IoT For All
IoT For All
On the 200th episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Ryan Chacon is joined by two guests, Eric Conn, CEO and Co-Founder of Leverege, and Calum McClelland, COO of Leverege, to discuss the current state of IoT. In the episode, Eric and Calum also talk about how the market conditions have affected the industry and the challenges companies face. The podcast is wrapped up with a high-level discussion on where the industry is headed and information on Leverege's IoT playbook.
The Leverege playbook is a free guide developed to be a roadmap for success for any IoT solution provider. It distills years of hands-on experience in helping companies navigate the complex world of IoT, develop and sell large-scale IoT solutions, and launch new data-driven businesses. Access the playbook.
Calum is fascinated by philosophy, technology, and their intersection, with a deep optimism for how human choices and technological innovation can be combined to create a better future. Calum is currently COO of Leverege, an Internet of Things (IoT) applications development platform.
Interested in connecting with Eric and Calum? Reach out on Linkedin!
Leverege's mission is to enable and accelerate the digital transformation of all organizations, amplifying their human potential by providing software products and managed services that help them successfully develop and deploy IoT-enabled enterprise asset management solutions. Industry leaders around the globe trust Leverege to launch innovative IoT-enabled asset management applications to optimize operations, increase revenue, and delight customers.
(02:26) Introduction to Eric, Calum, & Leverege
(06:59) Use cases of Leverege
(10:34) Current state of IoT
(16:51) Market conditions
(26:06) Challenges in IoT
(36:13) What is an IoT solution?
(46:07) Scaling a solution
(57:34) Where is the industry headed
(01:09:05) How to learn more
- [Narrator] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.
- [Ryan] Hello, everyone. And welcome to episode 200 of the IoT For All Podcast. The number one publication and resource for IoT. I'm your host Ryan Chacon. If you are watching this on YouTube, please like the video, subscribe to the channel. If you're listening to this podcast on a podcast directory somewhere, please subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available. So today, a big deal. This is episode 200 of the the IoT For All Podcast. We have two fantastic guests. We have Eric Conn, CEO and Co-Founder of Leverege. and Calum McClelland, the COO of Leverege here to talk about some very exciting stuff. Just to give you a quick overview of Leverege. If you are unfamiliar, they are a company that is focused on enabling and accelerating digital transformation for all organizations, amplifying human potential by providing software products and managed services that help them successfully develop and deploy IoT enabled enterprise, asset management solutions. They work with tons of companies all over the industry and around the globe even that trust Leverege to build innovative IoT enabled asset managed applications to optimize operations, increase revenue, and just kind of make everyone happy. So today's episode, very interesting, we like to do this every, at least once a year, maybe twice a year, depending on how things are going, but this is the State of IoT. We are going to talk about the overview of the current state of the industry, headwinds and tailwinds that are influencing the industry. What the outlook looks like on the industry. We talk about kind of just the general challenges, people face when it comes to IoT. Why is often perceived as a hard thing to do, well, but we kind of debunk a lot of that. We talk about how to successfully build and sell IoT solutions. And then we also break down the five stages of the IoT solution journey from the Leverege point of view, they have an IoT Playbook that they're putting out that is going to be free for everybody to download and digest then. So it's very, very cool conversation. And then we wrap up by talking about where the industry is heading, general discussion kind of around that, and just the general opportunity that companies have in front of them if they're to consider adopting IoT. And why they should really care. So all in all very, very good conversation. I know this episode is a little bit longer than normal, but I promise you the value you're gonna get outta listening to is well worth the time. So please, please enjoy this episode, which I know you will. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast.
- [Ryan] Welcome Eric and Calum the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.
- [Eric] Hey Ryan. Nice to be here.
- [Ryan] Yeah, nice to have you both. I'm very excited about this conversation. This is episode 200, so it's a very momentous occasion for the podcast. It's happened a lot faster than we thought. I know Eric you were here for episode 100 and that was something that then we started to increase to two per week and it got to 200 rather quickly. So it's great to have you back and Calum, I know you were even on the podcast in very early days, kind of as part of it and now it's great to have you back here.
