Podcast #237 Managed Enterprise Edge

TRANSCRIPT

Ken: Good day, and welcome to episode 237 of our Momenta Industrial Impact podcast. Today, we're pleased to welcome back Alistair Fulton, COO and VP of Ecosystem for Blues. Alistair, you last joined us for podcast 202 while you were General Manager of LoRa Wireless and Consumer Sensing for Semtech. He has over 20 years of experience building vertical solutions, tools, platforms, and ecosystems on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). From early roles at O2 in the UK and Deloitte in New York to leading Microsoft's entry into the IoT platform and tool space with Azure IoT and spearheading Hitachi's award-winning Lumada Industrial IoT platform, Alistair has been at the forefront of industrial IoT. With his leadership of Semtech's wireless IoT business and his new role at Blues Wireless, he remains a recognized IoT thought leader, public speaker, and visionary. With that, Alistair, welcome back to our Industrial Impact podcast.

[00:01:41] Alistair: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be back again. As you said, it feels like a long time since we last spoke.

[00:01:48] Ken: Yeah, it does.

[00:01:49] Alistair: But it's not been so long.

[00:01:51] Ken: It does. It's a double pleasure because we featured Blues early on in podcast 168 with Mobeen Khan in 2021. It hasn't been that long, and of course, we talked with you in podcast 202, one of our top 10 podcasts for 2023. Please catch us up on what's happened since our last discussion.

[00:02:16] Alistair: Sure. As you mentioned, I was with Semtech for several years, leading the IoT division and principally focusing on LoRa and expanding the adoption of LoRa as a technology. I left Semtech at the end of 2022 for a much-needed career break. As you mentioned, I've been in this space for many years. I realized one morning that if I was driving my kids to school, cooking them dinner every night, and reading them bedtime stories while they were still kids, I needed to do something about that actively. Also, part of the thinking was my wife has an independent jewelry business, so I played the role of house dad, if you like, so she could focus on building that out. I also realized that by focusing on LoRa and working within a very traditional semiconductor company like Semtech, there were better ways to further my personal goal of making IoT accessible to a vastly more comprehensive range of people. So that also informed my decision to leave with the onset of the Sierra acquisition. During that year or so, I focused on some personal projects around investment and advisory work. I worked as an advisor for several companies in the space, and it was nice to look around, explore, and see what had been going on outside my direct sphere of visibility.

[00:03:44]

Ken: We could dedicate an entire episode to what has happened at Semtech since you left. Suffice it to say it has been a tumultuous time for the company, but they finally seem to have found their direction. It's encouraging to see the initial successes of the Sierra Wireless acquisition. You made a timely move, especially in joining Blues. You joined them in December 2023, but what specifically attracted you to the company?

[00:04:13]

Alistair: I've followed Blues for years and have known their CEO since my earliest days at Microsoft. He was the first executive I was sent to see to pitch the incubation initiative I started, which ultimately transpired into Azure or IoT through multiple iterations and the work of many smarter folks than myself. Still, he was the first senior executive I pitched the concept to. He, at the time, was the chief software architect for Microsoft. He took over when Bill Gates stepped back from that role to focus on the Gates Foundation. It was one of those meetings where things would happen if Ray said this was a good idea, and if Ray said this was not, things would not happen. Luckily, he felt it was a good idea, and things moved forward. But I've stayed in touch with him ever since. He was very inspirational to me in those early days. He had an enormous impact on Microsoft over a relatively short few years. However, Azure IoT would not have existed for Ray, and many ways that Microsoft thinks about products today can be traced directly back to Ray's internal work to drive a fundamental change and approach. There was that aspect to it. I met with Ray several years ago, and he explained what he was trying to do with Blues. I didn't think taking such a radical approach to simplifying connectivity was possible then, but I'll discuss that briefly. The other thing that drew me to Blues was that earlier, it became clear that we could make technology like LoRa, LoRaWAN, the shiniest tool in the toolbox. Much of the work we did around LoRa was to abstract away some of the underlying complexity of the radio access technology to allow developers to focus on the application they were trying to build using very standard software abstraction techniques but applied to a much smaller hardware footprint. It became clear that one shiny tool in the toolbox was great. Still, the reality of IoT, specifically industrial IoT, has always been that you need multiple ways of connecting devices to deal with the myriad different circumstances you find yourself in industrial IoT, and simply having a great LPWAN solution in the form of LoRa didn't cut it.

