HITT- Navigating the chaos of IoT in network management- Dec 3, 2024

This HITT explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the rapid growth of IoT devices in network architecture and management. With IoT devices surpassing non-IoT devices in 2020 and projections indicating over 30 billion connected devices by 2030, the need for effective strategies to manage these networks is critical. Key issues include latency, security vulnerabilities, and the necessity for collaboration between IT and operational technology teams. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding specific use cases and prioritizing network traffic to ensure quality of service. AI and machine learning are highlighted as transformative technologies that enhance IoT deployment and operational efficiency.

Today is a look behind the curtain at the challenges presented to network architecture and management from those lovable connected devices and continuing advances in IoT.

It’s everywhere, and whether or not we notice it, there’s a controlled chaos going on, which means opportunity for Telarus advisors. Today, we look at strategies for building and managing the networks capable of meeting today’s demands and tomorrow’s needs for scale.

Joining us today are Graeme Scott, Telarus VP for advanced connectivity and mobility, and by John Josh Haselhorst, Telarus senior field solutions engineer. Graeme, Josh, welcome back to the Tuesday call.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Doug. Really appreciate you having us on. And, you know, the title of today’s session was connected chaos.

And although it’s a a little bit sort of click baity, I think it’s really appropriate because it sort of talks through what’s going on with a lot of your clients’ environments. Right? We’ve got this proliferation of connected devices, whether it be IoT or mobility, and it’s creating some challenges for the traditional network environment and causing a lot of your clients to have to go back and revisit and take a look at how they’ve deployed their network infrastructure, how they’ve set it up, and how they can address the unique challenges that these devices have presented. So we’re gonna bring Josh Hazlehorst in here shortly to give us, some details and really dive into some of the strategies.

But before I do that, I wanna really set the table here and kinda let everybody see what the opportunity is and what’s going on in the IoT space. So for those of you who’ve seen one of my hits before or seen one of my ascends, this slide may look familiar, but I think it really dives in and demonstrates what’s going on in the opportunity here.

Everything you see with IoT is up into the right. We’re looking at about a four hundred and eighty six billion dollar market by twenty twenty seven. And, to illustrate where all these connected devices are coming from, in twenty twenty, so just four short years ago, IoT devices topped non IoT devices connected to the Internet. Back then, it was about fifteen point four billion.

It’s estimated today that’s around twenty one and a half billion. So we’ve added almost another five billion devices to the Internet over those four years, and stats show that about a hundred and twenty seven new IoT devices connect to the Internet every second.

So that’s a lot. I think as we can all see, and it’s estimated that by twenty thirty, we’re gonna be looking at well over thirty billion connected devices. And if you have a tough time getting your head around that, just sort of think about your own home and all the things that are connected within your home environment. You’ve got, you know, your fridge maybe connected, your TV certainly, you’ve got cameras, you’ve got alarms.

When you think about that, it’s pretty easy to sort of move that into the business world and think, hey, there’s a lot of the same things going on there as well. Cameras, access control, in a hospital environment, you’ve got beds and monitors and they’re all connected to the Internet and they all have different needs. So before we move on to the next slide, that last point at the bottom is one that I always like to show because it really talks about how executives are looking at IoT. Ninety three percent of executives believe the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks.

So we’re gonna dive into some of those risks today, but your comp your customers are moving full speed ahead with these deployments, and it’s up to us to come in and educate them on some of the risks and some of the strategies that they can use to deploy these services and devices effectively. So let’s go ahead and move on to the next slide there, Chandler. So here’s some of the challenges that are introduced by connected devices. I mean, obviously, performance is one that we would think about.

Right? New devices create new consumption, and that can cause problems for existing devices on the network. Obviously, latency can always be a challenge. You’ve got different requirements for these devices.

Some are very low latency, some aren’t as sensitive, but you’ve gotta meet the demands there. And then, of course, IP address allocation.

Many of these things need their own IP addresses, and so scaling that can be a huge challenge for organization. So moving on to our next point here, device management. All of these devices, all of them need to be managed. Right?

