Remote Management with IIoT | Teltonika's Tomas Mikolaitis & Pranas Aksamitauskas
hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast I'm Ryan Chacon and on today's episode you're going to learn about what industry 4.0 is and means as well as the power of iot Remote Management and I have two members of the teletonica networks team Thomas michaelitis as well as pronus oximetalkus those of you unfamiliar with teletonica they are a technology company focused on manufacturing professional network connectivity equipment for international markets fantastic guests today I think we get a lot of value out of hearing for both of them please feel free to subscribe to our Channel hit the Bell icon to get the latest episodes as soon as they are out as well as give us video a thumbs up before we jump into it a quick word from our sponsor silicon Labs a leader in Secure intelligent Wireless technology has launched their 2023 Tech talk schedule this year's Tech talks include dedicated Technology Series for matter Wi-Fi Bluetooth and lp-wan in order to help you build the development skills needed to deliver Cutting Edge iot Products join silicon Labs experts industry leaders for these one hour live virtual trainings created for developers by developers accelerate your device development today by registering at SI labs com that's the letter s the letter i l a b s.com Thomas and pronus welcome welcome both to the iot for all podcast thanks for being here this week uh great to be here thank you for inviting us to joining your podcast um so I'm excited yeah I'm excited to have you both here um let me kick this off by having you both give a quick introduction about yourself and a quick overview of the company if you wouldn't mind okay so I'm Thomas milaitis uh I'm a product owner of toltonia networks Remote Management System and my main goal of course you know to talk with our customers look for best ways how to improve our system and of course you know be the the guy who provides information for customers but also takes back feedback and improves it over time since again gotcha we are working in that place perfect so I am Francis um operational marketing project assistive at Titanic networks and mainly my daily task to take care of marketing projects and we both represent the company teletonica Networks that how I like to say we accompany that manufactures tiny boxes that gives connectivity to everyone but if talking seriously we industrial network connectivity equipment manufacturer from Lithuania okay and basically our portfolio consists of industrial modems gateways router switches gotcha fantastic appreciate those overviews um so I wanted to jump into our conversation today kind of centered around industry 4.0 Remote Management
all that kind of good stuff but let's start high level and if one of you wouldn't mind just kind of giving a quick overview to our audience is when they hear the term industry 4.0 or industrial iot what does that exactly mean and how does that kind of compare to just iot in general actually if we start talking about industry 4.0 we can go back to the roots of that and from the beginning of Industry all the time on every every level of Industry Evolution uh the main purpose main goal was to have a better efficiency and greater productivity and at first [Music] how to say industrial World harness the the steam power to make advantage of of it and after that it was introduction of production lines and later computerization and we when we are going to talk about industry 4.0 it's could be called like uh optimization of computerization because in this we are not only keen on uh how to say uh how to say that only rely on computerization of production Lions but on interconnectivity of of it so in in this case uh iot is the one of key component of okay in industrial equipment and it's not only how to say control the only one production line on production equipment but very important to say that they has ability to communicate together with other equipment and also communicate with a controlling platform that is far far away from from that factory or so fantastic and when we're talking about kind of industry 4.0 industrial iot space and how it connects to as you mentioned iot being a component of that what technologies are really leading the way in um Industrial iot actually everything started to be have say more affordable when networking Technologies and protocols developed and because it started to be easy adaptable and easy to use in industrial environment and in this case that if we talk and compare iot itself like the main uh I'll say bubble or or so and Industrial iot is like a smaller part of it and I see because iot it's very wide term we can call Smartwatch or smartphone connected to the smart TV and streaming YouTube to in at our house it's like iot but it it's a bit different when it comes to Industrial environment and Industrial iot has a different requirements different complexity and it's it's not only how to say dedicated to a person's uh convenience but has a huge focus on return on investment also fantastic yeah and I would love it if now that we've kind of given a quick overview of of Industry 4.0 iiot the
Technologies what about I guess to bring a full circle for audience can you talk about some of the use cases that are kind of leading the industrial iot space just kind of talking through kind of what the main focus of those use cases are and kind of what they're accomplishing actually at First we can think that only that use cases related with manufacturing are important and and useful in iot sector but actually it's it's wider picture because our industrial IRT can be used whenever is say on time demand is is needed because with variety of different sensors different equipment you can see what's going on right what's going on wrong and at which point and you can react immediately or even give this decision making to as a artificial intelligence or so so even uh human decision making is is not needed that sometimes and from Smart manufacturing the use cases could be uh also the smart agriculture uh smart building management or so and I have a exactly one uh quite interesting use case from from my experience from our clients when in farming industry there was used cameras and various sensors connected to AI system and where the well-being of the animals where watched and analyzed and Through the Motions through the let's say that behavior of the the animals what made decisions maybe there's something wrong with them or not and to keep an eye because in that places whereas a lot of different items are in this example animals persons