Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have recently covered a company called Tuya. Are you familiar with them?

Sanjay Brahmawar: I haven’t worked with them directly, but I heard a bit about them. Maybe you can tell me a bit about what they have done or their coverage. 

Sramana Mitra: They just went public. I discovered them in my cloud stock series newsletter. They are positioning as an IoT platform. They are the first Chinese software company to have made it. Chinese software companies have not made it big. They have had great e-commerce successes but not software. This is the first company that I have seen that I found quite exciting. They are following this IoT as a service strategy. You may want to take a look. 

Sanjay Brahmawar: We will definitely look into it. It is interesting that you mentioned that because we are partnering with Alibaba in China. We are offering our Cumulocity platform on top of Alibaba cloud to customers in China although the main customer base is European customers who are operating in China to be able to offer customers within the automotive sector, machine-building sector, and supply chain sector.

We are deepening this partnership with Alibaba and we also intend to open that and offer a lot more to it. We will see more competition definitely, but it is interesting to see that they have initiated that more in the US market. I would love to follow that and see how they got more success in the US market. 

Sramana Mitra: Last question, talk about your ISV ecosystem especially in regards to startups because our audience is full of entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs looking for a problem to solve. Are there specific domains and use cases in which you are looking for startups to come and build solutions on top of your platform? 

Sanjay Brahmawar: We do see 5G and edge becoming an exciting space where we do see a lot of startups getting engaged and thinking through how 5G accelerates and helps with IoT as more of these campuses become more prevalent. That space is an area that we see a lot more startups and entrepreneurs getting more active. I would expect and would encourage more collaborations with Cumulocity to be able to deliver.

We see 5G and edge as a unique differentiation from Software AG and Cumulocity. I do think that that use cases in manufacturing are somewhat clearer now. This includes condition-based monitoring or overall equipment efficiency. There are a lot of startups already building these apps for these specific problems.

I think that the place where there is going to be a big explosion of probably more than 400 million apps that are driven and connected to AI will be around areas like supply chain, logistics, and smart cities. These are the areas where I think there will be a massive explosion of applications and further builds on top of Cumulocity and others. That is an area that we would collaborate with and are already collaborating with startups.

I mentioned the carbon emission example. Everybody is coming up with lots of lofty goals that they will be carbon neutral by 2030 and so forth. It’s one thing to make a goal, but the other thing is to deliver on that. I believe that technology is the biggest lever and in this case, IoT and AI will be the biggest lever to be able to deliver on those carbon emission goals. Here entrepreneurs and startups will play a very important role. 

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG
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