Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG (Part 2)

Sanjay Brahmawar: The second is the operational model. You would be familiar with this. A lot of software companies have been dealing with the old model of perpetual license selling. We decided, as part of our strategy, to move and shift to the SaaS model. This is a major shift for the company. It involves a lot of change in the way we are working and the way that we bundle our products.

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of Software AG (Part 1)

Software AG is redefining itself as an IoT PaaS company.

Sanjay talks about the transformation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start introducing our audience to yourself as well as Software AG. I know that the company has been around for a while but you are on a transformational journey. Let’s understand where you started and where you are going. 

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ben Forgan, CEO of Hologram (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption of the IoT that you are talking about in today’s universe? When you calculate your total available market, what does that constitute and what percentage of TAM have you or your competitors been able to convert so far?

Ben Forgan: The short answer is that it is difficult to measure. I can give some high-level ideas here. We know that it is a huge market. That is apparent. People have been talking about IoT for the past ten years. When you think about it, connecting things to the internet is really just the continuation of the trend since the internet began.

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Ben Forgan, CEO of Hologram (Part 1)

Ben discusses IoT connectivity and use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Hologram.

Ben Forgan: I’m the CEO of Hologram. Hologram is a connectivity startup focused on providing internet access for IoT devices. We talk about wanting to be able to connect any device to any network instantaneously anywhere. That is our vision for the product. In basic terms, you can think of it as phone plans for things that aren’t phones. We have been around for about seven years now. We are just chugging away. 

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I understand what you’re doing. You said you have 200 enterprises that have already adopted your technology?

Joe Lea: We do. That’s critical. The broader our deployment, the more places we deploy. The level of accurately identifying suspicious events is better the more that we see. We’re happy to report that we finished our fiscal year yesterday. We’ve grown 800% over the last year. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 4)

Joe Lea: For example, Samsung smart TVs makes a DNS request followed by connection attempts once a minute for about 45 minutes. Then they take a nap for an hour. Then they start up and do that process again. We know what default applications are installed. We see traffic that goes to things like the Netflix app. We look at whether the device is stationary or mobile based on where it shows up on the network. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 3)

Joe Lea: We’ve been around for three years. We’re VC-backed by Sequoia, Red Dot, Bain Capital, and Tenaya. We have about 200 different customer deployments. Where we’re deployed, we’re seeing activity in the industry and we’re learning about devices. That source of knowledge for us is important. We’ve got about 120 employees.

We’re doing business with a lot of different customers, about 11 of those are Fortune 100. We are focused on the larger enterprise, but we work with small and medium size businesses as well. We have an amazing research team. Externally, we’ve done disclosures around high profile vulnerabilities like BlueBorne, which was an exploit that was impacting over five billion different devices out there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve done a nice job of defining the problem. What is viable architecturally given the fact that there are devices everywhere and the level of connectivity via devices is unbelievably expensive at the moment and increasingly more so?

Joe Lea: That viability problem that you mentioned is exactly the reason why I left Tanium. We solved a lot of the traditional endpoint problems that have plagued the industry there. But the approach there is to require an agent to be installed on an endpoint.That works when you’re talking about laptops, desktops, and servers but it doesn’t work when you’re talking about a voice over IP phone or an insulin pump within healthcare. >>>