you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast i'm your host ryan chicone and today's guest is raul wichigangs the ceo of notion a company focused on energy harvesting technologies and applications he has over 20 years of experience in the iot space with multiple successful exits and is the co-founder of the z-wave alliance which we'll cover a little bit in our discussion but on top of that we're going to spend a lot of our time focusing on smart spaces what they are how companies can benefit from having smart spaces how building managers can benefit from having smart spaces within their buildings and advice for companies looking to kind of start down that smart spaces journey about the different technologies and how to really get started but before we do 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 changes everything.com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcasts welcome all to the iot fall podcast thanks for being here this week thank you so much for having me yeah it's fantastic to have you here i wanted to start this off if you could just give us a quick introduction to yourself background experience you know anything you think our audience would find relevant to learn a little bit more about who they're listening to okay yeah my name is raul wichigans i'm the ceo of an ocean i've been in the iot industry for the last i would say well over 20 years been around both in the corporate side at philips electronics for bluetooth and wi-fi but my biggest chunk of these last 20 years i've spent building up the fantastic z-wave iotv business spend my time there from the smart home side two three years ago i started to also venture into more the commercial side of iot and industrial side of iot that is a space that is still a little bit younger than the smart home side of it and there's more new businesses that can be created which i think is is exciting fantastic and you're also the co-founder of the z-wave alliance correct that's right yep tell me a little bit more about that i know it's i mean i've heard of it and and been in um talked with individuals from from the alliance before but i just love if you give a quick overview of what that is yeah so the z-wave alliance is the is the body where through which a lot of the z-wave partners collaborate okay if you look at iot markets at large many of them almost all of them probably i would venture to think our eco-based ecosystem based type of go to market various companies with various different channels collaborating together to create experiences for the end users in the end and doing that properly and doing that in a orchestra orchestrated fashion that's where these alliances play a big role so already in 2005 we created the z-wave alliance and the ocean has done something very similar one or two years later by creating the ocean alliance oh fantastic well tell me a little bit more about an ocean what are you all doing kind of the the role you all play in iot and that kind of thing yeah so so an ocean is a a company that operates i would say for 90 percent in the commercial side of iot so iot devices and solutions that go into offices enterprises a little bit into industrial solutions and a little bit into smart home but not too much okay and where it sets itself apart really is they are they are they have always been creating iot solutions that are driven by energy harvesting based power so it's energy harvesting is is a is a term that is used for creating iot devices that are in principle wireless and and battery reelers they harvest the energy around the devices itself that that is rather unique um which is super critical for these commercial environments uh that we play in right because you know in in a home if a sensor runs out of a battery people don't mind to replace a battery here and there but if you deploy sensors in an enterprise you do that at scale right and um you're going to have to staff up your i t department just to replace batteries if they were battery operated devices so that is an absolute no goal sure and for that particular reason um energy harvesting is is a fantastic solution there yeah i totally agree i actually had a guest on a recent episode we were talking about energy harvesting and just the overall sustainability side of iot and kind of what what where we are now in kind of the future with battery-less devices and what that leads to potentially from a you know a benefit standpoint with not just the environment but also with different use cases and results so so that's fantastic talk a little bit about um some individual use cases or kind of applications of your offering and technology that you have going on that you're excited about that you know maybe a good way to kind of bring this full circle for our audience yeah so an ocean started its uh its business mostly in the building automation okay so the the devices that help you in an office environment to control your lights but also to control your heating and your shades okay but but it wraps around typically uh devices that sit into walls or in windows or indoors etc a big volume element there is energy harvested light switches so you can put them anywhere they're not wired up to your lights in any way shape or form you can put them on your wall but you can also put them on your desk or whatever makes sense for you and the energy of your finger pressing the button is enough to create a communication from the light switch to the actual lights to turn them on or up on or off or high or low et cetera et cetera that's a that's an example in that in the building automation space that we do quite a bit a bit of business with if you look at our other business that is developing like wildfire right now that is not so much the the business of of the the real estate owners anymore for building automation but it is the smart spaces segment where the smart spaces