Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Frank Greer, CEO of Zipit Wireless (Part 1)

Let’s review some more IoT use-cases through Frank’s eyes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of the Zipit story. Tell us a bit about the company. What do you do? How do you do what you do? Also, give us a bit of your background.

Frank Greer: I’m the CEO of Zipit Wireless. We’re a 10-year old company. We’re based in Greenville, South Carolina. We were a startup funded by VCs. We were spun out of a company almost 10 years ago. Our objective was to take our expertise and knowledge in cloud-based computing and remotely managing devices, and then apply that to what we felt was a thrilling business opportunity.

At the time, the IoT term didn’t exist. We had some foresight into what was coming. This was largely based on the expertise and knowledge we built over the prior 5 to 10 years. I can’t say we had any great insight. From what we were seeing in the industry, we could see what is now known as IoT around the corner. The tough part about talking about IoT is, to a lot of people, there’s a lot of nebulous terms. There’s a lot hype. There’s a lot of excitement about IoT. A lot of it is justified.

For somebody looking in from the outside, there’s got to be some tangible benefit that they can understand. Otherwise, what is the point of a company jumping into this. I think there’s a lot of companies out there that talk about IoT and use a lot of these nebulous terms. I feel it leads to a lot of confusion.

We have a simple story about what we do. We are a cloud computing company. Our goal is to try and add value to a company. We are specifically focused on companies that are product companies who have built their businesses around developing, designing, and releasing product. They never had to worry about connecting those products in the past.

Now all of a sudden, there’s a huge opportunity to connect these devices and bring them online and to add some greater value to the product. They come to this new world not having any experience in cloud computing and remotely managing devices. Those are the things that we help do. We provide a platform that companies can leverage to provide expertise in delivering what they want. We provide a third piece, which is operation services. We basically operate a cloud-based solution for our customers for the life of their product.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Frank Greer, CEO of Zipit Wireless
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