So firmware updates, configurations, patches, all of these things can be a real challenge for an IOT, IT team because they’re not getting a lot more resources to deal with it even though the devices that they’re responsible for are exploding. So in addition to that, you’ve got all kinds of different protocols being involved there. Some of these devices use what’s called LoRaWAN, which is low bandwidth, some are on five g, some are using wifi, some are using bluetooth. So how do you manage all those things and maybe you’ve got two different devices using the same band of spectrum or the same single band.

That can be a challenge for IT teams to manage to make sure that all of those devices are connected and delivering an effective user experience. Right? Remember, that’s what it’s all about. Making sure that the users of these devices have a good experience.

So let’s move on to the third point there, Chandler.

This one should not surprise anybody, but security. Right? We’ve got some fairly famous, exploits that have happened over the last couple years through IoT devices, and I know Josh is gonna talk about a couple of those here shortly. But IoT devices can be point prone to exploitation. So new devices, new attack points, definitely something that IT teams need to, to consider an increased authentication requirement.

Are the things accessing these devices the things that we wanna be accessing those devices, and how do we make sure that we’re we’re letting the right people use them?

This one is one that maybe a lot of people don’t think about, but this sort of idea of a shadow IT where different departments will introduce devices without really consulting the IT team. This happens a lot more than you think where all of a sudden a bunch of things are on the network using Internet or using resources, and the IT team has no idea what they are or even what they’re doing. So definitely something to consider. And then our fourth point here, obviously, quality of service.

Right? As I mentioned, the goal of all of these IoT devices is to deliver some kind of resources or performance or data, and there’s a user experience behind that. Right? Real time data is very critical to, what are your your clients are doing and what they’re needing.

So how they access that and getting that real time is what we wanna deliver. So how do we do that, with these, different constraints and challenges that are being presented? So different requirements to create different challenges and have sometimes created some problems with the user experience. So there’s kind of four challenges that we find that IT teams are struggling with.

There’s obviously a whole bunch more. But, But, Chandler, I’m gonna go ahead and go full screen and bring in our good friend here, Josh Hazlehorst, the man, the myth, the legend. Many of you guys have probably worked with Josh in the past. Fantastic guy.

He is the man with the plan. So, Josh, why don’t you talk a little bit briefly about what I just kinda shared with the good folks on the call here. Let us know your thoughts, and and tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing through some of the engagements you’ve been involved in.

Yeah. No. Great, Graeme. Thank you.

I like to I like to have this concept of sell without selling. And and and really what I mean by that is, yeah, there’s IoT devices out there. There’s sensors out there. There’s different kind of telemetry.

There’s different machinery or whatever. I have to know that persona that I’m talking to in an organization to really understand that that particular use case. And I’ll give you a couple examples. Right?

Let’s just start with the the components of of an IoT world. Right? And and that really leaves there’s three core components. And this is gonna hit about your latency and your security and your your data driven analytics.

Right, is the three components of the actual sensor itself. Right? Anybody can buy those. I can go on Amazon, eBay, buy a humidity sensor, a temperature sensor, a vibration sensor.

Oh, I just caught a rat in a rat trap on the outside of my, you know, restaurant sensor, and that goes to the the the facilities guy, the janitor guy. Right? Why? Because I don’t want my front door stinking like dead rat while people are coming into my restaurant.

Right? But so you have those sensors. Right? When we talk about, I’m gonna have these sensors all over the place in a distributed environment, that’s when we start having these latency issues.

But not every application is a high intensive, high sensitive world. Let’s go back to that. I just caught a mouse.

Who cares if that took a minute for the janitor to get? Right? But let’s talk about a manufacturing plant that’s running scales or systems, and I’ve got high vibrations that’s gonna break my my conveyor belt in a Amazon, you know, warehouse. Yeah.

I need instantaneous feedback. Right? So the components of those are the actual sensors. A lot of these sensors are in the machines these people are already buying.

So we’re not selling them sensors. They already are included with some of these devices. Right?

