Evaluating Risk with Avnet
On this week’s episode of Real World IoT, Ken Briodagh speaks with Vice President of IoT for Avnet, Lou Lutostanski. In this role, Lou works across the company to identify and create opportunities to leverage Avnet’s capabilities and expand the company’s reach and expertise to entrepreneurs, startups, leading technology OEMs and other IoT innovators, enabling them to bring IoT solutions to market, from idea to production. Lou has 30 years of experience and industry knowledge, joining Avnet in 1987 as a system sales manager. Throughout the next 13 years, he gained increasing responsibility as a field application engineer, sales manager, branch manager, and vice president, area director. Throughout his most recent years at Avnet, he served as vice president of sales for the Americas and as vice president of demand creation for the Americas.
Evaluating Risk
Security will always be a risk with any system you are implementing, but the risk that Lou sees as holding back the IoT fall into three main categories. First there is the risk of the business case, as too many people don’t know why they are choosing to implement IoT in the first place. The second is the actual implementation where your operational technology is being joined with your informational technology. And the third is the lifecycle management of the infrastructure once it is in place. Until all of these different risks can be handled by all IoT service providers we will not see the IoT take off in mass according to Lou. Proof of concept “purgatory” as Lou put it is a problem when it comes to evaluating risk for a new IoT technology. Focusing on the technology itself will always lead to failure if you do not know why you are implementing this in the first place. With a new way of doing things comes risk, but with the IoT, efficiency increases with the more implementation. The problem is it is near impossible to prove this for each specific use case without showing it. This is why we see people get stuck in this test-it-out phase.
Overcoming Hesitancy
Most of the time in the current Internet of Things marketplace, you are seeing people go through multiple test cases without fully diving in and starting to implement some of this technology so they can see big returns. Most of the industry is using this test case method so the question is then how can providers sell their IoT services and get this large scale implementation within businesses without getting stuck in this rut that is seen so often. For adoption to become mainstream there will have to be an evolution of organizations called solution providers. These are people who understand the business case and can consult, who can pull all the people in and outside of their organization needed to complete the solution, and who can stand behind the solution for a long period of time to allow it to come to scale. These are some of the things Avnet is currently doing to try and help organizations implement their IoT technology and move beyond a stagnant testing phase.
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