Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there other really interesting, far out there, use cases that you’ve encountered that are worth discussing?

Michael Martin: We have one going on in the lab right now. It’s an interesting one. It is a replenishment application. We have an innovation lab where our engineers work on thought provokers that we bring to our customers to show them ways in which that technology can be used in different aspects of their business. For example, we’re working on a weight sensor to place under a water cooler in the office. As the water gets used in the water cooler, the weight obviously becomes less. You could trigger a replenishment for the vendor who comes and delivers the water bottles to ensure that we get just-in-time delivery of that office supply. It’s a pretty simple example but it shows that if you start to use IoT technology in a manufacturing or logistics environment to trigger replenishment, it’s just another way in which that technology can be used to support the business. By getting more lean, that definitely has more value in the business. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. You were a services and solutions company. It sounds like you have built this whole system from scratch. How is it that there aren’t off-the-shelf systems out there from the people who do retail enterprise software?

Michael Martin: There are and they’re coming. For us as an integrator, we’re not as interesting in being the sole provider of the technology. Our interest is either helping people figure out how to apply existing commercial technology to their business and being their integrator. We help them deploy in a secure manner and also to deploy it at scale.

One thing that we do to add value to customers is, we’re very good at doing projects that involve lots of people in lots of places touching lots of things. That grocer, for example, had hundreds of stores. Once they decide the technology that they want to deploy, they need help in actually getting it in their stores as quickly as possible in a predictable way. We don’t try to be the sole conceiver, constructor, and deliverer of the technology. We’re happy to assist whether we’re helping build it from scratch or helping them use commercial off-the-shelf solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to understand what are good interesting Internet of Things use cases, not the process of how you service clients.

Michael Martin: One interesting use case from the experiment stage is we work with a large grocer who has typical business objectives that a large grocery retailer would have. In that experiment phase, we developed a prototype application to showcase for them what they could do in the store with some location-based mobile technology. What we did is, we used some technology that communicates with the mobile phone through Bluetooth. We showed them how they could integrate a grocery shopping list app into their existing customer application, and how as the customer moves throughout the store, that would filter that shopping list to show customers items that were close to them. Again, in that stage, that was a very quick prototype that we built. We showed them that just to stimulate some ideas around things that they could do with IoT technology in the store. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 1)

If you think large enterprises are readily rolling out IoT solutions, think again. They are not, they should not. Find out why.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Michael Martin: I’m the CTO and CIO at nfrastructure. nfrastructure is a technolgy services and solutions company. We help customers design, build, and operate infrastructure and application solutions from the core of their enterprise all the way out to the edge. We do a lot of technology services to support that mission— everything from networking, collaboration services, cloud, edge device services, IT service management, and a variety of services that are aligned with helping an organization connect their technology to their users in support of their business.

Sramana Mitra: So this discussion is about Internet of Things. What do you do within that space?
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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal (Part 5)

Ray Rothrock: We woke up just a couple of years ago. When Target happened, there’s some bad software inside networks. How did it get there? We say, “I have firewalls. I have data leak protection. I have all these stuff.” It happens because of mobile. It happens because of email. It turns out that the perimeter isn’t really the perimeter. We all live in a cloud world. BOYD devices show up on the network, bringing bad stuff. Now, that we’ve come to the conclusion that the bad stuff is inside, how do we deal with it? That’s what started in 2013 to now. Everybody’s got the bad stuff. They know they have the bad stuff. The question for a Senior Manager is it’s not a matter of if. It’s a question of when and what do I do about it when it happens. That’s RedSeal. We tuck into that trend where your networks got problems. We help sort it out. That’s the industry view.

By the way, as companies become more network-centric or using digital technologies to run their business, they become more vulnerable. Let me give you a specific example. July 8 this year. United Airlines, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Stock Exchange all had a digital problem and all three shut down. It was a cyber event but it wasn’t a security problem. They just got problems. These things are complex. Three companies on the same day. Now, it’s with the CEOs because if you shut down an airline for a day, you affect the revenues. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Not at all. How long does it take to map a sizeable network like the kinds of numbers that you’re rolling out here?

Ray Rothrock: If you’re a skilled engineer, it could take a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Cisco took a couple of weeks.

Sramana Mitra: Is it a scan running continuously, or is it a scan running at certain times?

Ray Rothrock: It depends on the complexity and lots of other attributes of the network. Most people run it overnight because it usually takes a couple of hours.

Sramana Mitra: So the scan doesn’t take more than a couple of hours.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the question that I want to explore, which is about open problems. You’ve already talked about the hyperscaling of mobile devices and apps in the next few years. If you were to start a company today, what kind of things would you work on?

Mike Ryan: I would look at how these revolutions have gone in the past, just for a little hint. Again, we look at this through the enterprise. If you go back to the days of PC, we had IT, mainframes, and customer databases. Along come personal computers, and along comes database three. All of a sudden, the company has 50 customer databases because departments went off and did things on their own. It’s the empowerment of departments in the enterprise that we think is most interesting in terms of growth. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal (Part 3)

Ray Rothrock: We have three factors that determine a number. The number is like a Personal Credit Score. It ranges from 350 to 850. We crunch those numbers with our proprietary algorithms, and we give you a metric on the piece of the network that you’re interested in. There are three things that go into that. Number one, is that the configuration files should be in good shape. There are best practices. There are all kinds of things we can look at the equipment to say, “You’ve got this properly configured.” The other thing is the vulnerabilities. Do you have hosts on your network that are at risk of being attacked based on where they sit on the network? The third is what you don’t know. This is what gets everybody’s interest.

When our software runs, we always find equipment, routes, and other pieces of the network that nobody knew existed. They were designed by somebody years ago and were long forgotten. We’ll show routes. It’s what you don’t know that will hurt you. >>>