So then for that latency world, I have these edge gateways. And what a edge gateway is, if people know edge computing, it’s no different theoretically. It’s I’ve got all these sensors, and all these sensors in a specific region are gonna send that data into an edge gateway.

Then that edge gateway is gonna talk to a master control processing unit. Right? These are usually cloud platforms. It’s a central server that’s gonna take all of that information from all of those edge gateways, and it’s gonna analyze all that data.

Here’s the problem. This is where I go talk about sell without selling. A lot of us, especially guys that have been in IT that are system admins or IT sales guys, are selling the IT guys. I’m talking to the guy at the firewall.

I’m talking to the guy about that that guy the same guy I sold Internet to, voice to, servers to. This is not always the same guy. A lot of times, this is facilities managers, operations managers, health and safety managers. These are people that have nothing to do with IT.

IT, it becomes my problem because they’re eventually gonna hand this to me and say, good luck with that. And that’s where that security and latency mechanism comes in. But let’s think about where these use cases sit in. Right?

Let’s talk about any kind of building, industrial, manufacturing. Right?

The the reason I have sensors in these environments is to analyze data of any kind of telemetry on my million dollar batch plants, my million dollar, you know, forklifts and dump trucks and whatever. I need to get that real time telemetry.

Why? So I can proactively do things like maintenance. I can keep my machines running and fix my machines while they’re running so there is no downtime. What does IoT devices and sensors in these environments?

And let’s back to the first one, the industrial control. I’m not talking to the firewall guy about this. I’m talking to building managers, maintenance managers, stuff like that. Right?

In a retail franchise environment, we’re seeing this, you know, analytics for, you know, customer behavior using sensor data of where are people actually congregating.

If you look at a big box store, their main money maker is square footage and wear. And my main money spender as a a supplier or a vendor is if I’ve got the end cap there right in front of the of the cash register, that’s gonna cost me ten times more money than if I have an end cap in the backroom by the bathroom that’s Denley Lit. Right? We’re talking money and we’re talking revenue, but we’re also talking things like loss prevention, which is a huge cost to an organization.

So am I going out there and am I selling to Home Depot?

Maybe. Or am I selling to that vendor, that supplier that’s supplying Home Depot and trying to get to that end cap and trying to get away from the bathrooms. Right? But I need if I’m a if I’m a CEO of that vendor, I need that data.

I need those analytics. I need to see where those humans are congregating and how they’re buying, what their buying patterns are. But I also have to be really, really concerned if I’m Home Depot or Lowe’s about that loss prevention mechanism. Right?

So that’s that retail analytics game. If you guys have seen guys like, you know, Epic IO and some of these IoT mobility experts that we have in the supplier portfolio, you’ll see some of these smart buildings that they’re building. It’s not just to sell. It’s to make money and decrease cost, but not decrease cost by, hey, man.

I can save you some money on your interweb services. No. No. No. No. I can save you money on loss prevention.

I can make you money on getting to that end cap. I can make you money on doing more transactions. Right? So those are huge.

Smart buildings. Everybody lives in cities. Everybody sees these, you know, multi tenant office buildings or whatnot. But if I’m a CB Richard Alex, if I’m a, oh, god. What are those other you know? Graeme, help me. What are those rent an office?

Oh, like, WeWorks or somebody like that or Yep. Yep.

Perfect. Okay. So what if I’m on a a fifteen story building in downtown Chicago, and I have three floors that are completely occupied max tenancy.

I’m gonna have sensors in there for my environmental controls, my lighting, my environmental controls, my air conditioning, my power. I’m gonna have all that stuff. Right? But what about the three floors up top that people haven’t even occupied or or they all left at lunch?

Why am I still consuming power and energy to power those floors? Well, because I don’t know any better. Right? So the cost to me of a building maintenance type of organization like a CB Richard Dallas or whatnot is is power consumption.

So I’m gonna cut cost by saving you interrupt? Internet? No. No. No. I’m gonna cut cost by shutting down those floors to a minimal capacity, but I need it to done be done automatically.