cannot look after everything and IIT system can do that right right yeah it sounds like kind of the Remote Management element of what iot technologies enable is super important in in especially the industrial space um can you talk to kind of that point a little bit more and why Remote Management is so powerful and important especially in industrial as opposed to I know it's important in other Industries obviously as well but just kind of it seems to provide a lot of extra value in the industrial space companies being able to do more with less they're able to handle things remotely become more efficient as an organization but just if we're talking about Remote Management in general as it relates to the industrial space why is it so powerful and important uh I think we have in this case we have to look why Remote Management is required in the first place and if we're looking it's very narrow perspective it can be in my opinion three cases you know monitoring accessing or controlling and if you look at the classic way how in the past before you know all iot structural and use cases were done the Remote Management existed like you know simple finger calling to a person to get into in a place to check what's happening but now we are talking not about you know huge substations where you know you can have local team we are talking about small things or thousands of locations with hundreds of sensors cameras computers etc and naturally you know if you want to have a profitable business you have to think how to make things efficient in this place and the only way to think forward is to go with Remote Management since the power it comes here that when computers and machines are way better to track what's happening perform parallel perform parallel actions for failure updates for reconfiguration uh right as Francis mentioned with the use cases of animals the same thing you know you can be alerted on small things for web of person it still can't look it's everything okay so reaction time can be re reduced and again predictive maintenance with Remote Management is now enabled since the Personnel can easily you know start investigating uh what's happening remotely and right react and fix maybe change configuration and you know keep things still running or you know can dispatch the team with the right tools right parts and start analyzing what's happening there and fix ACP yep no absolutely I'm glad you mentioned um the predictive maintenance side of things because that's a really hot topic and big leading use case in the industrial space where the ability to monitor your machines you know processes remotely and understand where things are potentially going to go wrong or where there are potential issues that could arise and being able to handle that it's pretty pretty big are there any other kind of um as it relates directly to the Remote Management and even predictive maintenance to a disagree are you all seeing kind of anything from a use case standpoint that's kind of surprising you or standing out on that front uh as of late currently you know we have run in various use cases so again yeah every time we see how our partners using our perform our devices and our systems uh we're always interested to know how that imagination comes but in my perspective I have made three really um free use cases which really stood in my mind so one is that both machines with those predictive maintenance uh I talked around the one company from Switzerland if I remember correctly what they're doing they still have all those um on-demand teams which is traveling on site to manage maintain the coffee machines but the difference they mentioned uh when they integrated iot with Remote Management is that now they're traveling on site with purpose and what they and they know what they're gonna do maybe they just have to fill the coffee others are bringing the spare parts the machine parts to ensure that you're providing best service and you ensuring that people are getting coffee in that case yeah but there's also other use cases we have for example we have really interesting use case with slot machines where customer uh has since again we're talking here about money and those companies are really strict about security where they have really interesting use case that every month they have to change the password for their routers and now to my knowledge they have around 10 000 devices running and imagine that the person has to change the password for all of those 10 000 devices it can be quite tedious and it's not scalable with iot and Remote Management this becomes from 100 job one person job and instead of months we're talking about hours and this is the strength by iot coming and with that is also coming onboarding and of course management security updates Etc where very interesting use case in the last one the third one which struck in my mind is that the company is maintaining vending machines and create car readers require software update it's mandatory for them and it's very was interesting to hear from that that when after moving from standard approach where a person is traveling on site to perform upgrade and moving to Remote Management through the system a single update paid for the whole system through management the integrated device Etc so we can see how efficiency in matter 10 folds increases in company and this is quite significant you know to hear from the customers where simple thing like having a secure access to the end device changes the whole business approach fantastic yeah those are great kind of examples of what's been going on in the space from a use case standpoint um I'm still amazed at all the different kind of use cases that pop up in the different Industries and what iot is enabling so I appreciate you kind of running us through those I wanted to quickly kind of transition away from kind of the overview in the use case side of things and talk about some of the challenges you all are seeing in the industry right now especially in Industry 4.0 industrial iot kind of use cases what when it comes to the implementation of iot solutions the adoption of iot Solutions in these industries what are you seeing as the biggest challenges in the space right now with the companies that you're talking to working with and so forth um I think yeah you know we can talk about the most common mentioned towards security okay since at this point you know every company can have from 10 devices and I mentioned and up to 10 000 devices so you can see you I think we all read the possibilities that you know your fridge can be one of the bots in the botnet so as a service provider we uh we're having