Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s interesting to me is that you are able to sell six-figure deals without hard ROI to address a perception issue. That’s unique I think.

Tim Panagos: It may just be a point in time.

Sramana Mitra: The higher the ticket size, the more the need to justify hard ROI. What you’re pointing out is that you have been able to sell six-figure deals without hard ROI. That’s probably a point in time. It is a point in time where you are benefitting from that.

Tim Panagos: I also think different people care about different aspects of the ROI. Some are worried about spaces that are unoccupied. They aren’t aware of what might be happening in the space. People are worried about leaks in the ceiling causing damage. In a normal building, someone’s going to mention that there’s a leak in the ceiling before it’s too bad. If you’ve got an unoccupied building, measuring leaks becomes imperative.

Does that mean everybody is looking for ROI on leak detection? No. It’s just a component of one of the values that people can get out of this. In many ways, it’s dealing with the unknown. The larger your organization, the larger your space footprint and the more chaotic that is. Here, people are choosing their own core values out of what it means to know more about that chaotic space.

Sramana Mitra: You are a bootstrapped company?

Tim Panagos: We are.

Sramana Mitra: How long have you been doing this?

Tim Panagos: Ten years now.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing IoT right from the beginning?

Tim Panagos: Like a lot of startups, there were pivots. In the beginning, we weren’t doing IoT. We’ve been in IoT for about five years. In the earlier five years, we built a data management platform that was looking for the kind of data that people wanted to think differently about.

This idea of streaming data is new in the technology space. Everybody knows what operational data looks like. Companies like Oracle grew up and dominate in that database area. Data that moves quickly and is constantly refreshed is a different opportunity for organizations. I left Accenture. Accenture bought my last startup.

What I wanted to do was take the technologies that I was seeing being applied for very large organizations and democratize some of those things. We started with that idea of a data management platform and problems that I saw customers at Accenture had.

Over time, what we found ourselves looking for was what is the kind of data that organizations have that fits that model but isn’t already well-handled. IoT became a rising need for enterprises to deal with this data. It naturally fit with what the platform was. That’s when we got some product-market fit. We began to invest more and more in the IoT aspects of the business.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare
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