Now is that a high latency, high sensitive type of an application? Not really. So with things like edge gateways and cloud controllers be a requirement for that specific application? Probably not.

Think about that as, like, when we’re talking things like SD WAN and transport for, you know, session based applications like voice video data or whatever. Very, very sensitive applications. Right? But But what about email?

Do I care that it took five more seconds to send and receive that email? How would I even know? Same situation with some of these applications that rely on these sensors to to to cut my cost, right, for our organization is not all of them are the same. There’s no, you know, keys to the kingdom, goose that laid the golden egg that this is the device that’s in.

It’s perfect for all applications. No. It’s all different. And we need to know that. But that being said, that sell without selling, I need to know who’s responsible in that organization for that specific use case.

Think about that smart sensors in these MTLD buildings. Right? That’s not the IT admin. Right?

That is the building manager. That is the building operation manager. That’s the property manager. That’s their control mechanism.

So I need to be talking to them, not necessarily the the the systems admin. Eventually, it goes to system admin. Right? Because eventually, these are connected devices.

They got IP addresses. I’ve gotta secure these things, Graeme. I don’t know how many times you’ve heard it, how many times we’ve seen it then. Hey, man.

These guys got in through a rogue IP address, and then boom, all of a sudden, they got everybody’s credit card information, buying information.

If I don’t involve IT and I don’t bring these things behind firewalls or I don’t microsegment these applications outside of, like, guest VLANs or Securebee, then then I’m breaking my own food chain. And and I see a lot of these guys, especially with buildings operations facilities managers, right, is I’m gonna build these. I’m gonna do these systems so I can so I can see people coming in and out of my manufacturing warehouse. So I can see, you know, high vibrations going on.

So I can do, you know, you know, real time telemetry on doing things like maintenance on machines. But I never even talked to the guys in IT. I have no idea if this is a secure mechanism, but I do know that I wanna remotely be able to manage my machines. Yeah.

Well, we’ve gotta get these guys married to each other. We talk about marrying OT with IT. Right? That is a real thing.

I was working with a a chemical a global chemical company not too long ago, and their their operational technology division, which was their chemical guys, my batch plants, my big tanks. These are the guys that are automating processes, like, what chemical’s going, what sequence into a big batch to make a to make a vitamin. Right? Don’t even talk to the people on IT.

Like, literally don’t even ever have conversations. They don’t even know each other’s names. But yet, I am the manager of this division, and I get to see how each chemical layers into a batch to create a vitamin that I sell at Safeway, but never talk to the guys in IT and on a wide open environment. Well, what would happen if maybe a crypto lock, a raised man a raised ransomware attack came in and just basically, boom, lock it.

I have no credentials. Credentials have gone.

How do I make vitamins to sell at the Safeway now? Sometimes it’s not about cost savings or cost containment. It’s about revenue producing activities.

And I’ve gotta continue to produce this revenue, so I’ve gotta secure these environments. Right? I’ve gotta encourage these guys to talk to each other.

Graeme, how many times have you talked to an IT dude and you said, hey, man. Who’s in charge of the manufacturing floor for those three machines?

Duh. I don’t know. I see the dude coming in with a lunch panel every day. No.

No.

We need to get these guys talking to each other.

Yeah. And I think you raised so many really good points there, Josh. Like, couple of things I wanna go in. We we threw out a couple of terms there, OEM and OT.

So OEM, original equipment manufacturer, OT, operational technology. Right? The point here, there’s so many different things that are driving these needs and the IT department is grappling with how to respond to what’s going on in the environment. And I think the most important point you leverage there, or you mentioned there, Josh, and something that I talk about all the time in our Ascend events, and I know Tim Bossa talks about all the time in the Anchor In event, is this idea is how do your clients make money?

Where’s the revenue coming from? Because that is where they’re looking to deploy technology to help facilitate revenue growth, cost cutting, those kind of things. That’s all the business ultimately cares about, and IT has to be set up to deliver on those initiatives that the other departments have to implement that. So couple last words on that, Josh, before we go into talk about some strategies.

