The Impact of Embedded Technology | Losant's Brandon Cannaday | E211
you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcasts the number one resource and publication for the internet of things i'm your host ryan cohn we do ask that if you are watching this on youtube please give this video a like and subscribe to our channel if you're listening to this episode on a podcast directory somewhere please subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they are out on today's episode we have brandon candidate the co-founder and chief product officer at losant they are a company that has built an easy to use and powerful enterprise iot platform designed to help teams quickly and securely build real-time connected iot products and services for their customers we've had low stand on before they're a fantastic company fantastic group of people we talk a lot about the iot market from their perspective the impact of the embedded of embedded technologies popular use case for iot products um value of vendors investing in r d to iot enterprise consumers why it matters challenges they're seeing in the space um all in all fantastic conversation brandon is a great guest i think you'll get a lot of value out of this and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome brands the iot pro podcast thanks for being here this week yeah thank you yeah it's great to have you um let's start off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience absolutely so once again my name is brandon candidate i am the chief product officer and one of the co-founders for a iot platform company called losant so we're in business to help people across all industries really bring their specific iot product or solution to life and um tell me a little bit more about the founding story of low stand i i've met many people on the team kind of over the years and but i've always wanted to kind of hear a little bit more about kind of how the company was founded the opportunity you saw in the space to kind of have the company obviously exist up and then grow into what it is today yeah so i'll give you the the short version is um we were uh prior to losing we were in cloud services in a different technology really not opinionated on any technology at the time um you know we had grown that organization pretty big got a really strong understanding of highly scalable highly secure college services but uh kind of near the tenure we were eventually required near the end of our tenure there our customers started coming to us asking could they use that platform to deploy iot solutions iot was gaining a lot of traction especially cloud-based iot and you know sure you could deploy it on that platform but it really didn't have any of the those concepts that iot requires the concept of devices time series data the rules engine eventually you know the publishing and end user experience so that got us really thinking you know what would a platform specifically tailored towards the development of an iot product look like we did a little bit of exploration we're in cincinnati ohio we're surrounded by mid-tier manufacturing a lot of perfect customers we just started knock on doors asking questions and we found out there's a really good opportunity here this was about seven years ago when losan was founded and really on two major principles one was usability the developer experience on the existing offerings was not that great we wanted to make something friendly very easy very enjoyable to use and the other was cloud native at that time the cloud vendors had no concept of iot there was nothing in their catalog that said iot so you know we found a really strong opportunity to make a cloud-native very user-friendly enjoyable iot development platform and that's what we launched with and we've had a really enjoyable successful journey fantastic i appreciate that overview let's talk a little bit kind of a high level here i'd love it if you could kind of share your perception or maybe the company's kind of perception of the iot market as it exists today obviously from when you all started low sand it's changed a decent amount until where it is now what is the current state of the market in your kind of from your kind of point of view yeah it's a it's a it's a really good question we have what i think is maybe a unique perspective on iot especially when we talk about manufacturing and industrial when we started that was kind of where all the activity was you know this industry 4.0 smart manufacturing industrial iot that's where all of the use cases were and still even today when you go and look up industrial iot most of the use cases are as part of the manufacturing process but what we've really honed in on and found this growing this emerging opportunity that our technology is catered for is what's happening to the things that they're manufacturing especially in industrial space this large equipment that's being created being shipped to customers there's no real technology being added to that stuff so for us we're not as in the manufacturing process at all we're on kind of the flip side we're helping these manufacturers turn the things that they manufacture into connected products so still a huge opportunity manufacturing process manufacturing floor that's not for us we found a great opportunity it's growing very quickly a lot of interest on that industrial connected product space and then also especially post covid uh we're seeing a ton of interest in what we call smart environment which is campuses rooms and spaces like that understanding occupancy understanding how the space is being used i have too little space too much space sure um so that's kind of where we see a lot of the interest in iot as it stands today yeah i've had a lot of conversations recently around the connected spaces and as people are coming back to the offices just realizing how powerful iot can be in helping build smart spaces these connected spaces that provide a level of insight and data to these buildings commercial real estate companies managers you name it even companies themselves who rent the space more insights than they ever have before to be able to really understand how best to kind of build out and how best people are utilizing the space to help them make better decisions yeah especially you know right now we're kind of in this time of uncertainty where we're in this back to office plan um or hybrid work environments there's just a lot of unknowns right so facilities management security even you know the hvac energy consumption there's a lot of questions that this technology can help answer and what's nice is it's very approachable you know doing um uninvasive occupancy monitoring you don't need you know actual video cameras which is uncomfortable for employees you can do very uh simple uh sensors that just count and uh with that limited that small amount of data that very small step it's amazing how much insight you can get absolutely you mentioned um we're thinking about connected products um we mentioned that a second ago i wanted to ask a little bit about that what is from what have you seen