Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did you pitch for Internet of Things story?

Colin Sutherland: The product that we’re actually delivering is data. That’s where our entire industry is moving. The practical application of the data in reducing accidents and improving fuel economy is terrific. You can collect information and store that on the cloud. It is an asset that enables managing, not only where the data is. but also with outside sources like weather.You can then match the weather-related data and the vehicle performance to alert the driver that five miles up ahead, the road is about to freeze.

This is the type of information that’s coming on now—the accessibility of data in the vehicle and making it available in a Big Data environment, sharing it with smart cities so they know where the most risky intersections are so they can make this intersection more safe. We can do that today. We had to grow our customer base and generate profits. The product that we’ll be selling 10 years from now will be very data-centric and not specifically solution-centric, which is what we’re doing right now. We’re already seeing that migration happening right now.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at the trends in Internet of Things as it pertains to vehicles, what area would you steer entrepreneurs to look into as new opportunities to starting companies? What are some problems that you see that need to be solved? Let me put it another way. If you were starting another company today, what would be that company within the space?

Colin Sutherland: I would actually start a company that would be capable of mining data from more than one course. Telematics data like ours would be one of those sources. You want to go and create simple capabilities and marry, at least, traffic pattern data together with vehicle data. Beyond that, I think you’d also want to get into consulting practice. Part of the problem that we have in our industry is we are literally collecting 600 million pieces of data a day from our current install base, and the challenge that most businesses are facing is they don’t know what questions to ask of the data. I would be opening a consulting practice that would have to understand what all this information represent.

Then how do we offer consulting with the business to have them be able to ask the right questions. How can I learn more about my business through Big Data? Secondly, I would probably start offering some really interesting dashboard reports or business scorecard reports on ways to improve. One of the problems with all of this stuff is data itself is fairly alienating when you talk to small and medium sized businesses. For an entrepreneur, you need to understand that you actually have a  massive opportunity ahead of you because small to large businesses are relying on outsourced partners to provide these answers for them. Get into the game of data mining and understand how to merge these things together.

Sramana Mitra: I think what I’m hearing you say is that there is more data being generated in this mode by vehicles using solutions like yours that are not really being leveraged for product information. This data is basically lying around because the app that was extracting context-specific data to produce actionable items does not exist.

You’re talking about consulting. To me, it sounds like opportunities to build context-specific apps that could then convert this data into information. You start with consulting just to understand the customers and problems, but the opportunity really is to develop apps on top of Big Data.

Colin Sutherland: Yes, that’s a good way to describe it.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Thank you for sharing your perspective.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab
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