Biggest Opportunities in IoT | Silicon Labs' Matt Johnson | E199

you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot frau podcast the number one resource and publication for iot if you are watching this video on youtube we would really appreciate it if you would give this video a like and subscribe to our channel if you're listening to this on a podcast directory somewhere please feel free to subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available on today's episode we have matt johnson the president and ceo of silicon labs they are a leader in secure intelligent wireless technologies helping build a more connected world if you're familiar with iot for all at all you silicon labs is a very frequent contributor and and member of our community so i think you'll get a lot of value out of this episode we talk about the biggest growth potential areas for iot in the coming years what is matter if you've heard of matter and how that's kind of playing a role in the space or will be playing a role once it's kind of released um that is something that we talk a good bit about as well we talk about um what it means to be open and have more of a standardized um kind of offering out in the market from an industry perspective we also talk about the security elements of iot um and we then break down kind of market being very competitive and how we see people or i guess companies growing to all being adopters of iot and kind of how that works how we see that evolving and where that's kind of coming from very good episode i think you'll get a lot of value out of this one um particularly when we actually we start off talking a little bit more about um use cases in the home so a lot of you who consumers smart homes i think you'll find a lot of entertainment and enjoyment out of learning more about smart home space which then ties into that matter discussion which i mentioned a second ago so um so please i i really find that you'll find a lot of value in this episode and i hope you enjoyed this episode but before we get into that if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changeseverything.com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome matt to the iot pro podcast thanks for being here this week thanks ryan i'm excited to be here and looking forward to talking about this absolutely yeah i've been very excited about this episode ever since we got it scheduled so i'm glad you're here and i'd love it if you could just kick uh this off by giving a quick introduction about yourself to our audience oh sure uh my name is matt johnson i'm the president and ceo here at silicon labs and i have been in this role now since the start of the year and prior to that i ran our iot business for years at silicon labs tell us a little bit more about silicon labs as a whole so you were running the iot side now you're kind of overseeing all of it um what areas do you all kind of play in and what's your general role in the industry sure so for those who are not familiar with silicon labs we're a semiconductor company which historically meant chips but now it means you know chips and software and tools and that's what we do and where we focus that is specifically for wireless connectivity for the edge that is the easiest way to think about what we do and you know to help make that real we provide the complete solution if you had a device that needed connectivity compute security we could provide a wireless soc that provides all of that for our customers so oftentimes in a lot of applications we're the only or the largest piece of silicon for those applications because we provide that all completely integrated talk to our audience a little bit about the edge component when it comes to iot and kind of the power and the importance and even like the opportunity that focusing more on the edge has in the iot space sure uh so you know we're biased this is all we do we're 100 focused on the iot so i need to preface it with that but we see the most exciting and incredible opportunity uh at the iot edge um you know if maybe think of it a couple ways uh first of all just in terms of the quantity uh of devices right our industry has never seen anything like the volume today and in the future that connected devices at the edge represents so think today you know maybe 10 or 15 billion units a year and then if you go out into the future you know a decade from now you're talking 50 60 70 billion units per year of potential devices there's nothing that we've ever seen in our industry like that if you look at you know other transformational markets uh pcs handsets automotive uh they're you know just dwarfed by the you know orders of magnitude larger uh quantity of units but that's just something that we try to wrestle with in terms of you know addressing and scaling to meet the space i think the most exciting piece is is the qualitative side of this in terms of think of societal impact environmental impact um you know economic impact of all these devices that's where you get into some you know really i think meaningful work and game-changing uh opportunities whether it's you know literally improving the quality of life for people or you know improving the environmental impact or sustainability in multiple areas or think of things like industry 4.0 and the fourth industrial revolution they're all underpinned by being able to connect devices digitize devices at the edge and and that's where we play so it's it's exciting absolutely yeah it's it's super interesting kind of to to think about all the potential in the industry and one thing i did want to ask you is this kind of a two-part question one is um kind of where you see the biggest growth potential in iot in the coming years but this also ties into kind of the the commitment i know you all have made to really be all in on the iot side especially this year kind of going forward so tell me a little bit about that decision and how that plays into how you all see or where you all see the biggest growth potential in the space um as it stands now and kind of moving forward so