this uh [Music] um having this uh play a role where we have to ensure all our partners network security device security and look you know that single Bridge can you know Unleash the Power of million devices you know into the whole network so you know the security is really a huge part and as we all know the most security breaches are coming not for example from a buggy software the most security business coming from the uh the weakest link which is most cases are the person you know using five simple password like password or 777 and from the developer of such Remote Management platform in iot business business we have to force users to use strong passwords so at least no eight symbols capital letters numbers two factorification now it's a mandatory thing you know we even cannot rely with the hardware getting so powerful we cannot even rely on those strong passwords we have to give additional factors in this place and you know communication between devices and server web accessibility Etc all those parts are in the role of our hands and we have to look at security at this point and we have to prove that security in some way so this is quite a challenge uh comes from for us but of course there is other challenge we see in in iot business and of course it comes from you know uh from Elder generation where they see that stereotype that only proper maintenance can be done by person who is in place Yeah by directly interacting with right and that is I think that way bigger challenge to overcome since only with good examples with good use cases you are showing that it's possible to do things with iot remotely and since you know sometimes it's the problem is just not even the hardware Wise It's software wise you have to change update or just change config run configuration you know I think we saw quite a many use cases where uh single true or false statement changes or whole things so I think this is the two big challenges for us we have to look at yeah the last point you mentioned I'm glad you brought up because it it's interesting when I've talked to a lot of um guests on this podcast that are in different Industries anytime industrial gets brought up there always seems to be a lack of flexibility that they're battling with with the companies they're talking to whether that's buy-in from upper management whether that's getting the approval to be able to even do a pilot for a lot of these implementations mainly because they're in the boat compared to what you said like it in their mind it only can be done one way and bringing in new tech to their existing systems and existing processes only in their mind is is a disruption to the way of what they know so it takes a lot to kind of convince them and I think what we're seeing universally around the industry a lot is the need for more success stories case studies kind of examples of iot actually being successful from a deployment standpoint in as many Industries and solving as many use cases as possible because that allows those individuals who are maybe kind of stuck on the fence of when it comes to adoption giving them more uh insights into what iot can actually do for their business and it's not just taking people at their word it's actually seeing competitors seeing other industry players succeed implementing iot will it then kind of help encourage them to kind of get over that hill of adoption for sure yep yeah I agree totally you know and of course you know the same is true also another side if you know if iot fails you know we'll we're getting not one step back we're getting things done sure so we always take Mass care you know and ensure that we always think what we are doing and of course oh totally very good point absolutely um so last thing I want to ask you both before we before we get off here is um so as we are now in 2023 what does the future kind of look like in your mind for the uh industry 4.0 industrial iot kind of space What are you most excited about what are you looking forward to kind of what do you think is going to happen actually uh the future we think is the future will be very interesting actually because for we do not completely understand how connected we are at the moment and if we look I don't know 10 or 15 years back the present day could look like uh science fiction movie or or so because our daily lives are connected to our house appliances for example you can get a notification from your fridge that the milk is is low or so but what I have about that industrial iot is getting more and more affordable and it's not just for big Enterprises big manufacturing companies but they are accessible and affordable for small companies and for these companies uh industrial iot LEDs to increased productivity efficiency and also the profits what is the main goal of the business and allows not to increase the cost the same skill or so so sure the demand for industrial iot will be growing definitely I'm coming years uh and and the reasons why this happening is that more and more industrial iot and in general IRT are used in our daily lives I agree with you Thomas anything on your end that you're seeing kind of from your perspective that you kind of are looking forward to or excited to see kind of going forward from my perspective you know I think you know from Remote Management looking in the hour you know where we are going as autonica uh more and more you know see an ability to control remotely you know and less time spending on the road and most time spending taking decisions and having you know business running and not you know wasting resources in the place where you fall for for use for ACT uh for work which does not give any added value so you know as mentioned sitting in the car and driving around check no I totally got it yeah perfect um so thank you both for taking the time what I wanted to ask you just before I let you go here is for audience out there who wants to learn more about the company kind of what you have going on follow up from this discussion in any way what's the best way they can do that I believe that the best way is to visit our website they'll talk about minus network.com and also it would be nice to have all the viewers of this podcast to follow us on social media on LinkedIn and it's okay perfect we'll make sure we include all those links website and so forth in the description and all the material that goes out but otherwise both of you thank you so much for taking the time fantastic conversation I really appreciate you taking the time to kind of talk to our audience a bit thank you for inviting us as well yeah we are happy to have this opportunity
2023-03-15 23:52
