On this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Ben Cade, CEO of Myriota, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss wide-scale IoT adoption. They talk about the roadblocks to IoT adoption, satellite connectivity, consolidation of the IoT industry, advice for succeeding in IoT, IoT industry challenges, why companies should consider IoT, and progress in the IoT industry.

Episode 304's Sponsor: Troverlo

Troverlo Autonomo is rewriting the rules of asset tracking and data collection. No more chasing elusive devices or losing sleep over data breaches. Autonomo's unique background app ensures you stay in control, even when devices go off the grid. It's scalable, platform-compatible, and delivers a rapid return on investment. Visit Troverlo.com now and harness the power of Autonomo to transform your IT department!

About Ben Cade

An engineer by background, Ben Cade is passionate about productizing deep tech innovation in ways that deliver better outcomes for society. He is a two-time founder: Linaro (open source software for Arm-based devices) and Trustonic (security for IoT devices), ventures whose impact is measured in hundreds of millions of end users and billions of devices. Since joining Myriota as CEO in April 2022, Ben is humbled to lead a proudly Australian business with true potential to change lives, livelihoods, and environmental outcomes for the better, globally.

Interested in connecting with Ben? Reach out on LinkedIn!

About Myriota

Myriota makes anywhere connectivity possible through patented direct-to-satellite technology designed for the demands of IoT, namely secure, low-cost, low maintenance, and long-battery-life. Myriota is the place where the Internet of Things (IoT) meets space!

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(01:28) Introduction to Ben Cade and Myriota

(04:04) Wide-scale IoT adoption

(08:45) Satellite connectivity

(11:15) Will the IoT industry consolidate?

(15:26) Advice for succeeding in IoT

(18:27) IoT industry challenges

(20:41) Why should some companies reconsider IoT?

(24:03) IoT progress

(29:50) Learn more and follow up

Transcript:

- [Ryan] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast. I'm Ryan Chacon. And on today's episode, we're going to talk about wide-scale IoT adoption and why to some, it still remains elusive and is space and satellites the solution to helping increase IoT adoption? With me today will be Ben Cade, the CEO of Myriota.

They are a company that is focused on anywhere connectivity, making it possible through their patented direct to satellite technology. If you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe to our channel and give this video a thumbs up. If you are listening to this on a podcast directory, be sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they are out.

Last thing I will mention before we dive into this, we have recently launched our AI For All Podcast all about AI, lots of very interesting topics and fantastic guests. Be sure to go over to our AI For All YouTube channel to subscribe, so you get the latest episodes as soon as they are out and you can check out all that awesome content that we're going to be putting out weekly. Other than that, let's get on to the episode. 

Troverlo Autonomo is rewriting the rules of asset tracking and data collection. No more chasing elusive devices or losing sleep over data breaches. Autonomo's unique background app ensures you stay in control, even when devices go off the grid. It's scalable, platform compatible, and delivers a rapid return on investment. Visit troverlo.com, that's t r o v e r l o dot com now, and harness the power of Autonomo to transform your IT department. 

Welcome Ben to the IoT For All Podcast. It's great to have you.

- [Ben] Well, likewise, really excited to be here.

- [Ryan] Yeah. Excited to have you. Looking forward to this conversation. I'd love it if you could kick this off by giving a quick introduction about yourself and the company to our audience.

- [Ben] I'm an electronic engineer. I started my career at great companies like Sony, at Arm, was there for nearly over a decade. And we went from pretty much nobody ever hearing about Arm to Arm powering most of the world's IoT devices. I was lucky enough there to find the opportunity to found two different businesses, one in open source called Linaro, growing strong today, and then more recently, back in 2012, formed a business called Trustonic, which was all about trying to help change the state of security in IoT devices, and we know that's something that's plagued those kinds of devices. So roll forward eight years and billions of devices, we hope we made a difference there. And as you do in the middle of the pandemic, we decided to change location, move to Australia, and that's where discovered actually a really vibrant deep tech community, came along, found investors that really focus on deep tech, like Main Sequence Ventures.