kind of the second part is kind of why did we you know go all in and 100 focus on the space is that yeah correct yep uh so i'll i'll work my way back uh yeah so if if the why is simply put these you know what i was mentioning before in terms of the size of the opportunity quantitative and qualitative just is unlike anything we've ever seen and it's also a market that's unlike any other right the complexity diffuses diversity you know there's not one application there's thousands of applications hundreds of ecosystems uh you know tens of thousands of customers so for us to seriously you know maximize the opportunity we felt that 100 focus was the only way that we'd really maximize the potential and achieve our true potential in terms of impact and really helping the space scale so we decided which is unusual in our space instead of trying to acquire more companies we actually divested a big piece of our company and sold everything that was unrelated to iot wireless so we could 100 focus on this space because easy way to say it massive growth potential and we're really well positioned and we wanted to focus on that nothing else because literally none of us have ever seen an opportunity or position like this sure and we wanted to go for it in terms of your other question on uh what are the biggest growth spaces areas um you know if you step back there there is not one uh oh this is the you know the super application that's driving the space you know we participate in multiple market segments uh home uh and consumer type applications life and healthcare uh industrial commercial retail they're all growing uh at a very fast pace and if you look at all the different technologies we support uh you know whether it's wi-fi bluetooth zigbee z-wave thread sure they're all growing very fast so the first level of that is there's not you know one application or technology that's really uh driving this i think what we are getting to though is a a time a place in a market where the technology has you know let's just call it reached a maturity that allows for easier adoption and scalability of the industry yep which is allowing people to implement and develop faster and we're finding what i'd call you know really meaningful use cases and benefits of adoption of the technology that are accelerating adoption so you know easy examples just to make it real um think of health care uh during the pandemic we saw an explosion of you know telehealth and people needing to connect you know not only when they're in a telehealth visit but they want to have you know your uh pulse oximeter your blood pressure your heart rate uh temperature all of that connected uh to your smart device so you can share that with your doctor those things are you know long-term trends that that don't go away another one is in industrial right if you look in the industrial space it's always been exploring and uh doing let's just call it prototyping and beta testing of different iot implementations and what we've seen over the last few years is kind of a maturity of the technology to that it can be implemented in a useful meaningful way in an efficient way and the return on investment is there in pretty short you know nine twelve months type time frames so that is driving explosive adoption and growth as well because you know the returns are good it pays back and companies not only want that return but they also want to make sure that they remain competitive as others in the industry are adopting these technologies so those are just a couple examples where you know we see that really explosive growth so i wouldn't say it's one thing but if you wanted to get to you know big top level the the technology and the ease of use and the use cases and benefits are really starting to hit a let's just call it tipping point that is causing this acceleration and and regarding those use cases and applications have you seen any particular industry kind of explode more than others or seen more trends in one industry versus another kind of adopt iot more aggressively recently as opposed to maybe how things have been maybe particularly as it relates to one example potentially like you know the industrial space um as opposed to you know another space is there any that kind of stand out to you um i i'd say like you know easy way to think of it is that they they are all growing uh remarkably fast usually you know traditionally you'll see one up or down or you know others going faster than others but to answer your question you know for a while we saw a really really fast adoption in the home in the smart home which is the one i think most of us you know know and love uh and that continues um but i'd say you know if you look at commercial uh you definitely see a lot more think of uh smart cities right or in retail uh you know just the ability to improve the shopper user experience um that adoption is going very quickly and we already talked about industrial where it's really about the the economics and the roi hitting a tipping point and that's driving that that fast adoption and i should point out i don't see any of these as um you know one or two year phenomena these are multi-decade uh phenomena that that have tremendous upside potential industrial is arguably you know 20 to 25 adopted or less so there's tremendous growth right that's still available there yeah and and you mentioned that the smart home space what um anything surprising kind of happening on that front that you all have kind of noticed or kind of been keeping eye on um matter i think matter is um surprising in one sense that we're talking about an industry that a lot of the companies involved in driving matter and supporting matter are competitors can you tell our audience just quickly what matter is i know it's it's been discussed but just want to make sure they know so uh long story short matter is a industry standard that is intended to accelerate the adoption of smart connected devices and the way that's being done is by providing a uh standard that drives easier use easier adoption easier connectivity at