Transcript:

- You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All podcast on the IoT For All Media Network. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon, one of the co-creators of IoT For All. Now, before we jump into this episode, please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or join our newsletter at iotforall.com/newsletter to catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out. So without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome Ken to the IoT For All podcast. How are things going on your end?

- [Ken] Oh, great, you know, keeping busy, having fun, having some conversations.

- [Ryan] Yeah, this is a very exciting episode. This is episode 100 for the IoT For All podcast. We have two guests today. So you and then Eric Conn, who I'm gonna introduce here in a second, but I wanted to bring you on first to introduce yourself to our audience because not just are you a guest on this episode, but you're also a newly added member to the IoT For All team. And another exciting piece of news. We're gonna be launching a new podcast on the IoT For All Network that you're gonna be the host of. So would you mind just giving a quick introduction about who you are, kind of, you know, what brought you down to IoT For All, what you're gonna be doing. And then quickly introduce the podcast and talk about the focus a little bit.

- [Ken] Happy to, I do have to say though, when you started to say Ken is, but also, I just wanted to say but also a client. I'm gonna start over here, but folks, thank you for listening, really appreciate it. I'm Ken Briodagh, new editorial director for IoT For All. And I sort of come here through journalism and editorial and marketing all the way down the line, and I've been podcasting for a long time and I'm really excited to sort of bring this new podcast. "Let's Connect!" to the IoT For All Media Network. On this podcast we're gonna be talking about how ecosystem players in IoT technology thought leaders and sort of all the innovators, you folks out there listening, in IoT can sort of get a place and a platform to tell your stories, the things that you're working on. And also when you're listening to these episodes you get sort of an inside look at how technology strategy works. What are some areas that you should be thinking about innovating in? If you're an implementation company or an end user company listening, then maybe this is gonna give you some tips on directions that make sense for your company and things in IoT that you weren't aware of. So the idea is to help bring sort of the best practice in IoT implementation to as broad an audience as we can manage. So you know, all the rules like, subscribe, rate, review, comment, all the things that help us feed the algorithm so we can get as many earballs on these things as we can.

- [Ryan] Yeah, and a good followup that I'll kind add in here is I'm sure people are wondering, well how will that change the IoT For All podcast? Since a lot of what you said is stuff we've been doing for the past, you know, 100 or so episodes. And I think a good way to explain it is that, your show will be much more focused on connecting with the IoT ecosystem. You know, what's happening in the ecosystem, new offerings in the ecosystem, talking to more of those individuals and experts. And then the IoT For All podcast, we'll kind of have a little bit of a broader reach talking to companies maybe that are more of the adopters of IoT and the journey they went through, the solutions that are out in the market for companies that are not in the IT space to adopt, and just kind of offer that kind of advice and education to those maybe earlier in their IoT journey and may not directly be connected to the IoT space or work and they live and breathe in it like we do. And you know, your target guests for your show.

- [Ken] Yeah, so we're gonna be, I don't know about you, but I'm really excited about this concept of the the IoT For All Media Network, because now we're gonna be able to sort of reach out to a lot of different audiences and over time maybe bring in additional shows and start syndicating them out, really trying to make this a hub for the IoT industry to go to listen to their own stories and to learn from each other.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, and that expansion that we're hopefully do later on this year, bringing on some other popular podcasts to the network to kind of utilize the IoT For All engine to you know, gain attention and put more resources out in the world. Is gonna be a fantastic thing that I absolutely am looking forward to. So let's go ahead and pivot here for a second. Let's bring in our guests for today, Eric Conn, the co-founder and CEO of Leverege. Eric, you wanna go ahead and unmute yourself and join?

- [Eric] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ryan. I remember when you did your first podcast approximately two years ago, and I have to admire you for your consistency and devotion to basically one podcast a week without fail for two straight years. So that's an amazing achievement and I'm really happy to be on for the 100th anniversary of your podcast.

