Reimagining the World of Solutions with IoT
hi i'm nadeeb johar leading the iot strategy for convergent technologies today i will talk about how iot is an important ingredient of digital transformation and give you a glimpse of how at convergent we are perceiving iot and moving towards intelligence of things i'm so excited to be with you to really imagine the world of solutions with iot as a system integrator we always believe in the longevity of our customers and we tend to understand their pain points and we are always part of the solution and not the company or a product or a platform as solutions become more complex we are moving quickly from connecting things to connecting services and we are landing into connected environments or ecosystems which are confined to industrial verticals as you can see on the slide and our footprint goes deeper and wider beyond access control and video analytics please note that each industrial vertical is different and has its own language compliance and problems the real challenge is that the whole paradigm of solutions is being changed and inflicted by iot decision making is becoming more agile and frequent than ever every customer is facing a challenge to manage and secure billions of devices joining the network for sure it has been a business problem for a while but now it has come real upfront so internet of things is not a silo but rather an important part of the whole digitization process and is a convergence of ai which is artificial intelligence cloud and edge compute more specifically at convergent we focus on intelligence of things and we will talk about more in a bit so world of solutions is very complex as you guys might have experienced by now no doubt we go wider and deeper in whatever we do but we drive complete anatomy of solution with a lot of customer obsession we have learned that customer is looking for a validated solution which is complete in itself they look for what value proposition we are bringing on the table we have a strong ecosystem of partners behind us with dedicated go to market strategy and we have understood with our experience that best way to land expand and monetize is through proof of values proof of concepts as iot is built upon point solutions we always have for every solution a clear customer business outcome and our goal is to have a simple to order solution skus now iot has been around since last three to four years a lot of work has been going on the complexity of connecting securing and managing set of diverse devices but still a lot of data remains locked inside its sources data is the connective tissue for industrial processes we have to find an efficient way to plumb the data and programmatically move the right data to the right apps at the right time everything matters so we see that there is no well-defined way to enforce the ownership and privacy of the data so at high level if i if you try to visualize there are two types of networks enterprise networks and iot networks in enterprise networks confidentiality is very much important right but when we traverse to iot networks availability becomes important right availability is part and parcel of the iot networks also we have seen that when we talk about the availability we mean the real-time communication determinism and performance so the business priorities really change from cia to aic when we traverse from enterprise networks to iot networks so let me go a little bit deep into availability what we mean in iot availability and integrity of control matters the most high availability redundancy and reliability have to be part of our designs you know this is very important to understand that to be specific you know if we want to go very specifically intelligence of things is getting value from the data leveraging iot and iot itself is a convergence of ai edge and cloud so that completes the whole definition of iot how do we take that at convergent so we have seen that connected devices are cropping up across industries and it's a very interesting opportunity for us but there are certain challenges many of such devices are traditional dump devices like lights garbage cans cabinets or siloed hvac systems which are no longer reliable there are many open platforms available leading the charge towards getting connected with ease of use without emphasizing security this can be an appealing trap for end users who are being tempted by ease of usage but very likely creating the fault lines on the corporate networks and then comes the data the dream of data often lives larger than the reality it's not enough to have more information you need and certainly at the end of the day you will require the tools to act on anomalies and aggregate data in order to identify trends and extract insights at convergent we have already begun the journey by helping to make the data from your connected devices more actionable with our industrial iot integrations we bring the data local to your security systems so you can combine and act on this data and this is how we connect the remote locations and federated sites the first step is of course to shield and protect where we shield them while making their data accessible and then we validate ensuring that we are bringing in sensible data which the system knows what to do with the next step is ingestion that is bringing that data into the system that operators are already using and where stakeholders are comfortable last but not least is exposing the data which means to allow that data to be manipulated and analyzed to provide reports and insights without increasing overhead so the whole story is that data is a new oil it's it sets us free rather than looking or locking us to take decisions