Yeah. I would say personas are very, very important. But I would say if you get anything out of this conversation, there are internal IT people that do think and and claim it’s their internal responsibility to cut cost for their organizations.

That is not what the CEO hired you to do. The CEO hired you to figure out how to utilize technology to make me more money. Yep. Period. Not to save me money. Yep. So take that.

Yeah. No. You nailed it. You nailed it. So, Chandler, let’s go ahead and bring up some of those other slides.

What we’re gonna talk about here is some strategies that, IT departments can use to, you know, handle some of these challenges that they’re being introduced by these IoT and OT type devices. So, Josh, why don’t you dive into a couple of these, strategies here. These are some of the things you’re having pretty in-depth conversations about. So just tell the folks here kinda where you’re going with some of this stuff and some of the things you’re recommending.

Yeah. So I’m not even gonna start at the top. I’m gonna start at the far right top. Right? Prioritize network traffic. This is what I’m talking about applications and and application criticality.

Not every single application, not every single IoT device needs priority services. So we have to prioritize how those specific applications need to behave. They don’t all have to be on fiber and hundred gig waves and all this other stuff back to that Office three sixty five gig. Right? Some of these applications are non business critical, and time to get that information is okay. Right?

But go over to segment the network. You’ve gotta sec you you gotta isolate this traffic off of your your main network environment. This is not the same stuff that, you know, your firewalls and your switches and your main user computing admin controls. These need to be completely separate, completely isolated so I can protect my environment. If something does happen with a sensor, it doesn’t affect my business operations or my business outcome.

Yeah. That’s, some good points there. And I think, you know, this is kinda just table stakes. Right?

As far as looking at, the way if you want this stuff to perform properly. And, again, really kind of pushes this idea that, hey, maybe you’re not comfortable talking about IoT, but you certainly may be comfortable talking about the network. There’s lots of ways to get into this account. Chandler, next slide.

Josh, what can you tell us about these things here?

Yeah. So scalable. So I don’t just go to Amazon and buy a humidity sensor and and and stick in your refrigerator at your hospital that’s gonna tell you that, hey. This fridge is down, you know, above thirty two degrees, and and I’ve got food sources in here. That’s great.

But was that Amazon sensor was it scalable? Did it have I can only install ten of them. Did it have, only five of them can actually report at a single point in time. I can’t just go buy stuff, and this is what people do, especially facilities and operations, guys.

They buy off of the Google dot com and off of architecture, not architecture. I installed two two temperature control sensors and two freezers, but I can only I can only monitor one at a time. This is not scalable for an organization, a cafeteria, a hospital, a whatever. Right?

So please talk to these people and let them know that, hey. Just buying off of retail is most of the time not good enough.

Yeah. No. I think, you know, I always talk about cameras, because it’s a really easy way to illustrate the the proliferation of of IoT. And, you know, so many businesses started with just a couple of cameras, and now they’ve got fifty.

Right? And so how do you have a network that kinda scales to meet the demands there for sure? Security also a huge one. Right, Josh?

So, I mean, this goes without saying, but a big big part of any strategy with IoT.

It does. And there’s a shift in this. Right? Is and there’s a huge way that breaches happen. And one of the monster ways is simple credential effect. Whether I stole your username and password, Graeme, so I can get into a controller and mess with things, Or I wasn’t even good enough to steal your credentials, but I was good enough to just change your username and password.

So I gotta be able to use things like multifactor authentication, strong passwords. I need to do data encryption, but there’s a newer theory out there.

One came out a couple months ago. It never went to market. It was called three FA. Right? Triple factor authentication. The newer one is password less authentication.

I am no longer gonna bother my system admins with password resets. I’m no longer gonna be bothered with credential theft. I don’t have credential theft. I don’t have passwords. I don’t have usernames. My username and password is me, my machine, my face, my biometrics, my fingerprint, how I tap on my keyboard, my user behavior, that becomes my authentication.

But not only do I need to be able to authenticate who I am, where I am, or what machine is trusted, I also need to be able to authenticate where I’m at in the world.