- [Ryan] Yeah, thank you. It's been an exciting journey. A lot of people involved behind the scenes that have really made this possible and you know, a big shout out to our fantastic guests, you know, that we're able to kind of, you know, put faith in the brand and in the podcast when it was getting started, they helped to really kick it off, to get it to where it is now, and our ability to expand into two shows and potentially more going on. So I appreciate that. And it's great to have you on here. I think what would be nice is I know a lot of our audience is probably already familiar with Leverege and what you all do, but let's start off by having you give a quick introduction just who you are, and then talk briefly about what Leverege does, and kind of your overall offering and approach to the market.

- [Eric] Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about me. I'm a software engineer/math guy. I've been in this tech space since I graduated from college quite a long time ago. And basically for the last 25 years I've been a serial entrepreneur. So when I started working, I worked at a place called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. We did a lot of basic research, and the internet was just sort of starting to come to be, and it was really exciting. And I wanted to get out of research and more into product development and more into commercial types of endeavors. So I joined a company, started a company with a couple other guys. None of us had actually done startups before, and we figured it out though. And you know, by the time we got done it was very successful and it was sold to Raytheon, which is one of the probably top three or four companies in the defense market. And I haven't looked back since then. So I just love creating new products, looking at the white space and markets and solving problems with technology. So that's essentially what drives me. Leverege is kind of a joint offering from me and one of my long-time best friends, Steve Lee, who's my co-founder and CTO. We got together, we had been working together in previous companies and in July of 2014, we decided, Hey, it's a good time to start a new company. We both had a kind of breaks and the action of what we were doing at the time. And so we started that. We spent the first six months just figuring out, okay, what do we wanna be when we are a company and not just two guys hanging out for lunch. And we decided IoT was really buzz-worthy and had all the ingredients, something that was hard. There wasn't like a 800 pound gorilla as they say in the market, it was very sort of fragmented, which meant that there's a lot of opportunity to solve problems. And there wasn't a gigantic company already sorta owning the market. So it looked like a really good spot for us. We really enjoy technology. We have a lot of experience with wireless communications, hardware, cloud computing, all the things that are ingredients of IoT. So we'd been doing that basically since I guess, early 2015, when we really started in full force and you know, been having fun and growing the company since then.

- [Ryan] So we've spoken to a lot of guests obviously that cover many different areas of IoT. And I'd be curious to kind of get your take on how you positioned Leverege in the market to not just differentiate yourself from other companies, but also kind of your overall, you've got to focus on helping companies adopt and implement IoT and kind of you know, what role do you all play? And what I'm getting at is having you kind of speak to those individuals who do not work in the IoT space, but are looking to get started on their journey. How would Leverege play a role in that for them?

- [Eric] Yeah, at its foundation Leverege is truly a software company. So we make a product that runs on top of your standard cloud providers like Google and Amazon and provides basic IoT services, which is still relatively abstract for somebody that doesn't know what IoT is, but it it's a value added layer, very close to the end user that's very much needed and it's not really supplied by the big cloud companies. So we said, we run on top of them, but what we found when we went to market when we first started is just trying to sell this abstract concept of an IoT platform, was a very tough sell. There's you know, tough sledding, a lot of education required. Customers didn't even know exactly what IoT meant, because I mean, it is a strange acronym, the Internet of Things. What does that even mean? Right. So we ended up sort of working backwards almost from the product through a systems integration and ultimately to pilots, because what we found now over doing this for six years is pretty much every company goes through the same three phases. They wanna do a pilot, a proof of concept and MVP they have different names for them and different goals, but they wanna see, one, does the technology work? Does it provide some sort of ROI for their business? Because at the end of the day IoT is all about solving business problems or people problems with technology. So they wanna understand how it works. So you have to train them up on a lot of the terminology. There's an incredible amount of technology involved and you need to simplify it for them. And in some cases, abstract away around the complexity so that they can really focus on their business. So we have a product that we call jumpstart, which is kind of a productized service that we just go in very quickly and we can build, you know, gather requirements, figure out exactly what they wanna do. What is the pain point they wanna solve, deliver something and let them see it, touch it and feel it. It's not Just a paper tiger, it's an actual system with hardware in the loop. And they get to see it working in their business. If they like it, they see the value from it. Then they can move to phase two, which is we become their systems integrator. Which before we started doing that and basically embracing becoming a systems integrator, we were having a lot of problems of what I call crossing the IoT chasm. So to go from a pilot to a scale deployment across your enterprise is a really, really big jump. There are a lot of pieces involved. There's a lot of costs that you have to uncover. There's a lot of operational friction. There's a lot of digital transformation within an organization, training of staff, you know, changing of processes. There's just so many things involved. And if the customer doesn't have someone they can trust to help guide them through that journey, they can kind of get lost or the pilot will just sort of go away. So as soon as we made the mental leap as a company to say, you know what, we're going to do, essentially the dirty work, if you will, but it's rewarding too, because ultimately we get across the chasm. But until you do that for a customer and build that trust and really help them understand how they use this technology for the betterment of their business, they will never scale. So in essence, to summarize what does Leverege do? We provide a software product that enables the creation of low cost IoT solutions much more quickly than if you tried to do it all yourself. So it's a set of tools that you can Leverege just to build things more quickly and more inexpensively. And we provide the guidance that a customer needs, especially enterprise because that's our main focus to get that integrated into their business so they get the maximum value out of it.

