Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to a different platform and a different customer and do the same kind of use case description.

John McDonald: I’ll give you another example of a well-known company. Panasonic has many different businesses but one of their businesses is a unit called Panasonic Automotive Systems that makes car radios or as they call them, infotainment systems. It’s probably the most sophisticated piece of integrated electronics that you’ll find in the modern vehicle. Oftentimes, the amount of code that goes into the radio exceeds the total amount of code in every other element in the car by several times. It’s an extremely intricate and complicated electronic device with a ton of software that’s baked into it during production. Panasonic has been a long-time customer of CloudOne in regards to providing them with the environment that their engineers need to be able to successfully develop and deliver the code that goes into those infotainment systems. They have several people all over the world in several development teams and sometimes, contractors or other vendors that they work with to augment their own people need to collaborate live on a global basis.

They need to be able to share problems and insights on how to fix those problems. They need to be able to reuse code that they may have used on other projects in order to save time and money. They frequently have the need to integrate other people into the development process itself as they often get components from third-party manufacturers, such as a navigation chip or a digital signal processor. If they integrate the component into the infotainment system, naturally there would be problems. In the old days, we would have to take the offending code, if you will, zip it up securely, and send it to the vendor of the component, and await eagerly for an answer on how to fix the issue or the problem that they’re stuck on. Sometimes, that answer comes rapidly and sometimes, it doesn’t come at all.

All the tiny standoffs can create a tremendous amount of expense and time in developing the platform. Today, they have the ability to tie-in all of those vendors of components dynamically and live into the digital process itself because in the virtual private cloud, they all have the same common space and they can securely control the access so that they can share only what it is that the vendor should see and nothing more. When they’re done with the interaction, cut-off that access, and everything stays tucked neatly into their secure cloud. This reduces, by several times, the amount of time and energy required to build these radios and it makes it a far more efficient, cost-effective, and ultimately, successful method of building these highly integrated devices.

While we’ continue working with them, Panasonic has grown to become the world’s leading producer of these systems. In this case, the platform we’re speaking of is the platform that the developers use to create the entire radio itself, which is different from the platform that you heard about in the Cummins example, which is more about data collection and analytics. It shows you some of the different variances on these systems that we build and provide. It depends on the customer, their objective, and what sort of components they’re using that we bring together for them to successfully deliver the result.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne
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