the consumer and developer level so if you step back and think you know historically it's been you know there's all these different different technologies and ecosystems which one works with which if i buy something from apple will it work with something from google and work with something from amazon if i buy this wireless technology will it work with that one and the other one and you know if you go to you know whether it's a website or a big box store it can get confusing very quickly or as a developer trying to accommodate all this matter is the industry getting aligned that everyone can't be going at it on their own it needs to be a consolidated orchestrated effort if we're going to provide that experience and that improvement for developers and consumers to allow them to use these technologies quickly easier and with more confidence so matter was born out of the zigbee alliance which we renamed to the uh csa alliance and you know the big surprise in the home is companies that you know whether it's google or amazon or samsung or apple who historically competed and they still do have gotten together with the semiconductor companies who also compete against each other right we've all tried this on our own and we're seeing some level of success but not the level of adoption for the industry that is transformational that we all know want and need and the only way we're going to get there is if we work together sure to provide a constructor overlay to make it easier for these technologies to work together to get set up to develop and get into the marketplace with less resistance so that's matter and what that represents i think is remarkable i think remarkable for all these companies to be working together for all of us to agree that this is worth the effort which is not trivial um and i think you know to answer your question that's a massive development in the smart home and beyond the smart home that i don't think the industry fully appreciates yet how impactful this will be over time yeah i think it's important to also this kind of brings up another point is this around the the value and importance that the different protocols in iot make in the success the ability to help adoption grow and so forth can you talk a little bit more about just kind of that piece and the importance of protocols in iot and you can also maybe touch on the importance of being open standardized and how that all plays into the security aspect as well wow yeah i'm gonna write this down because you just hit like three huge ones um so yeah just stepping back for if anyone's not familiar it is shocking how many let's call it different ecosystems of connectivity there are out there and different wireless technologies that are out there and most of these wireless technologies do not work together right so easy ways to think about it zigbee doesn't work with z-wave doesn't work with bluetooth doesn't work with wi-fi yet they all exist for a reason right they all have they're just to be blunt pros and cons and they all bring a value towards making the iot successful so we took a different stance on this than most companies years ago we decided our focus is on making the iot successful it's not about making a technology successful because what we found and can tend to happen is if you have one technology that you really push it you push it as the answer for everything uh and and that's not the reality of the way it works if you think of a think of a smartphone smartphone has many different wireless technologies right whether it's cellular or wi-fi or bluetooth or gps you name it and they each bring a unique value and capability the iot is no different right an iot application requires multiple wireless technologies and we believe to make the iot succeed there's tremendous power in supporting them all and allowing them not only to work well but to work well together and integrate these technologies so that's why we focused on having more breadth and depth in this space than anyone else because we believe that you know one technology is not the answer it's getting all these technologies to work well and work well together which by the way that's what matter is doing it's pulling technologies like 15.4 or wi-fi bluetooth and allowing them to work extremely well together and and seamlessly so that's that's the first piece is it's really critical to understand that all these technologies play a role by the way there's a ton of proprietary ones out there too that do their own thing for good reasons and they help our space as well you asked about open uh open's really important um you know if you if you study the history of our space or industry there's not many closed or proprietary standards that really went mainstream and and helped the consumer and helped the industry uh and we're big believers in that right you look at the success of wi-fi or bluetooth as an example uh this is why our approach is to make things open easy examples uh that i can give you we used to have a thread technology that was based on a proprietary stack for the wireless interface we opened we decided to go open and we would now support open thread um another good one is z-wave z-wave was a you know for lack of a better term proprietary closed ecosystem that only silicon labs owned we acquired the company the technology and people thought we were crazy when we said guess what we're making this an industry standard we're opening it up we allow people to uh create parts uh that are alternate sources that compete with us and we did that because we really believe uh in our cores that if you really want the iot to succeed and you're really putting the success of the industry first open is what will win and open is a path to making the base impact so that's that's our philosophy around uh open standards you asked around security um can't emphasize enough how important it is that our industry embraces security not as a feature but at the foundational elemental level that the experience and use of of this technology is secure it you know again if the goal is to make the