- [Ryan] Fantastic, and speaking of, kind of getting across that chasm into you know, scale, can you share some of your more successful projects that have maybe gotten you know, started out in the jumpstart phase, you moved into you becoming the systems integrator and helping them get to scale now. You don't have to share company names if you're not comfortable, but just some more real life examples to kind of bring it full circle to how you all are helping the market.

- [Eric] Yeah, I'll talk about. One of them it's public, so there's no issues with disclosing it, but it's you know, within what they call the LPWAN, or Low Power Wide Area Network, subsegment of IoT just to add more buzz words on top of buzzwords. It's a very interesting Applications that on its surface seems very simple. But there's a customer we worked with our partner Cox2M. We have a close relationship with Cox Communications and they use our platform to solve problems for different industries. But one of the first ones that we did together was for Manheim Auto Auction. So if you're in the auto industry, you know who Manheim is. They're the largest sort of supplier of used cars in the US and potentially the world, but definitely in the US. The stat that I've heard is three out of every four cars that is sold in a used capacity in the United States touches a Manheim lot at some point in its life. So that's an amazing amount of cars, when you think prior to the pandemic the US was maybe selling 18 million cars a year, somewhere in that range to have you know, 12 million of them go through a Manheim as they convert from leases or resold. It's a lot of volumes. It's a lot of cars. The fundamental problem that business had was they would have these large parking lots with tens of thousands of vehicles on them. And they would need to get all of these, you know, they'd have to orchestrate to get thousands just a subset of the tens of thousands. Get thousands of very specific ones in a certain order for a live auction that happens in very quickly. It's both live with people there, as well as online, and cars come through. There's cameras. There's sort of barkers. Everything you would think about when there's an auction. And if you can't get the cars lined up, if you can't find them on the parking lots, it's a real problem. You can't sell cars and cars are depreciating assets. So every month a car's value goes down. So if you can't get the cars, move them and sell them, resell them, you're losing money every day. So Manheim had been trying for years I think maybe even a decade to essentially put low costs GPS trackers on these cars that are battery powered, that would last for multiple years and be very inexpensive. So they could see where all their cars were on the parking lot. When I first heard about this Applications, I thought, well, that's really simple. Like we've all had GPS on our phones forever. But when you think through it, the requirements there make it way more difficult, because you're talking about your phone, you as a human you're the custodian of your phone. You charge it, you make sure it's charged. Well, I had a little tracker that's just thrown into a car, who's watching over it, no one. So you have to track the trackers. You have to know their battery States. They have the batteries have to last a really long time to get the value. And that's essentially the solution we built, it's a Cox2M product that uses Leverege platform underneath, it's all our vision. And that same product is now been sort of genericized and has been applied to multiple types of industries where you have lots of things on parking lots or in buildings that you just need to find them and sort them and understand their conditions. So that's been a very successful thing. I think Manheim at this point is closing into 400 or 500,000 vehicles. The triumph they're tracking at any one time, and it uses a niche by growing technology called LoRa from a networking wireless standpoint to be able to transmit the data because it's very friendly on battery life and other things like that.