And I was lucky enough to meet a really good group of people at Myriota who were really trying to change connectivity by delivering that through satellites anywhere in the world very securely and at very low power. So that's where I'm at today leading that business and helping it go global.

- [Ryan] Awesome. Yeah. The name, so Myriota has been a name that has come up many times in the past, in conversations, and through my experience in the IoT space. So I'm finally glad we're able to connect, have somebody from the team on the podcast to kind of shed some light on your expertise and what you all focus on.

Given your experience that you have in the space and the very extensive background, what led you to where you are now, talk to me about how you've seen adoption evolve in, a way to put it, in the IoT space, because I feel like when I joined the industry, one of the big things we did here at IoT For All was try to help educate people to better understand the value of IoT so that they could be, have more understanding of the value IoT can provide.

So they're more likely to adopt because adoption's always been the thing everybody is striving for that helps the industry grow to meet those projections that these analysts keep giving us. But to some degree, depending on who you talk to, adoption has maybe not always reached that potential at times or in certain industries, it didn't go the way people thought. So why does, I guess from your perspective, talk to me about how you see adoption in the IoT space? Is it something that still is relatively elusive when it comes to widespread? Or how do you see things or how have things evolved from your perspective?

- [Ben] Yeah, I think it's a great question, and there's a lot of things to unpack within that, but I remember back about 2005, we started talking about the Internet of Everything, and that was something that eventually became the Internet of Things, and we've grown from there. So look, is IoT happening?

If you take this more broad definition of IoT that we have today, where you talk about home devices like many of the devices sat behind you, absolutely, right? Because they're within an environment that's more controlled, your home. You've got access to Wi-Fi, for example, and the vendors are building something that will just work, right?

And so it has to have that simplicity. It has to do what it says on the box, and it has to be at the right price point. So we're not universal there for sure, but we're way further ahead in that level of adoption. Similar things in, let's call it, things like smart factories, an enterprise where again, okay, a business has control of that particular environment, right? It can put Wi-Fi, or it can put your cellular systems in private 5G in, and it can control that environment. So we're seeing update there. The, and set that in context, I think, and again, analysts numbers should always be taken with a relative level of a pinch of salt, right?

But you're talking about a roughly speaking 30 billion connected devices right now. But if you talk about what we really meant when we first coined the phrase Internet of Everything, we were really focusing more on that really embedded, the things that are invisible that will start appearing everywhere, not necessarily close to us in our homes or in our factories, but actually in the natural environment.

And that definitely hasn't happened, right? So then you have to start looking at that and say, what, why is that, fundamentally why I got excited with Myriota is because for the first time you're getting, and it's not just Myriota, there are other businesses out there trying to solve this problem, but how do you deliver something that's really about remote sensing, remote location, basic, but really important pieces of data that you need to get back home somewhere, right?

And how do you do that in a way that's just going to work? So, I think you've had this challenge, which is, yeah, it's not easy to, firstly, it's not easy to conceive, and therefore it's not easy to see where the ROI is. And even if you're convinced that this is a good thing, then you don't even know if that device, when it's actually installed in its native environment, is actually going to have any connectivity at all, and therefore going to be able to solve that use case.

And even if you get through those two parts, you get to the third problem, which is, battery life, right? Because it's okay to change your battery. It's a pain, right? But you change your thermostat battery every six months. It's really annoying. Actually, every two years, it's still annoying.

But in the field where you've got to go and travel somewhere, that's really difficult. And so you have those soft of connection of different problems, right? If you can get connectivity, and you can guarantee that great, then is it simple enough for anybody to be able to install? Very rarely right now.

And then if you get through those parts, will it live in the field for years without having to go and physically maintain it?