segment varies from building automation is that it isn't related to the structure of your building any longer but it is basically the tenant of a building that wants to deploy for the health of their employees or for getting people safely back into an office after kovit or for the sake of sustainability they want to deploy iot sensors for the most that meant measure facts about is there a good ventilation system is there a good amount of oxygen in the air are certain desks being used or not used so that when people come in they know where their teammates are are based or for example where you have your preferences to be at 72 fahrenheit or you prefer to work at 75 fahrenheit so you group together according to your preferences and you're not wasting as a as a company you're not wasting um energy because everybody has to be the same or equally warm or equally cold or you get a lot of those discussions in in larger corporations i'm sure and you know that's where in smart spaces we have we have a lot of those type of applications based on these sensors and then these sensors they communicate on the existing infrastructure of the wi-fi access points fantastic partnership with with aruba these wi-fi access points are then used to carry that information from the sensors up to the cloud through a piece of software that we have developed that partially resides in the aruba access points and then you don't need to run any new infrastructure in order to to deploy these right that piece of technology and that's that's a great interest to a lot of companies absolutely so i wanted to talk a little bit more about the the smart spaces um topic in in general um when when people hear smart spaces um it could mean a whole number of things but when when you all talk about it what is just the high level term smart spaces mean to you and you know why is it so important that we're focusing kind of on this area uh in the iot space from a solution standpoint yeah so so smart spaces are the tenants of buildings the that's that's the way we are segmenting that but if you look at that who are those companies you know it's it's sport brands it's telcos it is banks it is insurance companies typically companies that have a good amount of people and a good amount of desks and these companies have figured out that you know if they don't have a an agenda that addresses employee health right and employee productivity as well as um sustainability then in a few years you know you will not be getting any new young college graduates joining your company because they don't want to work for companies that don't have a sustainability agenda or that don't have the interest of the employees health in mind so every company big company knows that and they're trying to find ways right now of how can we assure that we do these things for our employees and for the sake of our own company right and in the end because of sustainability obviously also doing doing something good for this earth you know you shouldn't forget that 40 of the carbon that is emitted every year comes from buildings sure 40 and you know there is there is quite something we can do jointly by not having a lot of empty desks sitting around but managing that effectively and then cfo will love it too because you know they can figure out certainly now pre or post covet or towards the end of covet i would say people are going to come back into an office maybe three to four days a week not five days a week anymore so twenty percent let's say one day a week is twenty percent twenty to forty percent of the desks generally will not be used anymore right so if you still have them sitting around you one are renting space that you shouldn't be renting and when you have that space that you're renting that you shouldn't be renting you're also consuming um a lot of a lot of carbon that way right you're heating it you're lighting it up and that is that is just absolutely a no-go any longer and that a lot of companies are seeking the technology that can help them address those those issues and those opportunities and that's what we're right smack in the middle of so speaking about the building emissions how are sensors and thus the internet as well helping to kind of curb that problem um from euro's perspective so let's let's look at something in a usage model like desk occupancy okay like i said people are coming in three to four days a week working from home one to two days a week on average is what is the what is expected you will not have you don't need your own desk anymore but you have your preferences of either groups that you need to collaborate with or your preference in terms of heating or type of cooling settings right and you when you come into the office it will guide you to a desk that have either your colleagues that you need to work with or your temperature settings that you're there and it is also known and it manages that on a through a cloud it's also known that listen we can as a company save probably 20 of the real estate because of the 100 000 employees you know they won't be there every day and you can save yourself buildings or floors or or something of that nature not having to rent them and certainly not heating or cooling them or lighting them up right that's what these desk sensors help a lot with but also look at the health i'm not sure if you're aware but if you're sitting in a meeting room that is intended for 10 persons sitting there for 10 persons with 10 persons for about an hour okay if the ventilation is poor then the the state of mind of those 10 individuals is the same as they would have had about two glasses of wine to drink wow that's how much they are affected by the by the lack of sufficient oxygen interesting and that's also what these carbon dioxide detectors can simply measure and then ventilations obviously needs to kick in in order to make sure people have a