the impact of or i guess how have you seen the impact of embedded technology grow over the years and how has it kind of grown to help oems help hardware manufacturers really deliver iot connected products yeah so this kind of gets into the technology stack and you know how difficult it can be when it comes to making a connected product so if we back up a little bit one of the fastest ways and still a very popular way to convert a piece of equipment into a connected piece of equipment is through a retrofit so bringing on a small gateway the gateway has in our case we have an agent that runs on that it can talk to the controller and the equipment get the data to the cloud no changes required to the equipment so upsides are very quick very easy downside high cost so some of those gateways especially once you add cellular can get up in that several hundred you know even a thousand dollars so that limits the you know the unit economics sometimes don't work out it requires some expensive equipment for that retrofit to make sense so now we get into the embedded world your computer is much smaller the cost drops significantly uh now you can you the product lines that you can convert to connected grows um the challenge with embedded is unlike a gateway that can run you know our full agent that's all just drag and drop embedded development is hard it's one of the most complicated types of development there is firmware engineers are some of the most sought after engineers there's not very many of them difficult to create so you know we saw that opportunity last year actually a couple years ago we've been we spent about two years trying to well successfully develop brought to market an embedded version of our edge agent designed to run on these very small constrained devices brings our drag and drop development environment trying to bring that approachability of technology uh that you can get through bigger gateways all the way down to the embedded edge so that's where you know the industry has to the tooling has to increase it has to get easier back to you know our number one value as a product is the usability we want to make it enjoyable so um you know we're trying the ecosystem has to work harder too but embedded plays a huge role in making connected products successful um still a lot of opportunity to make that as easy as it can be yeah and one thing i wanted to ask you aside from the kind of use case we were talking about a second ago are you seeing any other kind of popular use cases pop up for iot producers uh yeah so use the word iot producer there um that's kind of what a phrase that we use to describe um the companies that are producing delivering iot as you know i say an integral part of the thing they manufacture um opposite of an iot consumer which is more using iot to understand their own environment right uh so yeah when it comes to use cases for producers that's really backing into you know what are the types of services that companies can sell to their customer base um industrial manufacturers by far the largest opportunity uh but when you get in a smart environment there's there's two windows there you had mentioned you know the uh the real estate management companies think about them becoming iot producers they develop their own product they sell it to their tenants so every one of their tenants don't have to go out and find their own smart environment solution they can acquire it straight from the property manager another really big one for us is telecommunication companies they have a wonderful foundation of connectivity and they're out there pursuing um value-added services they're becoming iot producers producing these products and services that piggyback on their core connectivity extending it in new ways new value for us verizon is a really big customer that we have um they have brought to market their critical asset tracker which is um gps tracking as well as their condition based maintenance solution which they sell into their industrial customers yeah so it seems like it's a great way to kind of extend the value of existing product lines for these producers that we're talking about tell me about kind of what you've seen not just obviously having another thing to sell but what what kind of business models is this kind of enabling for companies is it more subscription based are there new business models that you know maybe we're not thinking about or we don't hear about as often that are now being enabled because of of these producers kind of building these solutions and selling them yeah that's probably the most attractive part especially to industrial manufacturers you know they're normally in a world where they you know manufacture a large expensive piece of equipment they sell it and outside of maybe some support and service contracts are kind of done revenue stream is basically stopped so um what's really nice about surrounding your piece of equipment with a value-added service is now you get your one-time revenue model but these connected services are almost exclusively licensed as subscription or recurring services so now you can get into the recurring revenue game which is an area a lot of companies want to get to right so obviously new revenue the the other is increased sellability so the technology you add to a product makes it more attractive and adds sellability because of how much easier you've made it to integrate into some of these larger smart environment or smart manufacturing solutions so if we pretend you're an industrial equipment maker and you have sold this piece of equipment and it has all this technology into it you're probably selling it into someone else's manufacturing process they're going to want to include your piece of equipment with a bunch of other vendors into a broader um you know industry 4.0 solution so if you're selling a piece of equipment that has this technology integrated into it all of a sudden it made their job a lot easier so it's going to be more attractive you're going to get a recurring revenue model attached to it just generally increases your competitive advantage um and uh customer satisfaction absolutely yeah i couldn't agree more um super interesting kind of just way to think about how iot is being not just built and where the demand is coming from but also how it's kind of getting out to the end user uh definitely different channels are being opened uh something i want to ask you is um so if we talk about the value of vendors investing in r d to enterprise or to iot enterprise consumers why why is that so so important kind of in their process um i would i guess i'd go back to customer expectations right now are extremely high and the competitive landscape is extremely tough um especially in industrial space and telco space you know those are you know fairly competitively active industries so if you're a a vendor or a company thinking about how do i stand out how do i make my product more attractive that's where this r d investment is coming in certainly you have to think about it in terms of customer value i'm not going to lie and say we haven't had uh innovation