LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN

I spent this week at Mobile Congress World 2017 in Barcelona Spain. I walked nearly 30 miles in 4 days and covered endless rows of nerd infused booth space. But I’m leaving perplexed. I’m sitting here in a bit of shock thinking how could this be. I saw connected clothes, connected cars, connected fridges, connected trashcans, and more VR simulations than I care to remember. The term 4th Industrial Revolution was chanted so often by speakers and moderators it started feeling a bit like a cult.

I thought 5G might bring some answers and help define the edge and IoT but unfortunately it seems to spawn more questions. One panel of CxOs described 5G edge computing as everything from the part of the world that does not have cell coverage to software defined central offices, to connected smart devices. And even though 5G is supposed to always be connected, be super low latency, and handle massive device volumes, when the topic of low latency life safety use cases came up, most 5G providers turned a bit white and appeared somewhat squeamish.

Well if 5G didn’t have the answers, I thought surely the IoT platform providers would clear it up for me. The sad thing is, if you believe the IoT platform hype, IoT is about bringing signals from devices back into the cloud, grinding out some intelligence from the data then taking an action… (Insert sarcastic tone here) wow revolutionary!! The show left me wondering, “if we are going into the 4th Industrial Revolution why are we talking about the same old underlying computing models.”

Bottom line, I have a problem with this cloud centric model. IoT should not be about justifying legacy cloud spend, or finally squeaking out an ROI on our big data investment, or getting a whole lot more data in front of our data scientists so they don’t leave for a cooler job. IoT should be about changing the way people live, work, and play and in order to do this we have to change the way we think about computing in general. 

3 decades in technology have afforded me a decent pattern recognition radar and I’m feeling a repeating pattern coming on. Technology providers are doing the same exact thing they did when the cloud was coming into its own. They are trying to squeeze some new revenue streams out of their legacy technology solutions. Please indulge my disturbing visual… If I squeeze into a pair of skinny jeans…. It doesn’t make me skinny! What it does do however is make others uncomfortable and me less functional… But it DOESN’t make me skinny!!

For example, what happened when Oracle took their CRM solution that was designed as an enterprise single tenet client server software and connected it to the internet, had their marketing team create some cute cloud logos and call it a cloud CRM? Were they able to compete with SalesForce?? No!! In the same way that skinny jeans don’t make me skinny, slapping a cloud logo on legacy technology does not make it a transformative cloud solution.

Sure, some bought into the hype and used the solution but Oracle could not keep up with the business transformation results that SalesForce customers were seeing. This is because It was not an innovative new cloud solution, it was a tired old solution built to transform the way we did business more than a decade ago, wrapped in new marketing hype. Parker and Marc at SalesForce on the other hand started from a clean sheet of paper, untethered to legacy - in fact inspired by destroying the old way. They were hell bent on tackling the cloud, creating an amazing multi-tenant platform designed to change the way businesses operated. In my opinion customer experience has greatly transformed due to their innovations in how businesses view and interact with customers.

What is happening now with IoT is a repeat of what happened when cloud hype was roaring through every trade rag you could get your hands on. All the same players are rebranding their solutions as IoT platforms hoping no one will notice. Every technology company out there, SalesForce included, is investing in cool new logos with lots of devices interconnecting, slapping the logos on their old technology and marketing it as their revolutionary IoT solution. 

This is not how the 4th Industrial Revolution will happen. Reusing old tired computing models will not revolutionize the way business and life happen. It will keep investors and customers happy for a while but when the disruption happens it will be clear that sending signals back to a database, grinding through them and spitting out an action is not earth shattering.

I am a firm believer that the winner in the 4th Industrial Revolution must start from a clean sheet of paper. Signals must be processed in real time as they are streaming. Processing will happen close to where the devices, the machines, and the humans are. Real automation will happen where it matters most, where there is no latency, and where there is no risk of a poor connection to the cloud. Real IoT platforms will use signals and data to take immediate action. They will send only data that matters back to the cloud for analysis and deep learning. These systems won’t have to rely on a connection to the cloud to keep functioning.

The autonomous car manufacturers get this. There is no way they will rely on cloud connectivity to brake or steer out of an accident. In the same way, why should a factory risk destroying expensive equipment or a farm risk their crop yield just because legacy technology providers wont disrupt their own existing computing models. Disruption is coming for sure, but it’s not just coming to the way we work, live and play; disruption is also coming to the stodgy technology companies relying too much on marketing and not enough on innovation. Let the revolution begin!!