Again, I've talked to you before about why I'm in this space. I speak for many others in this space as well. As engineers, it is our moral responsibility to make these technologies widely available because they represent the best chance of addressing the causes of human-driven climate change. I felt the moral calling to broaden my work. Blues has taken a radical approach to making connectivity work for developers. Unlike, I would say, other players in the space, and there are many different Edge solutions out there, Blues' Ray started with a blank sheet of paper to design how things should work from a developer's perspective, how these technologies should work, how they should interact, how should my choices as a developer be facilitated by a solution rather than hindered by a solution, rather than trying to- honestly, re-spin the failed models of the past which is what you see in a lot of other solutions. If you try to fit a cellular modem business into a new image of the future, it's never going to work, as well as start the job from scratch and do it properly. The final thing is the people. I mean, Ray- I've talked about how he's a hugely inspirational figure in the space. Still, he's also assembled a team in Blues that combines a bunch of grey-haired folks like me who have a veteran understanding of what's gone wrong, otherwise known as we've made most of the mistakes ourselves and hopefully learn from them, with a team of really highly talented, young, brilliant minds in the software space. We're a small company. We're 50-strong at the moment. We've gone through Series A, are well-funded, and are on that curve towards hyper-scale growth. It's an incredibly energetic, inspiring environment.

[00:08:38]

Ken: It certainly sounds like it. I was interested in using the term 'Edge IoT platforms.' Of course, that can be a big range from more consumer to prosumer to, of course, industrial, which we like to focus on. When you talked about the 'Why Blues?' aspect, you mentioned the fit for purpose, which is how I would describe it in terms of the design and the implementation. You could put industrial flavor on that. Help me understand why I would utilize Blues, especially in an industrial setting or mission-critical applications.

[00:09:13]

Alistair: A lot of it comes back to me kicking myself every time I use the word 'platform' because if you look at the technologies we're discussing today, the core things we're trying to achieve haven't changed in 20 years. We're still trying to generate data from devices, ingest it, and analyze it. We went off as an industry, that tangential path of building a separate island, IoT platforms that were somehow different, special from core OT systems, which they purported to support. That whole kind of diversion led to a great deal of confusion. It was partly driven by engineers like me wanting to build the shiny new thing. It was also driven by companies looking for new ways to monetize old data streams, and it drove a massive explosion in complexity in this space that didn't help customers get to the end result. This whole nation of IoT, as a separate world, a separate thing, failed ultimately. What you see happening with solutions focusing more on the industrial edge is recognition. The systems we are discussing are an extension of the enterprise core. Whereas in the past, IT departments could manage the connected assets within their environment using relatively traditional tools, and those assets looked like computers or were hardwired PLCs and those sorts of devices. That kind of universe of devices is expanding rapidly to support the demand for more analytics, data, insight, and, ultimately, a greater ability to optimize the functioning of very complex industrial systems. It's that when I talk about how I manage IoT Edge or Enterprise Edge. It provides tools that allow customers to connect previously unconnected devices in a way that doesn't sacrifice flexibility, security, or scalability. That's really what Blues has focused on. How do we make it as simple as can possibly be for a developer to connect a device and to do so in a way that is extraordinarily secure, highly scalable, and highly manageable without having to go down the rat hole of learning what is typically custom, usually highly complex development techniques to work with different technologies. What Blues has done is take all of that complexity from different cellular technologies, satellite, LoRa, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc., and hide it effectively behind a JSON API so that you, as a developer, provided that you can communicate in JSON, which most developers these days can, you can instruct the device to do what you want it to do, and it does it, as opposed to having tear back the covers and get inside the technology and make a significant investment of time and effort into building a specific radio access technology into your device. I think that's particularly important in the case of cellular because I talk to customers daily, I would say, in the US, who have been through the sunsetting of networks, and if anything was cancerous for industrial IoT, it's the sunsetting of cellular networks, which happens on a fairly regular cycle- five, six years. In an industrial environment, you often consider 15 to 20 years as a minimum lifespan for an asset. It's just completely thrown a spanner into that process. Blues have taken all that complexity- as I said earlier, I sat down and thought in the early days, "Well, how should this work?" Not how it should work and produce a platform that is the simplest I've seen in all the years I've been in this space.

