IoT GUIDE

SPEAKER BIO

Peter Bourne is the CEO of BrightWolf, strategic advior for ProAxion Incorporated, and an Entrepreneur in Residence for Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network. Prior to Bright Wolf, he spent 15 years in Director, CEO, COO, EVP and GM roles at both public and private companies, from early stage through revenue to profitability and exits.

Peter’s career covers a breadth of industries experiencing digital transformation, spanning all company operations including P&L, sales and marketing, and R&D. He has spent 20 years in CEO, COO, EVP and GM roles at both public and private companies, helping to commercialize new technologies, and developing companies and products for success.

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Bright Wolf has almost a decade of experience as a system integration and technology partner for Fortune 1000 industrial equipment providers seeking digital transformation through adaptable connected product solutions. Bright Wolf's pre-built components, open system architecture, and expertise with industrial controls, protocols, and embedded systems enable rapid delivery of flexible IoT products and services that generate business outcomes for our customers.

MEDIA LINKS

Libsyn: http://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/6293003

iTunes: http://apple.co/2BMe1cC

LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/y77nlm8v

iotone.com post: https://www.iotone.com/podcasts 

TRANSCRIPT

ERIK

Let's move into some specific case studies, and there are a couple questions that come to mind, on which you can go into a bit of detail operationally -- how do you work with the company, what you built, and then what the results were.

This is the fun part for me anyway. I like the people side of the business and our goal is to impact, not just our customers but, to create things with our customers that help them impact their customers. Generally speaking, in a manufacturing facility, those that are operating the facility never really wanted to own a pump or a filter or a motor in the first place right. They just want to produce whatever it is they're producing, whether that’s discreet or process manufacturing, and some of our customers have kind of leaped to the front of that. I think there's a great whole other podcast on how whether the current industrial giants are going to disrupt themselves, or be disrupted by people who are selling not pumps but pumping, and not filters but filtering as a service. Some of our customers have already leapt to the front of that, where they don't actually sell equipment to their customers -- they install it for them and they operate it for them remotely, thanks to IoT, and deliver outcomes.

We had a great adventure that touched all of the interesting points for an IoT journey. Our customer makes equipment that goes into agricultural production facilities. Their relationship with their customers has been, for 75 or 100 years, a discrete you know transactional equipment sale. They had the vision that they wanted to be more impactful, be more meaningful, and therefore also be more sticky and compete less on sort of price and functionality, and more on providing an outcome for their customers. So they turned their one of their products into a connected products system, provided the customer with dashboards, and an operator panel.

The initial result of that was quite unsettling and not expected and not good. It turned out that their equipment was not performing as well as their competitors’ equipment and the dashboard highlighted that to their customer. Their customer proceeded to rip all of their stuff out. For several months we're all looking at each other like that's not how this is going to go. It’s terrible and we're having audits with the GM of the business unit, the CEO of this 4-billion-dollar equipment company, saying “what the hell have you people done”. Several months later, right when they were tearing out their equipment, they said, we love your operator panel, and we're going to force your competitors to integrate their equipment with your system. So all hope is not lost but revenue definitely went down at that customer for a period of time. Two or three months and it turns out that the competitors’ equipment was actually performing even worse than the stuff they just ripped out. Happy ending there, it turned out that put their all of their stuff back in which was great, but more importantly than that, the system, not the hardware, that operated the hardware became part of the agricultural company's Standard Operating Procedure. If you look now at the production companies operating procedure manuals that they hand out to all of their remote distributed production facilities for these agricultural products they're making, there is check the vendor system and it's in there three times in the in the workflow. So now they're part of the process; they are part of how the plant is operated and that makes them far more important to their end customer.

ERIK

So this is a very sticky strategic connection on the revenue side. Is this also a significant revenue mover for them? The new solution.

PETER

It is. We're talking about a 4 billion dollar company, so it is nowhere near yet starting to move aside some of the hardware business. We're 12, maybe 18 months, in and the revenue from the system itself, is in the multiple tens of millions.

ERIK

I bet this happens a lot because there are a lot of companies that have excellent sales forces, but products that could be better, and a lack of visibility into the actual performance of the product. But typically you don’t really have visibility into the solution so it is a bit of a risk factor for a company. Were they able to use the visibility that they created to improve their products? Was that a part of the thought process?

PETER

It absolutely is. We focus on that quite a bit when we work with our customers. We managed to dive back into the technology for two seconds. The way we manage the data allows it to be access control or permission controlled across a wide range of user types. So for instance, you have the product group who's going to want access to pretty much absolutely everything, you also have the plant operator who want to get some control and access to data, but not all of the data from every facility from every customer everywhere, only to their particular plant and certainly not to one of their competitors plants. Many of our customers were in oil and gas, or in transportation, or in healthcare, have regulatory oversight, and need to be able to provide very clearly defined subsets of the data and access to the system for the regulator.

Because we're able to do a soft of attribute based access control in the data management layer, we're able to enable a different set of outcomes for each of the different constituents to be able to have that visibility and manage it appropriately.

Product organization is always looking at the data, either today handing it to a person to do the analysis, or in the future increasingly handing that to a set of compute resources to do the analysis and the tracking on for product improvements, hopefully not a lot of people have situations where their product isn't actually meeting their data sheet. I think that was an unfortunate surprise that nobody expected, but it does catch those things.

