Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John Horn, CEO of Ingenu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about your customer base. What customers are you serving and how?

John Horn: In the past, our technology was used primarily to build private networks. Our customer base at that point were utilities, municipalities, and oil & gas companies. These were industries that were looking for an alternative technology and they built RPMA networks. Our focus now is on building large nationwide public networks, somewhat like cellular but with RPMA technology.

We are building a network in the United States for which we will be targeting the same customers as a cellular company would. Throughout the rest of the world, we are licensing other companies to build those networks to support the IoT vertical technologies out there. Our customers outside the United States are our licensees who are building networks. Our customers inside the United States will be the actual solution providers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few customer use cases and help us understand what’s happening.

John Horn: We work with a handful of companies to build solutions in Africa, very specifically, to monitor their oil & gas production and distribution.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us more about that particular use case.

John Horn: There’s a major oil company in the Niger delta and they were experiencing some sabotage and things of that sort on their pipelines. The government there put out a requirement that they had to have digital capabilities on their oil field. So they had to find a technology that would allow them to do several things such as two-way communications and reach remote areas. It had to be very robust and secure. There had to be several security certifications. They looked at some other technologies. Some were cellular and some were satellite. They finally went with Ingenu’s RPMA just because it was able to fit the bill to all of their requirements. The other technologies just did not add up.

They were able to protect their distribution and their production in that geographic area using our technology to communicate over wide, vast distances where cellular would never work. That’s the bottomline. In the island of Aruba, they started with electric meters. They wanted to be able to have smart meters but they couldn’t make cellular work. They didn’t have enough cellular towers. We could get that fast coverage out of a few towers.

They were able to start with nothing but electric meters. Then they added gas meters. Then they added street lights and all the other things to their infrastructure because RPMA was such a solid network communication platform for them that they were able to add all of these other vertical solutions with the anchor of it being electric meters. They started using it for multiple applications, which is the proof point for why these public networks are going to work and why we have so many countries committed to building public networks with the RPMA technology right now because it can be used for thousands of different applications.

It is very secure, very stable, and it covers a great area at a low cost. That’s where the big difference is with cellular. Cellular can only make it work if there’s a ton of people in the area. You look at the United States. 96% of the people are covered by only 75% of the acreage. You have mass amounts of white space with no coverage because there’s not enough people to justify a tower. In that white space, there’s oil and gas production. There’s agriculture that needs water management and other things. Those are specific applications for us.

We have another company in United States that covers 50% of all oil & gas production in the Untied States with only 100 towers. They cover areas that are larger than most states in the eastern United States with just a hundred towers and they cover all the oil & gas production, from pipeline monitoring to the actual production of the drill heads. That whole ecosystem is protected by technology that’s run on the RPMA network.

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