[00:13:16] Ken: I'm glad I asked the question. You brought out some strong points there—resilience and overall security. Then, you started to talk about the analytics and insights, and we'll discuss the impact of AI in a few minutes. When we talked with Mobeen in 2021, he used the term 'industrial data pump,' which I thought was interesting. It's just as applicable now, especially with the amount of Edge AI we're trying to implement—literally, pattern recognition at the Edge. We have an investment in Edge Impulse, and you're providing some software to do that. Ultimately, being able to perform many processes at the Edge, rather than in the Cloud, for reasons of resilience, data latency, and security is very cool. Let's put a point on that. I'd like to hear about some of your notable wins at Blues to understand how you work with your clients to make them successful.

[00:14:17] Alistair: Sure. We see Blues used in all the expected use cases in industrial IoT. For instance, one of our customers specializes in Emergency Vehicle Tracking. They have a solution that allows operators to track the whereabouts of emergency vehicles—fire engines, ambulances, police cars, tow trucks, etc.—to optimize drive routes and facilitate communication with other vehicles by integrating with other vehicle management systems. This integration ensures that drivers get alerts on their dashboards when an ambulance is approaching so they can move out of the way. It also facilitates communication with dispatch to ensure that vehicles reach their destinations as quickly as possible, coordinating with traffic lights and lane assist systems. This customer initially built their solution on 3G, proving its value, but the sunsetting of 3G impacted their ability to continue offering the service. They also disliked their subscription model with a cellular operator due to high operational costs.

With Blues, there's no subscription fee; the cost includes ten years of connectivity. What appealed to them was the simplicity of development and operation, and they are now rolling it out. Another customer focuses on industrial refrigeration. When you walk into large stores like Target, Costco, or Walmart, you see huge banks of coolers that consume significant power. The quality of the produce in those coolers depends on the performance of the refrigeration units. Previously, implementing these solutions was costly for the operator or retailer. This customer has used Blues to build a simple connectivity solution that facilitates centralized and localized data processing to monitor the refrigerators' status.

Another customer is an aftermarket lift monitoring company targeting 16 million elevators worldwide. Their solution, which can be attached to any elevator, uses machine learning to detect performance degradation and alerts maintenance personnel to fix issues before the elevator breaks down. These are classic industrial IoT use cases, all about saving energy, reducing product wastage, minimizing pollution, and conserving resources—contributing to the bottom line of those businesses.

One of the more exotic solutions involves using Blues to connect ocean buoys. These buoys measure currents and water temperature, floating around the ocean and gathering data. This data helps global shipping companies optimize routes, potentially reducing fuel consumption by 20% to 30% through better routing decisions. These use cases extend the technology to scenarios that would have been challenging to enable 15-20 years ago. One of our recent successes is a demand response switch for a company that provides electricity grid management. This device connects to the grid to actively manage power supply during peak load periods. Given the strain on aging grid infrastructure, particularly in summer, flexing supply with industrial customers and compensating them financially is crucial. This customer built a prototype with Blues in two weeks after spending two years unsuccessfully trying to develop a solution with legacy technologies due to high costs. Blues target the pain points and frustrations, offering an easier way to achieve significant financial and environmental outcomes.

We see customers every day taking advantage of this, implementing projects that might have been on the back burner due to time and budget constraints. These projects can come to life today with Blues.

[00:19:37] Ken: These are all great examples of industrial impact and align well with your ideals. We've begun to see more emphasis on tracking emissions and global greenhouse gases—scope three emissions, in particular—reflecting upstream requirements. This could be a killer use case for industrial IoT. For instance, one of our companies, Smartex, produces textiles. During a recent visit to their operations in Portugal, we saw the potential impact along the textile value chain. Imagine a future where a QR code on your t-shirt reveals the entire value chain and material provenance. There's a bigger world you're just scratching the surface of, and Blues will be well-prepared for it.

[00:20:43] Alistair: I've always considered IoT a way to align economic and environmental goals. Every industrial company aims to be more efficient because it boosts profitability. The information and insights generated from IoT systems enable companies to produce more with less, aligning economic benefits with environmental goals. I believe IoT is our best shot at addressing human-driven climate change.

[00:21:21] Ken: Well said. You mentioned enterprise earlier and the term 'manage.' One of the challenges with Edge deployment, especially in OT, is managing diverse hardware and software at the Edge in an enterprise setting, particularly with remote data points and facilities. What is the role of managed enterprise Edge in enabling IoT, and how does Blues help solve that?

