Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To do all this, how much of this is your proprietary technology and how much of it is system integration using other people’s technology?

Tim Panagos: Our strategy was to adopt things that were already existing in the market rather than building from scratch. It’s my belief that we intersect with the IoT, cloud, and AI macro trends. All of these technologies exist already in the marketplace. It’s not a matter of whether we need a better sensor or we need better AI; it’s about taking these technologies that are on the shelf, pre-integrating them, and making it so that you can scale in a business.

Sramana Mitra: You operate as a VAR/system integrator?

Tim Panagos: I don’t think we are. I suppose there are aspects of that that are possibly correct. We do create our own technology, but it’s really about the productization of those things. A system integrator will say, “What do you want? We’ll build this for you.” It tends to be very expensive because you’re paying for people’s time.

Our goal is to pre-package. We have other people manufacture the sensors. Yes, we’re leveraging somebody else’s cloud. It’s the combination of those into a very specific product offering that allows us to deploy tens of thousands of these reliably so that businesses don’t need to know any of the details.

A lot of the early industries in all of those trends required the people who adopted them to really want to know the details and tolerate the details. Our mission is to take all that away. For us, it’s pre-assembling all of that and productizing.

Sramana Mitra: How do you measure ROI in your customers?

Tim Panagos: A lot of the current usage is about addressing the perception of safety. That is, in many ways, where we are post-quarantine. What our users are really worried about right now isn’t making more money or saving money as much as increasing the perception of safety. Some of those indicators of return are measured in intangibles like employee sentiment which is fairly abstract.

Prior to quarantine, we were focusing on harder measures of return. That took a backseat to perception. Things like predictive cleaning is a good example where if I’m responsible for servicing or cleaning a space, what I want to be able to do is know where should I direct those cleaning resources to create the best user experience while minimizing the cost of sending people out to clean a large space.

In that particular space, the ROI was measured on how many headcount-hours could we save by reducing the amount of redundant cleaning. We do think people will get back to that – wanting to measure real savings. Right now, people are focused on the other side.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average deal sizes of these use cases?

Tim Panagos: They tend to be in the hundred thousand to two hundred thousand range. We deal with large real estate portfolios. We’re looking for people who are managing millions of square feet. That is where we see the real challenge. It’s not when you have a single building; it’s when you have multiple buildings. You have a campus area. You have distributed buildings.

Our goal is to bring the complexity of that large distributed space altogether in a simple way. For those who have problems, $100,000 might sound expensive from the smart home perspective. For these big real estate owners, that’s quite small because they spend a lot more money on lightbulbs every year.

Sramana Mitra: Your target audience is large enterprise customers and Fortune 500 customers.

Tim Panagos: That’s right.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare
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