- [Ryan] That's awesome, and before we bring Ken back in, what i want to ask is, is the way you work with Cox2M as far as kind of having your technology being the underlying platform, but they are in a sense the ones selling it and operating under their name kind of like basically a white label solution. Is that how you often work with most companies that you have as clients, or is there kind of a mix with how that's handled?

- [Eric] Yeah, it's only one of two ways when you get to the scale side of things. We either sell it like a platform or as a service, and that's kind of the case with Cox2M at this point, where initially they had us as their outsource product team and we did everything, basically built all the applications. But as they've evolved as a business and they've grown their team, they now have their own developers. They have their own product people. They basically replaced us. All the systems integration activities we used to do on their behalf, they've replaced them with their own people which is perfect for them and perfect for us, because we just wanna be the platform company anyway. So in that case, we sell them platform as a service. They modify it, they customize it, they then resell it under the Cox2M brand. And that works out great. We also have a subset of customers that I would label more as software as a service, where solution as a service is probably more appropriate. Where we are kind of the lead systems integrator. And we provide a solution at a fixed cost to a customer. And it's much more of a black box for the end customer. They don't necessarily know nor care how it works. Like what are the different components, where the hardware came from, what communications protocols it uses. They just wanna know that it can solve a business problem at a certain cost. And they wanna know what that cost is. They want it to be very transparent. So that's the other segment of our businesses, essentially this SAS business, where we'll have a solution we sell it into a customer and they just use it, and we provide sort of 100% care and feeding and a service level agreement for that product or solution.

- [Ryan] Okay, awesome. So what I would like to do now that we've kind of learned not just about Eric, but also Leverege and what y'all are doing. I was thinking it'd be a fun kind of pry or game to kind of go through some of the most commonly asked questions or commonly discussed topics in the first 100 episodes and bring Ken back in. And kind of pose these questions out for Ken and Eric. And we can talk back and forth about, and spend the rest of our time together, kind of going through some of these higher level questions that I think got a lot of engagement early on last year, and could definitely use some revisiting going into this new year and what we can you know, talking around what we expect the IoT space to look like in 2021. So with that being said, the first question I have for you all is around kind of the IoT journey. I guess the first couple of questions around the IoT journey that companies that embark on once they kind of understand what IoT is and the value it provides to their business. So starting with Eric, what advice do you have for companies who are looking to get started on their IoT journey? These are companies who understand what IoT can do for their business, have internal buy-in, and have some budget and are really looking to begin. So where would you recommend they start and what should they be thinking about as they kind of embark on this IoT journey?

- [Eric] You know, I think the best place to start would be with a company like Leverege or a systems integrator of some sort. And the reason I say that is they not only have knowledge of the market and the ecosystem and all the different technologies involved, but they have also built systems. So they've read about it, but they've actually practiced it. And so I think you have a better chance of success if you can identify a systems integrator to kind of help you and they can kind of do consulting in a way, but they're actually building things and showing you things instead of just providing the graphs, they're actually testing it in the context of your business. And so only companies that have a native ability to create products and write software or work with hardware vendors and integrate things are gonna be able to do that and give you the confidence as a business to move forward beyond that. So that would be kind of the first place I'd start. But even before that, I would make sure that as a business you've really done your homework on your own pain point, like what is the thing you're trying to solve? And how much is that worth to you? Probably the biggest impediment for all of us on both sides of the buyer and sellers market is a customer that doesn't know what the solution has to provide for them, either from a requirement standpoint or it doesn't know what the value is. So if you're a business, like if you're a Manheim to go back to the example, you essentially run this, if that L statement is in your head. You're like, if I could eliminate, you know, if I could know where all my cars are, instantly in the Palm of my hand, what would that do to my business? How would that save me money? How would it improve my customer experience? Would it allow me more revenue opportunities? And kind of thinking through that purely at the business level first, don't forget about how it might get done, but like what would be the value of that? You know, is it really reducing manpower or getting rid of really bad jobs where you have high turnover and low quality and replacing it with higher level jobs that are better paying for people, just providing higher customer experience, maybe as competitive advantage in your market. Really thinking through that, that would be the very first step I would do. And that can be all done somewhat internally because every business knows their business really well. So I would start there, next step I would try to find either a larger systems integrator or a smaller niche one like we do. We provide them services in the area that we focus on, and kind of work with them and do a little, you know, build a little test a little and get feedback and then go from there.