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's been an interesting conversation because a lot of the guests I have on obviously are in different industries with different vertical focuses, building different components of IoT solutions that they bring to market. And they, it depends on where they are on how fast adoption has grown from their perspective.

I think one area that's interesting to elaborate on is and you mentioned a couple times is the connectivity piece, right? They have lots of different connectivity options, which enabled these solutions to exist at a cost that makes sense as well as provide the experience that end user is expecting, assuming they have the connectivity that works for them.

But a lot of people are overwhelmed by the decision making process that goes into different types of connectivity. But the way I talked to them about is just explain that the value of how or the value of having a lot of different connectivity options is you're more likely to find something that's tailored for your use case in the environment, which is going to be deployed at a cost that makes sense to reach ROI and so forth.

But let me ask you, from your perspective in this, in the satellite connectivity space, how do you see that kind of fitting in? I've had guests on that are in the satellite space before, and a lot of times what they'll tell me is that they're still pretty early on. It works to bring connectivity in areas that don't have access to connectivity like cellular.

You can't set up LoRa or something like that. But how do you view satellite connectivity in the spectrum of IoT connectivity and what it can enable?

- [Ben] Yeah look, I think the first part is there's no silver bullet, right? Connect, satellite connectivity brings benefits for a range of different applications and use cases, but terrestrial will be a better solution in a range of others. The part that actually we've discussed, discovered as we've gone through this is actually we've got to get rid of talking about satellite or terrestrial or all of those different parts, we've got to actually just focus on it just works, which is why you might see something that looks a little bit like something out of Aliens behind me. That is, that is a tank monitoring unit you can buy on the shelf in a Bunnings elders store, effectively equivalent of Home Depot and in the US, for a few hundred bucks, and it can be installed by anybody with zero knowledge. And so that's really our focus, as you say, is we're going after very particular myriad of very particular use cases in very particular sectors.

And we're trying to deliver that it does exactly what it says on the box And anybody can install it and if you go and Google somebody like an ag bot, you'll see a bunch of videos by farmers that are just showing how they install that. So I think that's where you know we as an industry need to move towards which is stop talking about the technology and focus on the problems and how easy you can deliver a solution that will just work.

- [Ryan] No, absolutely. I think there's plenty of options out there when it comes to all the different components from the software to the hardware to the connectivity, you name it, to build something. But at the end of the day, it needs to serve the purpose of the end user and the company and fit in with kind of the requirements that are realistic, obviously, to make this something that's affordable and can hopefully be successful to get to scale. What do you, how do you see things evolving over the next few years as far as just the industry in general? Do you see, like we've started to see some consolidation happen,

I think for the last few years, I've talked to people about consolidation and we are, a lot of people I spoke to have agreed that consolidation is going to happen, has happened, needs to happen. How do you see it? Do you see this kind of being dominated by a few players over the next three, five, 10 years, or do you see there being more vertical specific niches where companies, a couple of companies are able to own and but it's more that way as opposed to a couple of companies just dominating everything.

- [Ben] When I came across Myriota, the natural, when, and you talked about about satellite, the natural companies that come to mind are Starlink, SpaceX, formidable amazing technology businesses delivering a great solution. OneWeb and obviously Amazon is coming up now. What I see more broadly is there's two very different worlds, right? There is the sort of mobile broadband, high speed data, satellite, Starlink, amazing solutions plugged into something, a power plant, right? And running at a cost point that's 1,800 bucks a month and several hundred bucks a month for it. So do I think that's going to be a challenging place for anybody else to enter?

Yeah, absolutely, right? So you've got some legacy players and then you've got these more recent new entrants with very strong and huge capital. There will be some more consolidation there, but I don't think you're going to talk about five competitive players. I think you might at least,

China will have its own solution, but you will have three or four probably. But then on the other extreme, and there's a number of companies that have tried and continue to do what Myriota does, that's, you know, at a different extreme, right? We're not operating with billions of dollars to deliver very extensive constellations. You're trying to serve basically, you know, a different problem, which is very narrow band data at very low cost.

