Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: These platforms that you’ve described so far, besides the customer example that we went over, do each of these platforms have other customers?

John McDonald: In both cases, there are other companies that we’re working with and have been working with to implement an extremely similar kind of environment. For instance, we also work with a competitor of Panasonic in the marketplace and even though they are competitors, both use CloudOne in a very similar way. We’re working with several other customers for which the core issue is the data collection and analytics platform that they need for IoT. Obviously, we draw in the expertise that we have but we don’t share anything that’s proprietary or unique to Cummins with other customers. We definitely know and understand from our experience how to replicate success for other companies too.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in total?

John McDonald: We have between 50 and 100 customers that are doing, at any one time, a recurring relationship with us from a managed services perspective. In most cases, those companies are among the largest and the biggest brand names that you might know very well.

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you hearing in your work with them? What are some of the overriding trends in IoT?

John McDonald: What we have found in almost every case is that the heart of Internet of Things project is some form of monetization of data. In other words, there are some pieces of data that the company either owns or manages for a period of time, that they believe has some intrinsic value if it were to be unlocked and leveraged. It could be done in a number of different ways. You can certainly sell or rent the data. That’s a very obvious way to monetize the data, but it’s not always so clear. Sometimes, the data can be used to enhance the value of the product that you’re offering in the marketplace.

For instance, if you take that Cummins example, that’s exactly what’s going on there. The product they make is engines. What they’re doing with the data is enhancing the value of that engine by collecting data about it and offering up that data to the fleet operators. They’re not necessarily charging directly for that data but it enhances the value of the product itself. We see that phenomenon of monetization of data over and over again. It’s the heart of almost every Internet of Things project.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne
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