productive time together and a healthy time too yeah that that's super fascinating i would never have expected that or you know really thought throughout the details that's that's crazy that it's two glasses of wine kind of equivalent for 10 people in that room if the ventilation is poor exactly people don't people don't know and realize that and no not at all if you spend a lot of a lot of we all know that when we spend a lot of time with two glasses of wine in our body continuously or hours right right it's not that good to do that day after day after day sure but it's the same by the way with carbon dioxide that you have an overdose off in these meeting rooms it's really not healthy for you there's now also books appearing that address that that's super fascinating i didn't expect the conversation to go that route that's that's super interesting now is this something you know we're talking about how companies can really benefit from this but i also assume we can pull this out to [Music] more commercial building owners as well to be able to offer this for smaller tenants in some capacity and for shared meeting spaces and things like that is that that's probably applicable there as well right yeah yeah absolutely what we are finding is you know it applies to every building sure whether it's large or or small it applies to smaller companies as it applies to to big companies obviously the bigger companies they they have perhaps more more to gain quickly if they can do away with the real with some of the real estate the renting that they don't really need so they're making it perhaps more of a topic for them or they have more capacity to also find the right solutions and address that right whereas very small entrepreneurial companies um they're they're typically super super busy and may not necessarily be be thinking in this direction yet because they've got 100 other things going on yeah but absolutely fundamentally this this doesn't only apply to large corporations it certainly applies across the whole suite of smaller to larger companies so i'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are listening to this and learning a ton just with things that did not know about how poor ventilation affects people individually the other benefits of smart spaces and so forth how do you when you work with companies how do you kind of advise them to get started or if somebody's listening to this what would be the best first steps for them to get started going down this path to adopt these types of smart space technologies whether it's for their own building or it's you know seeking out new new space that has us already in what should they be looking for and what's important to keep in mind yeah so i i think um [Music] there's a couple of things to keep in mind first of all they gotta look at what are their primary goals and and be be conscious about it is that really the sustainability angle or employee health or of course most of the time it is both but but have a clarity on what you're trying to accomplish and then to contact either like one of our key partners aruba which a lot of companies already have the access points from they can contact us they can contact system integrators that have done it installations for them in the past and talk about their their demands and say listen we're seeking iot solutions and they must realize that you know when you start entering down down this path what is it that how much maintenance can we take or do we want to take or we don't want to take any maintenance this must be pain-free and frictionless right right and based on that you can make your selections as to what sort of products you can work with and how have you seen this space and the smart spaces space grow over the last couple years and how much of the growth of it has been contributed to going through a pandemic so i would say smart spaces four years ago as a market segment didn't exist or barely existed right it was building automation that had everything to do with the structures the walls the windows etc but the tenants were not involved in in any of that okay it it started to play a greater role pro pre-coverage because of sustainability and and companies getting sustainability on their agenda and seeking solutions for that [Music] that was the starting point and we've seen a massive acceleration because of kovit and particularly uh when when covet is now nearing it's right well i don't think it will ever really stop it but we're getting much more of a handle on it and people want to get back into the office they want to be amongst colleagues in part they need to be for offices and for for buildings they need to be back in that connection with each other and and now there is a there is a big search of demand because of this with kovit we see a massive acceleration and everybody that looks at this for the sake of kovitz they're also going like can we also reuse these same implementations and these same sensors in the same clouds for for sustainability as well and then you build two birds with one stone yeah i think we've seen across all different industries the the infrastructure that you put in place to deploy an iot solution the more you can use that to solve other problems within your organization or create better or improve efficiencies within your organization the more likely it is to be adopted but throughout that adoption process i'm curious to learn a little bit more about what you've seen are the biggest challenges for adoption to to grow maybe it's the implementation side maybe it's the um understanding and the educational components of understanding what's actually going into these things what have you seen of the biggest kind of barriers and challenges with with adoption and even the implementation of these types of solutions for smart spaces right you know we as a company but also we as an industry are scattered