Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ben Forgan, CEO of Hologram (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption of the IoT that you are talking about in today’s universe? When you calculate your total available market, what does that constitute and what percentage of TAM have you or your competitors been able to convert so far?

Ben Forgan: The short answer is that it is difficult to measure. I can give some high-level ideas here. We know that it is a huge market. That is apparent. People have been talking about IoT for the past ten years. When you think about it, connecting things to the internet is really just the continuation of the trend since the internet began.

Today, that means that everything under the sun is getting an internet connection. The estimates for general IoT devices out there range in the billions or trillions. However, we take a more rigorous approach to it for our particular segment. We think of ourselves as a connectivity company. We are providing cellular access to the internet. The way in which we provide it is suitable for IoT because we provide robust multi-carrier connectivity that works anywhere around the world.

When we look at mobile data trends overall, we see that starting in 2015 – non-phone things or IoT devices accounted for 20% of the total mobile data traffic. Today, they account for roughly 40% to 50% of total mobile data traffic. In the same period of time, the total mobile data traffic is growing substantially. In the future, we expect that trend to continue. We project that 60% to 80% of mobile data traffic is going to grow.

You can think about it like packets that are being transmitted across the network. We break that down and say that each is X amount of dollars. It is a big market. It’s still fragmented today. We are still in the early stage of adoption. You have other folks or classic mobile virtual operators that are more traditional. They are our legacy competitors I would say.

Hologram sits as a software platform – turning connectivity into software- that’s where we try to access the market. Think about what Strike did for payments. That is how we think about it in terms of grabbing our slice of the TAM.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the impact of 5G in this?

Ben Forgan: 5G is a continuation of this trend of the convergence of wired and wireless. When I talked about at the beginning of how we are internet providers, the way we provide that internet is through being a cellular access provider. 5G is showing that cellular is the predominant way of delivering internet access moving forward.

Our VP has a bragging hotspot in his apartment here in Chicago. You get the gigabit up and down on that, so there is no need for a wired connection as a result. When I think about 5G, I think about cellular being the primary means of delivering the internet. I also think about ourselves as a translations layer on top of that so that we can get devices onto that network.

Sramana Mitra: When you look around your orbit from your vantage point, what are some open problems that need to be solved for more of this infrastructure to perform? Give me ideas that new entrepreneurs can take on and start companies around?

Ben Forgan: That is a good question. There is a variety of things. In general, innovation around hardware platforms that can be converted to software is good. One of the things that we deal with frequently is chips that are old and as a result, they don’t perform as well compared to new technology. Because of this, it could take years for companies to upgrade their life cycle from 2G to 5G. Having hardware that is a bit more flexible and software-defined in pushing that software at the edge is an exciting area.

Security is a big one as well. As these devices dominate the internet, it is important for folks to think critically about security. Our co-founder, Pat Wilbur, is an expert on security. It’s not our core focus, but we definitely have a secure platform. Ultimately security takes many facets. There are some interesting opportunities to provide software for doing large deployments that need some visibility into the security of the devices.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ben Forgan, CEO of Hologram
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