for innovation's sake come through that's the a bad way to think about it but um you know this technology you put in place really is to increase the value of equipment in the hands of your customer um the equipment's gonna be easier to use the overall lifetime cost is going to be less that remote monitoring remote maintenance remote service really can drastically reduce the ongoing service cost of a piece of equipment all boiling back to you're going to make a better product so your r d investment is uh to make your product more attractive and more better for your end customers fantastic um so one of the last questions i want to ask you before we wrap up here is high level challenges in the space what where are you seeing kind of the biggest roadblocks the biggest headaches that companies are coming across in their kind of journey to being successful with with iot you can kind of approach it from any stakeholders point of view but but but just i'd love to hear from your perspective kind of where you see the biggest challenges lie and then also with the advice to kind of how to overcome those challenges if they are able to be overcome yeah yeah i would say the i would start with i guess i'll go two one organizational more business the other one technology so sure um a lot of times organizations pursuing especially this connected product world now they're uh selling a service versus a you know a piece of equipment that's a way different way of doing things it's a different way to support a product software products cloud services are supported quite a bit differently so we you know it's not unusual customer gets it out in the market and then you know they haven't quite figured out well how do we support this um it's just different do i use my normal product support channels do i do this how do i sell it um that's another common problem how do i monetize this so a lot of that work has to be thought through up front to have kind of that successful product launch um on the technology side a lot of it does boil down to uh the hardware the sensors um and also starting small a lot of times companies do get you know excited like this just looks great this technology is awesome it's going to change the way we do business and then you know they have this giant group of um people and stakeholders in organization they come up with hundreds of use cases they want to pursue for iot that's too big you can't move that forward it's too big of a step so kind of distill it down into you know what's kind of the smallest value that you can add to your customers a lot of times it's can i just get the data from the controller in the cloud so people can see it anywhere in the world stop there see if your customers even care um that's another one fail fast is sometimes really good limit your investment limit your risk so you know starting small sometimes a big challenge companies really don't like to start small they want to do something big and splashy but you know keep your ideas under control and also think through the organizational side uh very carefully you're you're stepping into a whole new type of product a whole new type of technology make sure you've got the organizational processes in place to to handle that and how do you um when you work with companies and there's obviously lots of different pieces to an iot solution it's not just the platform and the software there's the connectivity there's the hardware how do you work with companies or i guess what advice do you have for companies out there looking to understand how to kind of decipher all the different types of options and choices that they have and make the correct decision for their individual use cases that's something they should like kind of lean more on the platform company systems integrated that they're working with or is that something that they themselves can kind of take on to um to help make the right decision yeah that's uh that's a good one that i that i missed thanks for bringing that up yeah the um that is certainly another challenge the um the iot technology stack is one of the most complicated so like you mentioned hardware connectivity platform integration experience cloud you got all this stuff has to come together um for us you know we do a really nice job i think on on helping our customers we've seen a lot of the um of the hardware and connectivity options we know what works and what doesn't work so um that's something that we do as a platform provider we will help customers navigate all of that um so that is an option work with the the platform provider if you're if your provider does offer that um the the other one will probably be the system integrator or the you know professional services group that can help pull all this together um it's also not unusual to do internally but it is it's a lot to understand you likely will have to find some dedicated resources or kind of hired new resources that you may not already have internally and kind of tackle that but yeah for us um you know because we're the platform we're kind of central to the iot applications that get delivered all the data is coming to us and experience is building us we've built up a pretty nice um just knowledge base of of what's going to work and what's not going to work and right you know we share that back to the customers that use us absolutely um and for customers or potential customers out there and people interested in learning more about the company what you have going on follow up with questions what's the best way they can do that yeah i mean losant.com l-o-s-a-n-t
we do have what we call the developer sandbox so if you are a developer and want to get your hands uh dirty immediately uh you can start building for free it's um 10 devices um you can get started so and through lowsan.com you can find some contact information happy to give um anyone that wants a full demo and and talk about their solutions and how we might be to help great and um anything kind of new exciting coming out of los angeles that we should be on the lookout for kind of pay attention to yeah you know i would say that embedded edge agent that i mentioned that's our newest major release did that just late last year and like i said that is that is bringing our low code visual workflow engine which is what in my opinion one of the coolest parts of our platform uh down into the embedded world so that's definitely something if you're a firmware engineer or you want to add some intelligence directly into your device's controller that's definitely something worth checking out awesome well brandon thank you so much for your time it has been a great conversation i really appreciate it we have big big been big fans of losing for a while um working with your team and getting the content out that you all kind of share with our community it's been fantastic so i really appreciate you taking the time here i know we have some other videos and content scheduled to build together so i'm really looking forward to getting this out to our audience yeah thank you ryan 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
2022-08-21 02:08
