Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ayyeka CEO Ariel Stern (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption of the kind of end-to-end solutions you’re talking about at the city or state level?

Ariel Stern: Not that high. Some cities or municipalities are very advanced. They have a strong leadership team. They have a strong appetite for innovation. They understand that digital innovation is key for the operation and adopt digital tools. The number of such utilities is very low for numerous reasons.

The majority of the utilities are somewhere in between. They haven’t adopted yet but are looking into it. This is a big opportunity for us, because we are the first ones to approach them. The adoption rate is not high at the moment, but we do expect many geographies’ regulators to push utilities to adopt technologies.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any number?

Ariel Stern: It’s very hard. Defining the market is very hard. When looking into specific numbers, you have to ask what is the potential available market. Take the US. The US has something around 50,000 worker utilities. It’s very hard to get accurate numbers about how many of them adopted. The market demographic is very big.

In most cases, we are growing, but we don’t see wide adoption. You see pilots here and there. I can probably count a few dozens. What we do see is an increased number of inquiries. We do see interest. There are management roles that have been changed by the younger generation which is are more tech-savvy or digital-savvy.

Sramana Mitra: What are the open problems from where you sit within the IoT space? If you were starting a company today, what kinds of problems would you go after solving?

Ariel Stern: It’s a very good question, because I think about it once every two months with my partner. If we start again now, what would we do differently? Companies now rely more heavily on commercial off-the-shelf components. They try to reduce the areas of reinventing stuff.

The second one is, I would start to focus on commercialization. Technology companies are in love with development. I think companies should think of the user and not think as an inventor. In this place that we play, we deal with high-end digital technologies. Venturing into the more day-to-day utility work, merging those two domains is very hard.

The big challenges in Infrastructure 4.0 are the simple ones. Connecting remote assets to the data network is a huge challenge. Then in data consolidation, think about how to work together. Everyone wants to be the next Google or Facebook. Because a lot of it is government business in infrastructure space, you cannot take over by using a single solution. Thinking out-of-the-box on how to partner with other companies will come very handy for someone to start building a venture in the space.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything that I should have asked you?

Ariel Stern: One additional thing that we can discuss is a use case. For example, how to better manage storm workers. Over the last six months, you have major floods in Germany, US, and the Far East. Many places are flooded with unexpected summer rains. Business intelligence in the collection network can reduce the severity of flood events. You can drain the water much more effectively and save both lives and cost.

We see a lot of requirement around drinking water. We can guarantee quality of service around drinking water. Try to imagine what is the implication of a few hours or a few days without water. Another example is in the energy space. How do we effectively monitor health and availability in real-time? Most of the infrastructure projects are still running in the dark. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another use case?

Ariel Stern: When you think about critical infrastructure, many people have different views. Not a lot of them see the environment as part of the critical infrastructure. When you think about critical infrastructure, you typically think about man-made assets such as transportation networks or water networks.

Maybe you would be surprised to hear that many of the government focus is around environmental measuring – air quality, water quality, water availability. We have a lot of business in monitoring and helping entities better manage environment. Again, we’re creating and using the data in real-time and bringing the data to deeper levels to help stakeholders make decisions in real-time.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ayyeka CEO Ariel Stern
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