okay we provide cloud software we provide sensor technology there is a need for for those two elements but there's also a need for somebody that installs this locally a system integrator typically there's a need for an application piece of software that does very specifically certain things that a company is looking for so a software company as well so you can already hear there's three to four parties into the mix pretty quickly and for a company that makes running shoes for example they they're not experts as to who they need and what they need and they shouldn't be experts but today it's it's it is somewhat hard for for these companies to to find the go-to place right where can i get this needs that i have fulfilled right and yes i if there's three or four companies that need to collaborate in order to do that fine but where do i find these three or four companies and how do i make sure they collaborate well so that they're not all pointing in in each other's way like it was their fault or this is something they're supposed to do sure so removing that friction um for the sake of the and for the benefit of the of the end customers is something that we as a company need to and have it super high on our priority list of course i need to do a better job at and as an industry we need to organize ourselves and alliances are part of the answer there in order to to create a single phase and a single go-to place for uh the end customers to to go to and find these solutions and and be able to speak with somebody a single company that can organize it for them so then they ask you i mean i i do agree that the fragmentation of iot in general does lead to a lot of challenges for companies and you know the alliance angle is something that's definitely unique where do you see not just alliances but other um other partnerships in a sense playing a role in the growth of the smart spaces space and i i guess i want to tie that into also just learning where you think the space is going and where it can go in the next you know 18 to 24 months kind of thing yeah i think the the the companies that have done something like this for for many years already are the arubas of this world yes they've installed infra wi-fi infrastructure it speaks to your phone it speaks to your computers it speaks to your ipads so is that completely different from a wi-fi access point that speaks to sensors and have special apps on your phone to navigate you to to certain desks you know there are certain parallels that we can draw to that industry where these things have been sorted out in part by technology platforms like app stores in part by system integrators that have done fantastic jobs to put bundle solutions together and you know i think companies that have played a role in this it infrastructure can redeploy themselves to do the same thing for iot infrastructure absolutely and there's not a lot of them that that is already doing this but i think many of them are are seeing this opportunity and they're trying to find out ways of how they can how they can play in this yeah it's it's very interesting space because of a lot of things um the technology maturity and then also just seeing a situation in which a lot of us maybe you never have expected or experienced before through the pandemic of being a majority of people working in offices in certain spaces we then were forced to be remote i mean don't get me wrong there's a lot of remote people before this but then we were forced kind of the whole to be remote and now we are trying to figure out the best and safest way to come back into the office from because it does definitely increases productivity and a lot of in a lot of situations and a lot of businesses benefit from that and the conversation we're having here today is is fascinating because not only am i but i'm sure audience is learning a ton about what actually is happening in these spaces and how the technologies that we now have available can help us be more efficient be more productive as an organization all the way down to an individual level so so this is super interesting and i'd love it if you could just quickly share if anybody out there kind of wants to learn more wants to follow up with any questions just kind of get a better sense of how this may apply or how this could or you all even could help them um in their in their journey towards towards this adoption what's the best way to to look into that as well as reach out yeah so i would recommend everybody to go to our website and ocean.com i think it's a great resource for finding usage models [Music] testimonials from other customers that are doing this that that companies can learn from but i think also an ocean alliance.org
is another good place where you can see an ecosystem of of companies that that all build product that speak the same language but also system integrators in there software solution companies are in there and that's those are two two great resources generally that i think a lot of companies will be helped by fantastic anything um we should be looking out for coming out of the ocean side or even the notion alliance side in the next number of months so just kind of pay attention to we have some exciting and new things uh coming up but this is not something that uh okay that i can really reveal at this point in time no problem states to absolutely stay tuned okay fantastic well well this has been a a very great conversation i've learned a ton personally like i said i think our audience is going to get a lot of value out of this as well it's very applicable to almost every business out there so i really appreciate your time today and thanks for being on the show and thanks for giving me the opportunity absolutely all right take care bye bye-bye all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iit 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
2022-01-17