ERIK

If we’ve got a few minutes, maybe we can dive into another case.

PETER

Sure. Can't think of another one that's not just “it's an IoT system and it went fine” story. One thing that many of our customers are experiencing is, “this is more about how you get it done than what happens after it's done” story which is largely where IoT is today. There are people who you know who have great successes. The vast majority of people are in the business of getting it done right now. A large number of our customers went directly to the public cloud providers and applied somewhere between a handful and several handfuls of engineers to that toolset and attempted to build their own system from the ground up. What they found in that journey is that I mentioned that you know sort of incredible disruptive force that is AWS and Microsoft Azure both cloud technology as a collective. The software mindset is move fast and break things. The equipment manufacturer mindset is move slowly, don't break anything and these things get deployed for 20 years. 20 years is longer than the cloud existed, longer than the AWS even had a business. The innovation cycle that's happening in the technology components far outstrips the desire for innovation in the industrial equipment space. The penalty for innovation is stability, and that instability byproduct of innovation is not desired. All of our customers are struggling with how they manage that gap -- they want the new services they want interesting things to happen but they needed stable and they need reliable. Every journey that we've been on has been one of providing a buffer between the innovation in this and the managed service side, and the stability of the resulting product for our customers.

It's a human story. You've got half a dozen engineers who are spinning their wheels trying to keep up with the latest releases, while being distracted from providing actual business value to their end customers because they're focused on infrastructure management. It doesn't really set the case study for production IoT system. If you start building an IoT system from scratch today to use it as a development project, it's going to take you quite a while, even with all the wonderful tools at your disposal now, because it's still architecture problem. To me making that not a case study, making that problem disappear, is what is required for more broad IoT success in the industry.

ERIK

That brings to mind a conversation I had with a friend from Siemens he's serving business steel customers in China. He's on the system integrator side and building solutions. One of the concepts he is playing with, is a lot of the equipment that they have is integrated equipment -- the user interface, the intelligence is all integrated into the equipment that's actually providing the hardware service, the physical service in the facility. He's looking at to what extent can this be separated outright, where you have the hardware performs one very specific core function and then all of the software is extracted and developed separately. So the hardware is going to be in there for 20 years; it’s probably not going to be moving too quickly in terms of innovation, but the software then you can be much more flexible in terms of dynamic.

Are you seeing a lot of companies embracing this segregation of hardware and software systems, which previously were more of the embedded and integrated solution? So that they have they have more of an opportunity?

PETER

We absolutely are. It’s interesting that this comes at a time when the computer industry is going through these giant cycles of ebb and flow between centralization and decentralization, and the cloud was really just sort of the you know the latest, and the largest by far, centralization of computing, based on well published metrics about network speed, price of compute power, memory, and Moore's Law applied at the edge. We're pushing back out the edge that compute resource, and that sits now locally in the form usually of something called a gateway at the plant. Those gateways are getting increasingly cost effective, like subs thousand dollars with full industrial interfaces on them and all the kinds of things you need to operate in these hardened environments, and with increased compute power on them. That combined with the innovations in cellular technology, such as a sort of software based SIMs that are configurable benefit between providers, is making it so that we can now could, as an industry and as a company, put increased intelligence at the edge, either next to or near the machine, in the form of a gateway, use the industrial interfaces on the appropriate gateway to take the data off the machines, and then apply some kind of decision making authority and/or data collection capability right there in the facility. This seems obvious but you know it takes quite a bit to get that done, and to get it done right.

I mentioned what it takes to actually build the data infrastructure in those kinds of things, that all happens largely in the cloud. In parallel, there's also the increasing maturity at the edge where is also a gating factor for getting scaled IoT deployments done. There's a really neat separation that happens where you've extracted the data out of the machines, and then start to do something with the data, maybe with some light control of the machine as well. You don’t really have to change the PLC or the embedded PC in the machine itself. You can pull the data off and do something with it. On a more capable platform at a low enough cost.

ERIK

Last question, how can people get in touch with you? How can they get in touch with your team? Which types of organization should reach out to you and when would it make sense for them to reach out to you?

PETER

We love what we do and we love talking with people about it. So we have a large number of conversations going at all points in time, where we're delivering value to the customer just as part of the sales process; there's no actual official engagement, there's no statement work or contract or anything. So at any time you know we talk to people who are using ThingWorx today or have built their own -- we just would like to hear the stories and we like to understand better how the industry is moving.

My email is peter@brightwolf.com com, and there's a form on our web page. Obviously you could find me on LinkedIn. We're happy to have conversations.

The kinds of companies that we are most valuable to, are large industrial makers of products. That can be across any industry sector, we've got deployed projects and products in oil and gas, in fluid management, the pumps and filters and those kinds of things I mentioned, which in turn go into agriculture. We've got clients in healthcare, huge cold chain transportation, we have probably 10,000 tractor trailers with refrigerated units on them that we're managing around the country, all kinds of different industries and sectors. If it's a high value asset, and it's currently either being attempted to be connected or not connected, then we can help.

ERIK

Awesome, we'll put all that into the show notes Peter. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today. For me, it’s been a really interesting conversation.

PETER

Yeah it’s been great thank you very much.