Am I allowed to get business critical information from my home office, my work office, and the same business critical information in a critical information in a public Wi Fi at the airport? No.

So I’ve gotta be able to automate that geofence policy too of Josh Hazlehurst can get business critical information from his office, his home office, but at a public Wi Fi at the Starbucks? No. He he does not get critic access to critical information.

He only gets public information.

And I’ve gotta be able to separate that.

Yeah. And even more importantly, should an HVAC sensor be able to access any business critical information. Right? You know, I mean, I think that’s, you know, for those of you who who know, that’s that’s what the target breach came from.

Right? Was an HVAC sensor. So Hundred percent. To think lots to think about there.

One of my best friends just a quick one. One of my quick story. One of my best friends was one of the chief engineers at multiple CBRE buildings, and they he went out and bought platforms that he can monitor his smart buildings from his laptop, from his work office.

Never even talked to the IT department. None of that information was back behind a firewall. None of it was segmented. None of it required multifactor authentication. He just wanna be able to do his job from home. I get it. But we gotta marry, you know, all this stuff with the internal IT and security team.

For sure. Next slide there for us, Chandler, please.

So, yeah, obviously, staying on top of what’s going on the environment. Josh, talk a little bit about these two things.

So the back to that that that little story about, like, what a couple of, you know, sensors in my freezers at a hospital. That’s great. Right? And and now I gotta make these scalable.

But, also, I have to be able to do real time monitoring of these things. When I get a food source that gets above a certain temperature, not only do I have to throw it in the garbage, I have to reorder, and I have to reorder automatically. And these systems do that, but I have to be able to proactively monitor and manage these devices by using these edge gateways and these cloud controllers to give me real time data analytics. I’ll give you an example.

Decades ago, before IoT was the word called IoT, we were building telemetry out of a gold mine in Imperial Valley, California.

The biggest issue they had was they have these big monster shovels and these big dump trucks called triple sevens. Right? Tires as big as my house. These triple sevens to if they pop the tire was an eighteen month lead time by Goodyear.

These guys are pulling gold ore out of the earth making a million dollars a day, and now I got a machine on jacks for eighteen months. So we needed to build real time telemetry into those machines to go back to corporate HQ that shows overload, low temperature, low oil pressure, low tire pressure in real time because these are machines that are running in real time that make me money. How do I make more money? I have more machines running twenty four seven. Right? So I need to be able to see all of this telemetry in real time for any business critical application.

Yep. For sure. Edge computing. Right? How do we offload some of those processes to edge devices?

This this goes to just basic setup of your network, how you’re going to work.

Basic telemetry. Right? Back to that transport company in Imperial Valley, California. What if my cloud server was in Maryland? All that transport backhauls all the Internet traffic all the way to Maryland and then all the way back to Phoenix, all the way back to Imperial Valley, California.

Is that telemetry now real time? No. It takes time. It’s I can’t fix physics, but I can get you closer to the source, and that’s why I need those edge gateways in a regional architecture.

Yeah. Love it. Good stuff here. So we’re gonna go ahead and open it up to questions.

But I think really the big takeaway for the audience here, just the way we think about network, the way we think about what’s driving the need of the network, and that user experience has really changed. So whether you’re comfortable talking about IoT devices specifically or comfortable talking about the issues created by those IoT devices, there’s always a ton of opportunity to take advantage of this huge boom that’s happening in the IoT space. And, our team, of course, you you heard Josh talking for a while here. He could go on for much, much longer.

He sees a lot of these opportunities and and is here to help. We’ve got a great team of folks with Josh as well. So if you’ve got some of these opportunities, think you might have something, the Telarus team is here to help you. Doug, what do we got out there for questions?

It looked like we had quite a few coming.

Oh, some good ones today. Thanks, Graeme Scott, Josh, Hazelhorse for a terrific presentation.

Ken Tortura wrote in early on, and, Graeme, I think he was setting you up here. He wants to know about the importance of robust connectivity as these IoT devices, sensors, and whatnot multiply.

Yeah. I know. I’ll let Josh jump in here on this as well, but I think, you know, it’s it’s just very true. Like and I think what’s changed a little bit here too is it’s not always the same type of connectivity.

