IoT Is On The Truck

Blah, blah, blah..... IoT....blah, blah...., the future,.....blah, blah.... IoT.....

That's exactly what all the Internet of Things (IoT) chatter in recent years has sounded like to me. I have not been paying a great deal of attention to it all...and for good reason. I am not a technology futurist, I am a technology today-ist. For much of my technology career, I have been focused on sales enablement. As such, one of the core covenants that I have found myself having to reiterate ad nauseam to sales professionals over the years is:

Sell what's on the truck!

From where I view the world in my current role, the daily B2B technology buying activities haven't included a significant amount of IoT-specific technology from off the back of that metaphorical truck. Sure, there were a number of progressive companies making moves to position themselves to capture their piece of the market opportunity being generated, but it hadn't become part of my personal daily dialogues. Until recently.

Last year I became involved in a project with IBM to bring their new Embedded Solution Agreement (ESA) program to market. An expanded replacement to their previous ASL program, the new ESA program opens up a broad cross-section of IBM's portfolio to be leveraged as embedded components for any company that creates their own proprietary intellectual property (IP). Known sometimes as "OEM embedding", it certainly isn't a new concept by any stretch as it's been a common approach to the engineering of millions of products. However, in recent years it has taken on a new level of maturity - mostly in the new options in how embedded components can be licensed, sold and\or distributed to end users. Keeping in step with the new consumption-based technology models, IBM's ESA program now offers licensing options that better align with pay-as-you-go technology sales. By extending consumption-based licensing options for their on-premise software, SaaS and appliance driven solutions, IBM has removed some of the more taxing burdens that often plague those buy vs. build decisions. Having been a product manager for many years, I have been personally engrossed in a number of those decision cycles, so I can appreciate how valuable it is to have more investment options to consider.

So what does embedded technology have to do with IoT? Everything!

One of the hottest commodities in technology today is data. And there is a lot of it. It's been discovered that there's gold in them thar hills of data and it takes significant sophistication to sift through it all and mine it for nuggets of valuable, actionable business intelligence. This process of mining data, analyzing it, making sense of it, and cranking out scenarios of hypothetical predictability requires some heavy lifting by a serious number-crunching machine (I call them data sausage grinders). This challenge isn't deterring everyone, as there is an explosion of producers of B2B and B2C offerings who are making a run at tapping into that data gold mine as a way of adding value and creating new revenue streams to the products, solutions or services they sell. For many of those companies, leveraging existing technologies, such as IBM's Watson API's, is a smart way to tap into the IoT data analytics market opportunity - without having to create their own sausage grinder. And who better to build on and trust your product with than IBM?

Many producers of the "things" in IoT aren't necessarily technology companies but the value of their products can be greatly enhanced by tapping into a source of existing data. Case in point: last year I was setting up my new Ring doorbell to work with my home wireless network when I realized, "Wow, my new doorbell has a MAC address! This is one of the 'things' of IoT." (it was a private geek out moment). So these doorbells capture video and audio when activated by motion or by someone pushing the ring button. These recorded activities can be stored in a cloud account for the homeowner. Viola, another huge pile of data just sitting there waiting to be tapped. Here is where that data was turned into a value-add for the owners of Ring doorbells. Ring has created a neighborhood alert community that allows homeowners to share captured recordings involving suspicious activities around their home with those neighbors who have also opted into that alert community. So every once in a while I will get an alert from a phone app about suspicions activities taking place in my area and I can watch the captured video of what's being reported. I mean, wow! Right? All this from a doorbell? Just think of the possibilities. This is no longer about our toasters talking to our refrigerators.

Now, I don't know for sure if the folks at Ring used embedded technologies to make any of this happen. But think through how so many of these kinds of technological opportunities are occurring on a daily bases. Consider how much data is out there that can be turned into gold.

Last week I had the pleasure of being a substitute co-chair at the Arizona Technology Council's IoT Committee meeting. While I added little value as a fill-in, I did help to coordinate the guest presenters for the day. Two very brilliant IBM IoT technologists, Tom Woodward and Greg Gorman, presented to the equally brilliant members of the committee on what IBM is doing in the IoT space. You can just imagine the use cases that IBM has to share about their own customers' IoT projects and business cases. It's just spectacular what's happening in technology right now. As I listened to the interactions in the room and observed the collective enthusiasm about the possibilities, I realized that IoT is definitely on the truck.

I geeked out.