And so that's a fundamentally different system. What you're seeing there actually is you're seeing consolidation or you're seeing people just give up. And the reason for that is because actually it turns out it's really hard to punch out to space by 600 kilometers with a really weak low power signal.

And so if you don't have that signal processing, and you can't deal with, for example, Australia is pretty easy, right? It's pretty quiet from a radio frequency, noise perspective. If you go to Europe or east coast of the U.S., it's really noisy, right? It's really hard. Yeah, I do see some consolidation happening.

I think, the reality is, yes, it's still early, but to give you context, against some of the, let's call it large, traditional, old space companies, we're probably now shipping about 75% of their volume into new market. So we've gone from nowhere in three years ago to write on their tails with a handful of salespeople.

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's interesting because I think the different kind of components of an IoT solution, those areas, the consolidation might be different rates just because they serve different purposes, and they touch different industries in a certain way. One thing I think is important for companies to do is really understand the industries that they're selling into and build solutions and market as solutions This is less about the kind of connectivity companies or the hardware companies per se but more about solutions, the solution companies that I think a lot of people think about how many platforms are out there in the industry, right?

There's lots of platform players, that their platform can do everything, work for every use case, but in reality, it's, that's not what buyers are looking for. Buyers are looking for people to understand their business, their industry, their problem. And they built something with some domain knowledge to say, hey, I understand what you're going through.

Here's a solution that fixes it. We get it. We built, we know what you're, what you need from us. And I'm starting to see more companies go that route. I'm starting to see more companies build solutions, market solutions as opposed to just technology, and I think that's a big step for the industry as a whole, the more successes we see, the more likely people are to feel comfortable adopting IoT, which goes back to our first question about mass adoption and how do we get there?

When you look back on the work you've done and what you've gone through since you've been in the IoT space, what are some of the things you've learned to build, with building an IoT company, that is having an effect globally and what advice would you have for companies out there that are looking on ways to grow, to just help themselves succeed in the IoT space in general?

- [Ben] I think you really hit the nail on the head in that sort of discussion which is the biggest problem you have, and it's one of the first things we did when I came in and joined the Myriota team. Myriota's been going since 2015, is to say where are we going to focus? Because it's really easy to talk about we've got connectivity and we can do everything, and so many different use cases.

But if you don't go deeper, and you don't really understand a particular problem, and you understand, hey, you know what, just because we could solve it doesn't mean we should solve it, or try to solve it. Maybe we're not the best, and really actually maybe we're not the best placed people to solve that.

So you've got to have high conviction that the area that you're going for, you can solve it better than anybody else, right? And that's that sort of right to win. That's why we're focused on tank monitoring, for example, just because we know the proposition rock, is rock solid. We can deliver at the right cost point that's driving growth that's thousands of percent a year not tens or 20s percent that most people are happy with as a, we're growing fast, right?

That's not fast because you're growing from a very small base. I'd say the other issues that we've had also speak to the fact that we need to be less about the technology and more about the solution. And we either work very closely with our maker partners who are building devices that really understand their customer and make sure that we're doing everything we can to make that whole experience as seamless as possible.

Or in the industry, there's, particularly in the embedded space, there's this, there's clearly markets that have players with very large volumes or large volume potential, but there's this long tail, right? Now that long tail in embedded is very long and a very significant proportion of all potential devices.

So there, that's why we have units like we call the sense and locate, which is a piece of hardware that's already ready to go, right? You add a little bit of software connected to your cloud, and you're done, right? And if you've got a deployment, there's a lot of companies that are trying to do some innovation in IoT, but they may only have volume of 500 units or a thousand units, and we're not talking millions of units here. So how do you equip them? They don't want to go and build a device. They don't want to take a microchip from Myriota and build the antenna and everything else. They just want to say, hey, I know this problem,

I can solve it. Can you help me get there faster? And so that's, those were parts of the evolution that we've learned, we need to do more of and be better at.