- [Eric] Yeah, it's great to see how far you've come personally with this podcast as well. I remember when you did your first episode and we're like, "Oh, I wonder if the audience is gonna like this new format and something new," we're really focusing on written content. And now the podcast, here's a 200th episode. You have a YouTube channel look getting into video a lot more multimedia stuff. It's really cool to see, not only how far IoT For All has come, but that the audience is really thirsty for this type of information and can consume it in multiple ways now. Because as we will find out when we discuss this, IoT is complex, it's hard and there's a lot of education needed for anyone to be successful in it.
- [Ryan] Yeah, I think when we started IoT For All, we're very lucky to time it in a good spot with relation to the IoT industry as a whole, being very technical at the time, this is about six years ago now. Very technical at the time most content was very dense, engineered engineer type focused stuff. So we were able to kind of bring a different vantage point into that. We're talking more in layman terms, helping non-technical people understand and just generally contribute to the whole community in helping adoption. Hopefully increase, which is a topic we'll talk about today. But yeah, it's been a really cool journey and I'm very excited about kind of this conversation, 'cause I think the topic we wanna talk about here is very relevant and I think a lot of people find a lot of value out of it.
- [Eric] Yeah.
- [Ryan] So first thing I wanna do for those of our audience who may not be as familiar with either of you. I'd love if you both, could kind of just quickly introduce yourself. Calum, I'll throw it over to you first. And then Eric, when, when you do an introduction, if you wouldn't mind then jumping into Leverege a bit and talking about what the company does and the role you all play in IoT.
- Sure.
- [Calum] Sure. So my name's Calum McClelland. I'm the COO of Leverege. Eric will share more about Leverege and what we do, but generally I'm very interested in philosophy, technology, the intersections that do. So day-to-day, actively building in IoT is part of Leverege. But it'll be fun to take a step back and look at the state of IoT as a whole. Where are things going? What does it all mean? So excited to talk about that.
- Absolutely.
- [Eric] Yeah, and I'm Eric Conn, I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Leverege. Yep, I've been in this business now for eight years. We started in 2014. We're coming up on our eighth year anniversary, actually gonna have, we switched to a remote first company in right as a pandemic started. And it's been a great thing for us. And we're having our first all hands, sort of company get together in a couple weeks where we're gonna meet a lot of the people we've never met before in person we're flying in teams from all out of the country and across the country to meet it in our headquarters in DC. Very excited about that. What Leverege does is we we're a software company, first and foremost, but we also have a lot of systems engineering and experience at IoT to help enterprises primarily whether directly for themselves or indirectly, if they wanna build solutions and sell them to their customers. We help them on the software side of things with an enablement platform or what we call the Leverege IoT Stack, which is a collection of software that just makes IoT a little simpler, a little faster, a little more cost effective on the software side. And then we enable hardware and connectivity to connect in, 'cause ultimately IoT is about moving data from the physical world into the digital world, whether it's edge or cloud and then making that data actionable and presenting it to end users so they can do something in their business primarily. We tend to focus primarily on enterprise as I mentioned, don't do anything direct to consumer ourselves, but we have customers that do have products that connected products that do interface directly with consumers. But we as a business are pretty much B2B or B2B2B.
- [Ryan] Fantastic, and one thing that's usually good for audience to kind of connect everything you mentioned about the company is, if you could share any real life use cases and applications of the technology in the real world, solving a business problem that may be good to kind of showcase how things kind of work together.
- [Eric] Yeah, I'll give two quick examples that one of them should be anyone that's a boater out there. You know your boat is an expensive asset that's in water, which can be very dangerous in terms of flooding or all kinds of other bad things happen around water. So we have a company that was recently purchased by Yamaha called Siren Marine, longtime customer of ours. And they've essentially focused on the connected boat and they've adopted our platform and technology stack to essentially create, they created advice that ties into every subsystem on a boat, whether it be build, security, cameras positioned, everything that you might want to know about your boat. You can basically get all that information in the palm of your hands on a native app. It works across the entire globe. So it has both cellular and satellite connectivity. So you can even take it out into the open ocean. You still have connectivity, but essentially provides you real time, 24/7 access to the state of your boat, which is really, really valuable to pretty much everyone. So that's one example of a customer. That's kind of the consumer, they're selling to consumers, but we're selling to them as a business. Another example, would be something like Manheim Auto Auctions. So this is more of an enterprise type of relationship. They also used via subsidiary called Cox2M, which is part of Cox Communications. They standardized on our stack as well. And their problem that they wanted to solve was unique to auto auctions, where they have parking lots with thousands, if not tens of thousands of cars spread out over a very large area. And when they want to orchestrate an auction, they need to go grab, say 2000, 3000 cars and get them into these various lanes in certain order. And that orchestration of all those vehicles is very, very difficult if you try to do it manually, you have hundreds of people running around on a lot, trying to find specific vehicles based on VINs and other sort of information that's not easily discoverable from a distance. So we worked with them, they built the hardware, these very low cost and long battery life GPS trackers that would be placed inside the vehicles. And then they could use walking directions on a native app. They could use on their desktop. They could see all of their cars, where they are. Are they in the right line? And that's saving Manheim millions and millions of dollars a year, just being able to do that because now their auction run much more effectively on time and the customers are happier. They're happier. And it's created new jobs actually as well, that are higher order jobs, instead of just people wandering around on the lots, somewhat aimlessly looking for cars that have no license plates and they're literally packed in very, very tightly. So that's a very, it sounds like a relatively rudimentary problem to solve, but it has huge value to that customer.
