go out to the team members who worked so diligently over this weekend to perform the go live migration and testing!!

The My VMware team created a number of information and help sites related to the launch that you should reference for answers to your questions:

  1. To understand My VMware use the Guided Tour within the portal itself.  It should appear the first time you login to My VMware.  You can always go back to the Guided Tour by clicking “Learn more about My VMware” link in the upper right hand corner of the portal.
  2. Check the My VMware FAQ to see if your question is answered there.
  3. Visit the VMware Knowledge Base and click the “My VMware” option on the left hand side.

My VMware is not only a web portal.  The team also created the My VMware App for IOS available for both the iPhone and iPad and the My VMware App for Android.

I’ve been working with my clients and the My VMware team for a few months now preparing for this launch. During that time I’ve learned a bit about the most common tasks users will perform on this new portal and discovers a few gotchas as well. I’ve written up my experiences in the following set of blog posts that I hope you find valuable.

Please keep in mind that when my clients or I work with the portal, we’re usually dealing with literally hundreds of different licenses, order, contracts, and historic support requests that are spread across multiple divisions and business units of Fortune 100 enterprises.  So I may have a different view of the portal than most.

latoga’s Guide to My VMware

  1. Say Hello to My VMware (Portal)
  2. My VMware Quick Overview
  3. My VMware Users and Roles
  4. My VMware for Most of Us
  5. My VMware for the Super Us(er)
  6. Some My VMware Gotchas To Be Aware Of

 

Filed Under: Announcements, Virtualization, VMware Tagged With: Launch, My VMware

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About latoga labs

With over 25 years of partnering leadership and direct GTM experience, Greg A. Lato provides consulting services to companies in all stages of their partnering journey to Ecosystem Led Growth.