but it can be toxic if mishandled so how do we add convergent you know look at it and put in and put it everything in practice the key catch is to have a surgical layered approach if you focus on middle of the slide here and i would like to walk you through every layer at the bottom layer you have a large number of local intelligent devices they can be system machines cameras dvrs nvrs video management systems safety and commercial related sensors because sensors are also very important to add more context to the use cases and also there can be controllers for edge devices and some of these systems communicate securely others may not since they are conceived as closed networks then we go higher in the stack where we see gateway management which is called connection or device management gateway management is extremely important to extract the data from its sources and make it usable there are three basic problems we are seeing with our customers at the edge the one the first one is low latency for real-time insights the second one is bandwidth constraints as everything cannot be sent to the cloud like some of your sites can be at remote locations and the third one is on-premises data processing then we go a little bit higher on the stack the next layer as you can see is edge and fog compute we have we have to compute the data to transform it apply rules and perform distributed microprocessing from edge to end point for the fog in simple words like fog is a very rarely used word these days but i would like to explain that fog is simply the collection of servers to funnel the data coming from dispersed networks and overall on the left side you can see that security is paramount which is convergence forte and challenges future proofing security in the digital age like cyber security is a prerequisite to all the digitization and we at convergent have a very nice cyber security program in place for our customers then we go little bit higher in the stack which says data control and exchange layer which provides contextualization and correlation of data correlation breaks the silos and data sets us free so now we have done all the math here from all the layers and now is the time to move the data to the right applications at the right time so please note that there are two different tunnels for data one is the id data and one is the iot data so iit data includes the ip addresses vlans and all the firewall information which normally goes to the data centers and then the iot and control data goes to the cloud so we have seen that most of the companies they do not want to send all the data to the cloud as they want full control of sensitive applications and when we deal with access control type of uh installation uh there are a lot of physical components like card readers etc and most of the edge devices do not have the capability to automatically connect to the cloud and i call it call home script so this is the reason why cloud companies want to come deeper at the edge in increasing more opportunities for system integrators like us and making the edge connectivity to cloud more smoother and also to bring more horsepower at the edge by empowering gpu cpu powers which can be leveraged to train the machine learning models at the edge you can see that there is a yellow box on the screen which says panorama so here's an example of a product panorama being launched by aws it was launched in last december it's basically has is answering whatever i'm saying here it's a booster and is a machine learning appliance that allows to bring computer vision to on-premises cameras to make predictions locally with high accuracy and low latency so solving all the three problems i highlighted which we are facing from the customers so along with the data as it is an important part artificial intelligence is also very important part and parcel of iot that's why you see these devices like panorama bringing all the computer vision at the edge so that you can either train the model at the edge or you can port the model from the cloud so any single company what we have doing ai doesn't support all the major functionalities they have lot of underlying technologies some are good in frictionless access face detection contact racing and others are masters in license plate recognition tailgating body-worn solutions etc many of these ais companies lay a lot of emphasis on learning side but very less on inferencing side by inferencing i mean here the prediction so when we at convergent create the solutions we work with partners who have a balance between model training and inter-inferencing or prediction so that they they are not missing the action as part of the whole game and now let's proceed on the right side of the slide you know where we you know we have few things to say that convergent is very well positioned to provide point solutions to start the pocs uh to put the foot on under the door of the customer and we have the capability to move from point solutions to portfolio solutions scaling them into these industrial verticals as you can see on the right side of the slides as solutions expand we can collaborate with other general system integrators in taking the metadata from cameras and integrate with any other erp systems we also have a very strong relationship with gpu cpu builders like nvidia umbrella and other chipset vendors so we have a lot of opportunities as a last mile runner and we can traverse starting from edge to the cloud and some of the services i would like to name like network security identity access management inventory control configurations ai and whatnot and even cloud companies like that they need a lot of help from us and they really want customers to define