iot reach its maximum potential people have to trust it and if there's not trust uh we're not going to reach that potential uh that's why we've been leaning in on this for literally years uh because we see this as you know kind of a cornerstone uh for our industry not a feature or an additional thing that you do after the fact it's going to be integral just like quality is uh security needs to be foundational absolutely no that was all very very well said i appreciate you kind of entertaining that long-winded question i had exactly i tried to get to all the points but no you did it was fantastic um i did i did want to ask kind of one question as we start to wrap up here it's it's more of a a question for our audience um and we get asked this a decent amount and it's looking at the market from an adopter standpoint and a lot of people see different iot offerings different platforms different solutions different tools lots of different technology if if i'm looking at this from an adopter standpoint say let's say a developer standpoint within an organization what should i be considering when i'm evaluating all the different components of an iot solution all the different options there and and what would you say are some of the biggest challenges that they're going to have to be thinking about to overcome in that adoption journey and are you thinking about someone who's you know just adopting today now or or in the future i'd say now i'd say now time frame just because it's it's going to be more relevant to to our listeners to say hey look i'm kind of i'm convinced i want to adopt iot i have my team looking into it what should they be thinking about how should they be evaluating the different pieces that play into it because there's so many options whether it's the on the hardware side the software side the connectivity side the standards obviously play into like we've been talking about how do you navigate that or how should they be thinking about navigating it's a great question and honestly it's a i think it's a difficult time to be a developer in in our space because it it's incredibly exciting all the growth and potential but it's also there's a lot in flux and uh it's it's that's why i asked today or in the future so you know let's be specific and and i'll answer the question i would make sure uh that one you know we talked about the importance of open we talked about the importance of security uh multi-protocol making sure that you're not trying to address the space with one protocol it generally doesn't work that way so making sure that you have that that platform approach that gives you the ability to adjust across as the industry uh evolves future-proofness or upgradability i think matters tremendously so let me be specific um if you're a developer in consumer odds are you want to support matter sure and odds are you want to support sidewalk from amazon right however neither is available uh as you know a final solution today so what do you do right and that's i think a very you know important way to think of it what we want to provide is a solution that gives a platform for our customers to navigate this and be future proof and you know specifically as as matter works to be finalized and rolled out there's they have confidence their solutions going to work within that right and be backward compatible with right zigbee and z-wave we're not trying to deprecate all the existing base out there that'll ruin the experience of the industry we want to make sure that whatever you pick going forward also works with what is already out there and you need to make sure you have that flexibility to support standards like sidewalk as they evolve and you need that ability to make sure your security updates and evolves as you go so you know if you were trying to summarize it in a nutshell think of platform approach not point solution to give you flexibility to navigate the future and then think about all the you know the upgradeability and adaptability you want to have across open standards multiple protocols being able to support different ecosystems like you know matter and sidewalk and the upgradeability so it's really platform approach and future-proofness is the way i would think about it because i think that gives you the best ability to not only navigate this space as it keeps growing and evolving but it also gives you the tools to adapt and give your you know your end customers the best experience possible and be as competitive as possible so yeah no absolutely does i think it's it's a very interesting conversation in general just the any at whatever stage you're in in the adoption journey there's always lots of choices and being able to kind of read between or or decipher between the different types of of connectivity hardware platform everything that kind of comes with an iot solution the nice thing i think people need to keep in mind is that having choices allows you to get to more of a perfect fit for your end solution at the end of the day it's just working with an organization or doing the research to make the right informed decisions so that you pick the components that are necessary to solve your problem and the more they understand the better and i think that kind of comes with working with organizations who really know their stuff which which does tie into kind of my final question here is is as we think about um silicon labs and the focus you all have now put on going all in in iot what does that next kind of era look like for you all being more solely focused on iot wireless and and kind of this world as opposed to kind of spreading yourselves across so yeah it's exciting uh so maybe the easiest way to answer that is is break it into different uh audiences uh starting with our employees uh who are most important i think it's a really exciting time for our employees because they see the impact of what they're doing and they see the success of all their hard work and that that's awesome that's exciting so being able to see the impact and see that they're making a difference is is huge and i think