- [Ryan] Fantastic. Yeah, thanks for sharing kind of those use cases. It's always good to connect it all and show kind of how it's being used in the real world. So what I wanted to do is kind of transition into a topic that we try to do each like each hundred episodes or so, trying to talk about what's going on in the space, try to at least once a year, and this is perfectly timed, I think with episode 200. And I wanna talk about the state of IoT, the state of the in internet of things industry a bit. And I wanted to pass it or have Eric, if you could kind of kick us off and talk a little bit about what, like give us an overview of the current state of the market and kind of how you view it and kind of what you see happening. That's important for our audience to really think about and understand just from a higher level.
- [Eric] Yeah, absolutely. I view IoT and digital transformation as very closely related. IoT, I kind of look at it as the, I call it the technological substrate of digital transformation. So it's really focused on the technologies that enable digital transformation, but digital transformation is the main theme and what we've been seeing. It's a slow inexorable type of thing, just like the internet was, right? There can be a lot of hype about it. There can be a lot of people that see the promise of it, but the reality is you're dealing with the physical world, coupling it with the digital world. It's very similar to what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with Meta now and the metaverse. So they're all very closely related. And as Isaac Newton once said, "We're all standing on the shoulder of giants." So what is basically doing, is standing on the shoulder of all the things, all the technology innovations, whether it be batteries, low cost sensors, just sensing in general, cloud computing, edge computing, AI, ML, it basically takes all of that, brings it all together to create a solution that is end to end has hardware, connectivity, software, and then ultimately value in data that can be presented to multiple constituents. It could be individual consumers. As in the boating application, I can see what's happening with my boat, or it could be a service center that's maybe just tracking some service on behalf of a customer and they wanna make it more efficient operationally. So there's a lot of different use cases, but ultimately you're tying it all together. And so IoT, some people wonder is it all hype? Is it really just a buzzword that will go away? We firmly believe that is not true. Like a lot of things that are kind of groundbreaking. They take time. There's a lot of pieces to it beyond the technology that are really, really vital to making a use case or an application successful in any market. So in addition to the technology just working reliably, you also have to have discipline around the financial aspects of it. What is the value you're providing? So you can do technology, but just doing it for technology's sake is not going to make a product. It has to have provide value that a customer is willing to pay for. So the cost relative to value, there must be a delta there or otherwise it won't scale. You can do pilots and test things out. So this digital transformation is ongoing. It's not going to stop just like it has in stopped for anything else. And IoT is just another sort of roll up of a whole bunch of technologies that are enabling new things to be done. You can look back and say, "Look at Amazon today versus Amazon 20 years ago, look at Netflix today versus Netflix 20 years ago." Totally different companies, totally different markets, different consumers experiences, but yet they transformed entire industries and that's exactly IoT does. It will transform industries. It'll transform the way consumers view products and services, but it is difficult. It does require discipline to get there. And there'll be a lot of failures along the way, just like in anything that's new. Every invention, the Wright brothers, didn't just design the perfect aircraft and fly it the first time, right? There was many, many times that's the way science kind of works and IoT is exactly the same way. So we're very bullish on IoT. We as a company have been growing nonstop since we started and we see that across the industry, but it is something that you can't take lightly.
- [Ryan] Let me ask you. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.