- [Ryan] Let me ask you this. When you look at the current state of the market now, where do you feel like the biggest challenges are had or what challenges do you feel like we face the most? As the IoT industry currently stays now and potentially where it's going.

- [Ben] Yeah, look, I think part of this will be solved a little bit by consolidation because there's just a lot of noise out there. So the fact that there will be fewer, and by that, I don't mean, nobody wants an oligopoly or monopoly, right? But I think, just more focused with some players with scale, I think that's gonna move us forward.

I think there's a general challenge in the industry, though, which is there's a lot of noise about what might happen in future. But for all of us that have seen this cycle many times over, what we, what is portrayed as just around the corner is actually realistically five to ten years from now. And we're very excited by some of those aspects, but we need to make sure that we focus on solving the problems today with the transition to things that might come in future as opposed to everybody getting stalled on a magic sort of silver bullet in future which may never arrive.

So I think that's always the challenge for us, especially when you have a lot of these innovative IoT companies, but they're not, they're not capitalized like a Starlink or an Amazon. And so there, if there's more focus on people doing what they do really well and we get that success, I think that will help everybody gain confidence in the benefits of IoT, right?

You talk, if we talk for a minute about some of the other standards out there, you've got 5G, we've got NB-IoT, we've got LoRa, they're really good solutions for different environments and different use cases. So I think as an industry, what we've got to be able to do is just show where they make sense and where they make less sense so that people as they're going through this can understand, hey, okay, this is why I would want to invest in a LoRa network for my factory versus hopefully Telstra has got some 5G connection, or I'm going to go a completely different route.

- [Ryan] One question I wanted to ask you that I actually I don't think we've ever spoken or asked anyone this on the show before. I think it's a good way to wrap up our conversation is around experience that you've had with companies who have worked with other IoT companies, but have not seen success, who potentially have been burnt by those relationships, those experiences, and are now hesitant to get back into IoT or hesitant to try again to launch a pilot or a POC to prove the value, even if it was, within the last year or the last five years, obviously technology has changed a good bit, but what would you say to people out there listening who have said, look, I've given IoT a shot, it didn't work out for me. Why should they be, why should they reconsider and really think about getting back into it as this industry is going to progress forward at what we hope is a pretty fast rate.

- [Ben] Yeah, look, that's a really hard question to answer. One part that we've learned is that to work those, you don't want to burn your partners, firstly. You need to be very honest about where various things are in the technology roadmap, and you need to have those as you're embracing new technology, you need to have those early adopters that are lined up with you.

They know there's going to be some speed bumps along the way, and you're going to work through that together. And so we've had some pretty patient, very supportive partners that are now enjoying the benefit of that perseverance. Of course, those people that sort of fast follow into that, then enjoy the benefit of something that's already a bit more proven, but to your point if you've been burnt before, you're going to be a lot more skeptical.

And you're going to ask these questions. And actually that's exactly what we see where people have gone after the tank monitoring marketing. For example, in agriculture before, they've listened to the claims that it will be a panacea and it will work or they will just work. And now they come back.

The good thing is they ask all the right and hard questions, right? Prove to me this or that. Of course, if you've got some heritage and if you've got some proof points, you can go and engage with those parties and help hopefully convince them that yep have sorry that you had a bad experience last time, but this is why this is different, right? And here's the proof. The challenge is where there still is no proof and you're knocking on that door and there's no other comparative point to say hey, look, we did it over here in a similar way. And that is a challenge that, you know, most definitely we hit upon time and time again is people have had a really bad experience.

And it's one of the focus areas for us, which we as a business have evolved to, which says, let's be clearer on where the ROI is. So let's be very upfront on the costs, the expected gains. Let's sit with those partners, have those conversations, and then on the second side we need to make it easier for people to get to that first validation and proof.

And that's why