that 100 focus and momentum we have right now is is huge for them for our customers i think it manifests itself as you know someone you can trust that isn't doing this as a sideshow isn't trying to take other technology and push it in there uh it's or you know they might not stay the course in this space we've been in this space for literally 15 years now and this is all we do now so you know a quick story to help make that real i remember uh three or four years ago being in a customer meeting and we had a bunch of our uh product managers in the meeting and the customer said you know hey there's so many technologies i don't know how to pick which one which one and literally like five people at the same time raised their hand and said oh i've got the best one right that's when we realized we needed to change the way we engage the market so we switched to you know application segment focused so we could be an unbiased um you know advisor and council for our customers and say look our goal is to you know be the best at you know light bulbs or be the best in the home for these applications and because of that we have all these technologies but these are the pros and cons this is what we'd recommend so that focus will continue to benefit our customers and developers because because it's the only thing we do we're working to truly make sure that we're the best at it and make the iot succeed and then the last thing is i think it's a benefit globally for all the reasons i mentioned if the iot succeeds it really does make the world a better place at multiple levels and that's incredibly exciting and i think all of us want that to happen and we're committed to doing that it's the only thing we're focused on now and i i love that it sounds um it's a very um kind of smart decision i think of what you all have made to kind of focus on this given how how much of an opportunity there is in in this industry and you mentioned kind of being more of an unbiased uh resource for people that i think carries a ton of weight in in the industry because there's so many companies out there right now who are very focused on just pushing their own thing even if it's not the right fit for solutions and that's only going to lead to poor experiences with iot less adoption and then that just hurts the industry as a whole and i don't and that's not how anybody wins this industry needs companies working together solutions to be deployed scaled and companies to see success to really help build up the adoption across the industry and that's not going to help if people aren't really kind of advising the companies that they're working with to the best decision possible so totally agree on kind of all those fronts for audience out there wanting to learn more and get a better sense of what you all are doing stay in touch uh what's the best way to do that uh so if you already work with us and you're just looking to reconnect uh you know for sure we have our existing connections if you're not familiar with the company please visit us and reach out on the website uh you know at www.scilabs.com uh that's an easy way in and we'd love to connect and talk to anyone who's interested in the space what we see is without exaggeration we have uh hundreds and hundreds every month of new people saying i'm awesome at this but which is their thing but i want to provide you know wireless connectivity to the cloud or to a mobile device how do i do that right that's we're great at that um the other great option and event for people is works with every year we do a developer conference where we pull together the industry you know on on average six seven eight thousand developers yep and really sit back and say okay here you are you want to get here what are all the tools uh that you need to get there and we have the major ecosystem leads there as well you know google's there amazon's there you name it to try to make it as easy as possible to get from a to b and that event is unlike any other in the industry because it keeps getting bigger every year so that's the other place i'd recommend to visit fantastic well matt this has been a a great conversation i really appreciate your time the insights you shared are are fantastic i think our audience is going to get a ton of value out of this i'd love to have you back at some point to kind of talk about things potentially later on this year see how things are going on your end talk about matter talk about just kind of the evolution of the industry and the growth we're seeing so thanks again for your time really appreciate it any time uh really enjoyed it be happy to come back and i really want to get a closer look at some of those toys behind you but we'll do that another time oh yeah yeah we uh we got a lot of a lot of stuff um and i've had some people on the show ask like oh you just go back behind a best buy and pull some boxes out of the dumpster i said no these are actually there's things actually in the boxes we have another room outside of the studio with more stuff that's been sent to us to play with test um so we're going to get into some consumer stuff just on the video side just to talk about the product development side of um or bringing a product to life and talk more about them behind the scenes of of iot consumer products not so much like reviewing and promoting them directly more of just like hey there are a lot of learnings in built bringing like for instance this this dog collar building this has a device a smart device bringing it to market um a lot of learnings i'm sure can be translated over to the companies that build solutions and hardware for the enterprising commercial right so it's just the end user that differs so that's awesome yeah a lot of fun stuff um but again thanks so much for your time we'll have we'd love to have you back and look forward to doing more in the future right thank you much all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iot fall podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time

2022-07-09 22:32

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