- [Calum] Yeah, if I can just add something, regarding kind of the size of the opportunity that we see in front of us and Eric touched on a lot of this, but a question you might ask is like, all right, how big is the market for IoT? What is the size of this opportunity? And one way that I think about it is IoT is about bringing the physical world online. So we started with all the people on the planet. There's now I think six and a half billion people who have smartphones, which is crazy. There's like seven and a half billion. That's only a billion people that don't have smartphones. Many of them might be children. And so back in the 1940s, Thomas Watson, who was president of IBM at the time had said something like, "Yeah, I only see a market for five computers in the world." Which is funny to hear that today, knowing that there are six and a half billion computers in people's pockets. But at the time was that so crazy to think when they were room sized computers that cost millions of dollars and are really hard to use and not that powerful. Not, but what was not seen is this progress of as things get easier to use, smaller, cheaper, you can open up all of the use cases. And so what we've done over the past, especially the past like three decades is essentially brought every human online. We've connected every human to the digital world that we've built. The next wave is connecting all the things 'cause humans matter most we care most about people in our lives.
- Sure.
- But there's a lot of things that are important too, whether it's your boat or for enterprises, the assets that they have. And so that's what IoT's about, now, where is the physical limit of that? Is it literally everything we're gonna connect? I'm not sure, but we are just in the early stages of this wave that is inexorable. It's going to happen. There's a lot of challenges, they're being figured out. And so, as Eric said, we're really bullish on IoT and it's opportunity for businesses that are building solutions to sell themselves as opportunities, but also companies that are adopting it because digital transformation is a transformation. And it can fundamentally transform the capabilities of businesses and how they do their work, how they deliver to their customers, how they become more efficient as an organization.
- [Ryan] That, yeah, that's fantastic. I like that breakdown. Eric, I wanted to ask you as a follow up to kinda what you were saying earlier. Are there any current kind of market conditions? I mean, we just came outta COVID, inflation is a hot topic. Supply chain is a hot topic. How are all of these different market conditions influencing the IoT industry or at least how should our audience be thinking about how they play a role, whether they're positive things that are influencing the market or negative things that are influencing the market. How do you kind of see that playing a role in the current state of the market right now?
- [Eric] Yeah, absolutely, when we look at it at a macro level, we see greater tailwinds than headwinds overall net, but there are definitely headwinds as well as tailwinds as affecting the industry. And some of them are relatively unique. So one of the things that we all went through, for the first time, unless you're a hundred years old is a pandemic, right? And that had some very interesting implications, psychologically and with the way work is done across the world. So in March of 2020, we're like most companies at that time, we had offices, everyone came into the office. That's how work was done. All of a sudden everyone needed to work from home, safety first, we weren't sure about how the virus was even communicated between people and so everything became remote. Well, what that exposed is if you're going to be remote, you can't operate as I like to say, you can't go to the data. You have to bring the data to you. So this whole concept of physical remoteness, got into everyone's minds of how important it is to be able to operate anything, including your business or your personal life remotely. How do you do that? Well, you need new tools. You need connectivity, you need devices. You need all of this infrastructure to be able to do that effectively. That same thought process is translated into business thinking as well. And this is the huge tailwind. I think the IoT or digital transformation industry in general is experiencing is everyone is now realizing, "Hey, I actually can do this one." You can actually be remote and operate a business. And consumers are expecting to be able to have touch less experiences and have things pushed to them. Whether it's if you're taking your car in for a service, you don't want to have to just show up, not know if you have an appointment, not know how long you'll be there. You want to be able to have an Uber-like experience for everything, so you can plot your life separately from whatever the service is. So this whole tying together and the mental model breakdown, which COVID forced of, we can't do things the way we used to has really gotten people to think about how do we transform so that we can be more efficient, can do things remotely. And then you layer on recently, coming outta COVID. So that thought process is already there. You have many, many companies are just switching to remote first, just like we did and finding out, hey, in some cases it actually works better. There are certain instances where being in person matter and are more efficient or just socially better. But generally you can do quite well. Especially as a software company like us, working remotely, you have access to global talent. You have access to 24 hour time zones now because you can have people everywhere. So there's a built in efficiency there, you need to manage it of course it's different, but that type of efficiency. And it coupled with a lot of sort of traditional brick and mortar companies or physical operations companies they saw during the stock market run up after the pandemic, or while the pandemic goes underway. All the big