[00:21:56] Alistair: You must ensure a few fundamentals in industrial IoT, particularly with mission-critical systems. You need to guarantee the security of connected devices, even if they don't connect to the internet, which is how Blues devices work—they use a VPN to communicate with the backend. Even with a secure-by-design approach, you need confidence that data from these devices is encrypted at the source and only accessible to you. You also need to update device software, possibly requiring over-the-air updates and the ability to manage these updates at scale with business rules.

This has traditionally been challenging for non-IP-based devices, and IT departments often raised valid concerns about IoT connectivity. Today, managed enterprise Edge recognizes the need to extend the same principles applied to laptops on a network to industrial devices connected wirelessly. Without this, you introduce vulnerabilities and management difficulties. You need to view diverse devices as part of the entire enterprise environment, regardless of their type, location, or data form, ensuring they are securely and efficiently managed as a cohesive whole.

[00:24:38] Ken: These days, you can't go too far in any IT or OT application without talking about the impact of AI in all its different forms. How are you helping your clients achieve their AI goals regarding their Edge deployments?

[00:24:54] Alistair: Today, the focus in this first part of Blues' history has been enablement. Connect the device so you can collect the data it generates and analyze it accordingly. As we progress, AI and ML risk being seen as the latest fad, and there will inevitably be a period of disappointment when people realize they're not a magical cure-all. That said, automating data analysis and extracting insights is powerful. Machine learning is key to intelligently managing fleets of devices. We're actively looking at how to use these new techniques to better understand what's happening within 100,000 connected devices, anticipate outcomes, and respond more quickly. We aim for our device fleet to be self-healing, anticipate issues, update software or business rules, and apply intelligence based on AI. That's the next wave of industrial IoT. The adoption of IoT has been held back by complexity, but the tools now available, enhanced by AI and ML, are very powerful. The basic connectivity challenge—connecting everything in a cost-effective, secure, scalable way—is what we're focused on solving. I think we've nailed it, and we're seeing uptake as a result. The following opportunities lie in using new tools and techniques to introduce more automated intelligence into managed enterprise Edge environments.

[00:27:34] Ken: Your focus on connectivity is certainly valid. I was in a forum a few weeks ago discussing greenhouse gas emissions tracking, and one of the stats mentioned, which we've talked about often, is that 85% of industrial assets are still dark. It's interesting for a non-OT crowd to realize how challenging it is when so many industrial assets cannot communicate, have sensors, or be remotely controlled. Connectivity is still a tough nut to crack. Building additional layers of value on top of that is crucial. Your focus is exactly right. As we wrap up, I'm curious—how do you maintain your Edge as a leader? Any recommendations for the audience?

[00:28:30] Alistair: I think we've talked about this before. Number one, always assume that you're wrong. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing your ideas in any technology space. Throughout my career, I've focused on assuming that whatever the plan or idea is, it's probably wrong. The first step is figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it, and the best way to do that is by talking to customers. Engineers often exist in echo chambers, and hearing from people dealing with real-world problems is humbling. If you just read the trade press, you might assume connectivity issues were solved years ago, but talking to customers reveals the true challenges.

I also listen to a lot of podcasts. There are many out there, but some of my favorites include "The Diary of a CEO" with Steven Bartlett, "TWIML" (This Week in Machine Learning) with Sam Charrington, and "How I Built This" with Guy Raz. These provide deep insights and help me learn more about AI, ML, and startup culture. I also enjoy "WTF with Marc Maron" to stay grounded.

Finally, it's about the people I work with. Surrounding yourself with people who think differently and have diverse experiences is crucial. Diversity of thought helps you quickly determine the right path and why you might be wrong. Never assume you know the answer, and always be open to learning. The day we stop learning is when we should give up and play golf.

[00:31:28] Ken: Great insights, Alistair. That is always well said. Thank you again for sharing your time and these wonderful insights with us today.

[00:31:36] Alistair: Indeed. Thank you for having me. I look forward to the next one, whether two years away or sooner. It's always a pleasure talking to you, Ken.

[00:31:46] Ken: Likewise. This has been Alistair Fulton, COO and VP of Ecosystem for Blues. Thank you for listening, and please join us for the next episode of our Industrial Impact podcast. We wish you an impactful day. You've been listening to the Momenta Digital Thread podcast series. We hope you've enjoyed the discussion, and as always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Please check our website at momenta.one for archived versions of podcasts and resources to help with your digital industry journey. Thank you for listening.

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