Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In the broad categorization that you just made, other than energy savings applications and then the off-shoots of energy savings, what are some of the other buckets of enterprise IoT?

Danny Yu: How to think about this is look at whose problems are we solving. We can talk about technology and effectively the technology can handle security and other things. There are standards-based products for these elements here. As an example, there are security-based access controls using open standards that would work on our platform. These are obvious extensions that inherently could be implemented.

Sramana Mitra: There is energy control that is getting a lot of attention and investment. That is a trend. If you play this out till the end of the decade, there’s going to be significant penetration of energy control IoT systems in the enterprise. There is security, which I think will go the same route. Inventory control is one. That is going to see a similar kind of progress.

Danny Yu: Whoever has the platform in the building ready off the first lead in application is going to be the natural solution provider for all these future offshoots.

Sramana Mitra: Maybe. Inventory is a completely different ball game. Inventory is not static. It moves around.

Danny Yu: I see this on the security side.

Sramana Mitra: Security may be yes, but no for inventory.

Danny Yu: Our core end-user focus cases are usually around facilities, folks, and operations. Once you have the building responsibility, facilities are a natural tie-in. I think there’s a rich set of still-to-be-realized operational elements that we don’t even need to get into asset management. We see ourselves developing more vertically-specific solutions around things such as retail banking and logistics, which are tied to their operations. There are certain use cases that are not really asset management but are tied to operations – keeping some of their equipment warm for how they manage their transportation. Since there has never been a network solution there and we can actually control, that’s operational. I don’t even have to go to security. There are these things in the facility already that had not been connected.

Sramana Mitra: You keep coming back to your business at an industry level conversation.

Danny Yu: I’m sorry about that.

Sramana Mitra: Which is fine. You should be completely obsessed with your business. I completely understand that.

Danny Yu: If you want to see where this goes at an industry level, my future view is that ultimately, we’ll have an IP. Everything will be connected to the Internet granularly down to the device. We’ll have different platform companies coming from their area of expertise whether that’s enterprise software coming down into the IoT. Those are probably the biggest movers coming into enterprise IoT. Then, who figures out the right sets of vertical applications within the specific segments will determine who’s the big winner.

The IT companies who take advantage of this are actually better positioned to exploit the technology than the traditional things companies. We’re here in Silicon Valley. We see the pace at which some of the end product companies move. It’s not always about technology. It’s about the value proposition and the customer.

Sramana Mitra: There’s more capital available to them. It’s just a different space that people play in when you’re playing as an IT company versus when you’re playing as a lighting company.

Danny Yu: They tend to think about hardware. Companies that make things are hardware-centric versus what we’re talking about, which is process improvement and productivity.

Sramana Mitra: How big a company are you now?

Danny Yu: We’re close to 50 employees. We’re growing quite rapidly. Probably in the neighborhood of 2x to 3x per year.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree
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