tech companies, their stock didn't go down. It went way up. And why was that? Because they were the beneficiaries of remote posture, right? They had automated so many things that they were able to actually do them safely and more efficiently, and they got larger market share. So the combination of the mental model saying that, "Hey, we can do things remotely all the way at the executive level of every large company in the world." In concert with, "Hey, these technology companies are actually set up really well to survive in this remote world and thrive," has made everyone sort of at the executive level, decision maker level say, "Wow, we really need to do this. This is not something that's a nice to have. It's a must have, if we wanna compete, if we wanna keep, put our workers in safe conditions," for all many, many reasons, this is something that you have to do. Now those are the huge tailwinds. And I think they will predominate over the time. But in the short term, pandemic also calls the headwinds, which is as everyone's probably read supply chain, that's leading to inflation, but I believe that those things are relatively transitory in nature compared to the longer tailwinds. So we're already starting to see through our partners because we're not a hardware company. So we haven't had directly any supply chain issues for our company, but our partners who make hardware and build things in the real world, they've certainly seen pricing increases, lack of availability. But that's already starting to ease. We're already seeing that happening, early signs of inventory levels coming back, things like that. So we think by 2023, a lot of that noise and some of those inflationary pressures will have relaxed and now those tailwinds will predominate.
- [Ryan] Absolutely, yeah. We've through a lot of the conversations I've had on here. There's been a lot of optimism coming outta COVID, even with the talks of inflation, talks about supply chain issues with just a growing need for companies to better prepare themselves for other situations that may come up in the future. Like another pandemic, whether that's shifting in use case priority within organizations, or just realizing that the value IoT provides where it's something that helps improve efficiencies, helps you save money, potentially even make money through new business lines and revenue kind of product offerings that you can create with this has really driven demand for a lot of these organizations who maybe IoT might have been further down on their list, but that the pandemic kind of actually forced them to think a little bit differently about things. And it's been really interesting to kind of see that growth.
- [Calum] Yeah, if I can add some other tailwinds as well, the things Eric described, a lot of those things have been happening over, especially over the past few years of the pandemic, but there's also larger tailwinds that have been playing out over the last decade or two decades now. And a lot of that's related to cost of components, all the things that make up an IoT solution. So if you generically think of an it solution as having four layers to it, the devices, the things that are actually out in the world, collecting data, sensing things, or perhaps performing actions some way in which they're communicating typically wirelessly. So the wireless network be that second layer, third layer, there's the infrastructure layer, the compute layer. So actually ingesting that data, storing it often in the cloud, it could be on-prem. And then finally the application layer, which is how are you actually making this useful to people in their day-to-day, if they're part of the organization. And every one of these layers, there are innovations that are happening, that are bringing down the costs and making all these things easier to use. So at the device level, battery and sensor technology has been a big beneficiary, especially of the smartphone revolution over the past decade and a half. So bringing down the costs, increasing availability of components that can feed into the devices, public and private wireless network rollouts, there's a lot of options. And so those just continue to be ongoing, lower compute and storage costs, especially as cloud is a big part of digital transformation, and that's still, it's a massive industry already, but still in the early stages that's bringing down costs. And then we like to thank for Leverege, having really good application development platforms, which is what we do is also enabling the overall costs to come down while the ease of use goes up. And this ties into what I was saying before with looking at mainframe computers, now 80 years ago, the reason there weren't that many is 'cause they were really expensive, really hard to use, really big. What we're seeing in IoT is that things are getting less expensive, smaller, and easier to use and that's just increasing adoption. So that's another, just big tailwind that's been playing out over the past few decades now.
- [Ryan] And Calum let me ask you since through each of those kind of periods of time and new technology and advances in technology, there's always these challenges that companies have to overcome in order and or the industry has to overcome in order to see adoption really take off. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you all see the market really facing, especially when it comes to the adoption. Obviously adoption takes time. There's a lot of moving pieces. There's some view parts of it as more complex than others, different companies you have to work with. Not everybody does everything for to bring an IoT solution to market so at the end of the day, IoT is not the easiest thing to implement. So can you talk about just from your perspective, what are the biggest challenges in this space and kind of how companies can think about overcoming them and maybe even showcase why some of these challenges are, maybe not as big a challenges as they used to be.
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