- [Ken] I'd step us back even one more and I'd be terribly risk if I didn't say you should start by reading on IoT For All. And they should look into some education onto what IoT is all about.

- [Eric] Absolutely.

- [Ken] If you're not plugging, are you even podcasting?

- [Eric] That's true.

- [Ryan] Yeah, Ken and some of Eric's points I feel like, you know, the education piece is super important and obviously we started IoT For All with the idea of helping educate the market so that we could help adoption across the industry, because there are different, or a lot of different components of an IoT solution. Everything from you know, the hardware, the connectivity to software, you know, you can keep going. And Eric made a good point of he recommends starting with a systems integrator. And I think honestly, even if Leverege didn't play that role he'd probably still suggest that. Because we've seen talking with hardware companies and connectivity companies that it's not bad to go down, you know, start with talking to them, but what they're gonna do is bring in somebody who really understands the end to end solution. Even if that company doesn't provide those services internally. Which really hits that one of the key elements of the makeup of the IT ecosystem, which is partnerships. And from your discussions with experts and guests from your past podcasts that you've already been recording for the new podcast, what has been kind of the overall, I guess, thought process and value that they see in a strong partnership ecosystem that each company kind of has.

- [Ken] Yeah, I mean, I don't think you could have been more right in saying that that sort of the partnership economy is critical to IoT and the growth of the industry I think. Mainly because no one company or provider or anybody really can or should be all and end all, there's no sort of Walmart for IoT. I think that the more specialized and expert a company is, the better they are at that thing. And IoT is really complex and there's a lot of different moving parts in any sort of system or IoT solution. Working with the right partners is how you get the expertise across the system that you need. Now, sometimes there's a sort of pyramid of partners. You've got your SI partner who then works with a bunch of other tiers of partners. That's often how it works. But if you're just starting out or even if you've been implementing IoT for a while and you're looking at a new Avenue creating a new profit center, doing some other thing, there is an expert partner out there, that will be who you should work with. And so I think that the research around finding those experts is critical as an early step. And that's actually a really high bar. It's hard to find those experts and those companies that can do the thing you need. So finding the right partners probably couldn't be more important, I think.

- [Ryan] Yeah, and Eric kind of elaborate on that. What are your thoughts on kind of the vetting process that non IoT companies kind of how they should approach that process when they're looking for the right company to work with? 'Cause there's tons of platforms out there, there's tons of hardware manufacturers and SIs. How do you recommend, like what kind of questions should they be asking or what things should they be looking for? And then on the opposite side maybe, what are the red flags that they should be avoiding if they come across a potential kind of lead partner for them during that process?

- [Eric] Yeah, I think you know, at the end of the day every business that's buying something wants to buy something that's open at some level, right? So you know, and secure. Like security and openness are probably one of the top two things that a buyer should be thinking about. And when I say openness it's the ability to change whatever you're doing in the future. You know, giving yourself options as a business and not getting tied 100% into any particular same sort of single thread and encounter, so that you have optionality. Because your business will change. You don't know if your partner's business could change. And you know, the days of vendor lock-in they've never been very popular, there's a