their controls in the cloud so you know now let's go in little bit reality and i wanted to give you a glimpse of use cases for few verticals on our radar and this is just a subset of verticals just to uh you know make my point here we do go wider and deeper as i mentioned but what we always look for horizontal bleed our main goal is to build intelligence for the customers and common use cases as you can see at the bottom of this slide are access control video analytics cyber and of course access control does include identity access management visitor management physical access we do all right and the the use cases in green are very common use cases which are horizontal and let's take an example of location services we recently acquired a company called innovative medical systems ims which offers custom designed innovative technology solutions to healthcare facilities and it includes the location services which we call rtls real-time location services and on the left side of the slide extreme left you will see that the different layers which i discussed a minute ago like you know sensors gateways edge connect and then data layer and whatnot so one thing is very important to note here is that for edge connect 5g and private networks are coming up front so we should not ignore that and when we talk about sensors in all these solutions as per me the most important iot sensor is camera and convergent is leading provider of cameras and the services required to make best use of visual data now if we move on the right side of the slide you will see a vertical mentioned utilities utilities is a part of energy vertical right and we might think that energy vertical which includes of course utilities and also oil and gas you know you might consider that they might be least digital in fact this is not true the utility companies are embracing themselves as technology companies which deliver power so their goal is building a smarter energy future with clean energy production even embraced by new new leadership in america for prioritizing green energy so in addition to modernization of their grids like creating smart grids their biggest pain point is compliance and health and asset health and and we will talk about little bit more uh on this vertical as an example to understand that uh how do we create the solutions so here let's double down on utility verticals as we have tested so there are certain priorities for utility customers like utility networks want to move very quickly into digitization as i mentioned for a unified control to handle all these issues these issues are real and there are around 1 billion of annual losses alone from copper theft and employee safety is also top of the line that they want to save billions of dollars from for the employer for coming from the employee safety and we have the ability to offer them defense in depth architecture like perimeter control etc and another important thing is upgrading infrastructure which is a big thing for utility customers they are upgrading from atm networks to mpls networks mpls mpls's multi protocol label switching networks as they understand that automation and data communication networks must be integrated with the power grid at all tiers so end-to-end connectivity is important for better visibility and control they also want to interconnect substations for many services and you also see grid resiliency and reliability which is a pervasive end-to-end architecture needed for robust foundation right and security is all important like for the important success for the for the substation uh and the the biggest pain point what as i mentioned in my last slide is compliance and asset tracking right so let's talk a little bit about compliance here that compliance broadly speaking if you see is of two types in any vertical like there can be operational and they can be process specific when we talk about operational compliance specifically for utility verticals it brings nuxit ferc fips and hipaa and beyond and then process specific can be socks or corbett socks is cerberus oxilate right so our focus is the the biggest shout which we are getting from our customers from our utility customers is nox it uh when we if we expand we mean north america electric reliability corporation and sip stands for critical infrastructure protection uh it is the top most ask we are getting from our customers and we have full ability uh to solve that problem and we are getting invited in various rfps and noxip basically is of various types it can be uh you know it expands from nazi version one to five or maybe six so next version one can be for sabotage reporting next two can be for identity critical assets and beyond but the but the main catchy thing what we are getting from our customers is noxia version five which is a mandatory requirement and based on nazi version five all utility cyber assets are required to be placed in an electronic security parameter zone and we have full ability to do to do that and this noxi version 5 was supposed to be implemented by april 2016 by all the customers but most of the customers have missed the dates or it's an ongoing process so that's why they are getting penalized and they are reaching out to us and we have the ability to help them so as you can see that i have double down on one vertical as an example and this is how deep we go into each vertical covering all the aspects and we want to leverage what we learn from one vertical to another and we always look for horizontal bleeds and all my colleagues in the field they talk vertical and think horizontal thank you for joining me today to learn more about uh digital transformation please visit the link below thank you you
2021-02-21 00:14
