Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you lift yourself to the 30,000-foot level, what trends really excite you and where do you see open problems that need to be tackled by new entrepreneurs?

Tom Bianculli: There are these three things that we talk about a lot. There’s IoT, cloud, and mobility. The three of those are coming together. We’re going to have roughly 25 billion connected devices by 2020. Right now, we’re probably sitting at under six billion connected things. In the next four years, that’s going to triple. It’s like everyone getting connected. That’s the IoT piece. Lots of people view cloud in lots of different ways. When I say cloud in this context, I mean the trend that’s focused on computing as a utility.

Whatever computing power I need, I essentially I have on tap. I can turn the knob up or down based on access to cloud computing. That allows me to do some really intelligent things with all that data that’s being collected by the Internet of Things. The mobility part of it goes back to the fact that we’ve got every person connected. Information can be sent to anybody in any moment in time.

When you fuse all those together, you’ve got a situation where you have exactly the right piece of information you need to make the best business decision in the moment. Fulfilling my need in the moment has also been adopted by social networking. The consumer space is also fulfilling the customer’s needs. Things like Uber fulfil my need for transportation in the moment. There’s all this cloud-sourced use cases and applications that take advantage of that cloud, mobility, and IoT.

Whether it’s in the consumer space or B2B, this thirst for information helps me make better, in the moment, decisions is where we see tremendous opportunity. The examples are endless. You look at ordering online and having something delivered to your home in 60 minutes, which is happening today. The idea of having a schedule just goes away. We’re seeing a lot of companies embrace that. They’ve been running their businesses on schedules and plans for decades. Now what they’re saying is, “If I’m going to deliver something to your home in 60 minutes, I don’t even know what my people are going to be doing 45 minutes from now because I don’t know what orders I’ve gotten that need to be delivered in 60 minutes.”

What do I need to go to? I need to go to dynamic deployment of my resources in order to fulfil people’s expectations. Dynamic deployment of my resources means I need as much data as I can get about what’s happening in my supply chain, what’s being ordered, where are my goods, where are my capital assets. When I think about those business and customer needs, and cloud, IoT, and mobility as enablers to deliver on those needs, you’ve got to pick which layer of that stack you want to operate in.

When you’re starting a company, where is your competency? Is it at the physical layer saying, “I’m going to sense the information that’s going to help make that better decision.” Is it at the edge analytics layer which is the next layer up that says, “Once I have this sense data from the physical world, I can do something to it so that it can be consumed by the cloud”

Is it at the cloud level where you have this meta data and you can operate on it to derive insight or is it up at an applications layer where I’m going to ingest the analytics output that’s providing these insights and I’m going to turn them into real-world actions that people can benefit from. I think that stack of sensing, agile analytics, cloud, Big Data analytics, and apps on top is where the opportunity is. What layer in there does an entrepreneur think they have vision, value, and competency? Vertical expertise almost doesn’t matter because there are problems rich in that template.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you. It was nice talking to you.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies
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