Right? You know, we tend to think of dropping in a big fiber pipe and a couple of hot spots and we’re good to go. Well, no. That’s not the way it is all the time now.

So some of these devices require different types of connectivity. Maybe it’s five g. Maybe it’s LoRaWAN. There’s a lot of different things to consider now.

So again, it just drives back to this need to open that conversation back up with your clients and say, hey. What’s going on in your environment as it relates to IoT, and what are the needs of those devices in your environment? How can we help you address some of that? Josh, anything you wanna add there?

You know, I think about that back to the who’s responsible for what situation. Right? Think about if I’m a a restaurant management company, and I’m yeah. The restaurant management company needs to have all these sensors for their refrigeration, humidity, or whatever. But what about their pest control company that they outsource to? Should they not have IoT devices and sensors to help them do their jobs also? I have two leads now, the restaurant management company, the facilities manager, and the third party pest control operator.

Yeah. Good stuff. And I think, you know, bringing bringing all those parties together, you know, understanding what the common goal is here. What are we trying to achieve? And bringing everybody together. What who do we need involved in this process to make things work effectively, for our users.

Hundred percent. And back to that connectivity, Graeme, they’re all gonna connect in a different way. And there’s different parties responsible for each type of type of use case.

Yeah. Several of our advisers talked about the, the nuts and bolts of trying to present to and close deals with these different parties involved. And John Vargo, for example, talked about, I’m sorry. That’s John’s got a different question. But several of our advisers talked about those interdepartmental meetings where you have to sometimes bring together those different interests to talk about not only their individual objectives, but the network connectivity and the impact on security and so forth.

Yeah. Josh hit on a lot of great points here, but, if you guys have attended one of our Anchor Inn events and and, or our horizontal selling. Right? Selling across the different areas of the organization.

And it’s very critical to sort of leverage the relationships you have within one department. Maybe it’s the IT department, maybe maybe it’s another department, to try and get in and understand what’s going on in some of the other areas of the business. With a lot of these advanced solutions, the decisions are being made outside of that IT silo. And, you know, we’re talking about IoT today, but let’s talk about CX. Right?

Customer experience is often Oh, looks like we just lost Graeme, mister Doug.

That’s alright, Josh.

John Vargo’s question that I started to reference a moment ago had to do with some expanding industries, and he referenced I don’t know what happened there.

Back. Welcome.

We moved on to John Vargo’s question just quickly. He was talking about some expanding industries and specifically cited microbreweries where he’s having some success.

Josh and Graeme, what are you seeing in terms of new industries that are either expanding or growing or have changing needs where advisors could particularly play with success?

Yeah. Sorry. I’ll let you I’ve missed a little bit of when I was coming back on.

So, Josh, I’ll let you jump in on that.

Yeah. For me, it’s all about where is the revenue creation. Let’s go to that microbrewery world. Where are they making their money?

Are they making money from me coming in, bellying up to the bar, having a beer and a burger? Maybe. So what would they what would that person want? Right?

That’s gonna be the restaurant manager, the facilities manager, or whatever. How many people? Floor traffic coming in, coming out. How can I increase that revenue?

Is that more marketing spend or whatever? But without having that anal analyzation of human traffic, how do I equate that to a okay. There’s a cost to create more revenue. And then in the production places.

Right? I’ve got my conveyor belts. I got my bottlers. I have all this information. I have all these machines.

What happens if one of those machines breaks or go down? How long does it take to get a new conveyor belt? How long does it take to get a maintenance guy to come in and fix my bottle capper? If I can do preventative proactive maintenance on these machines, I’m just making more money, doc.

Yeah. And just to build on that, I think, you know, the same way we look at critical applications over the network, look at critical functions for the business, and think about every business tracks something. Right? What is it that they’re tracking?

What information are they gathering from the field? And how can we help them facilitate the gathering and use of that information, whether it be to some cloud platform where they can break it down or to something else. But those are the questions we need to dive in on. What are your bit what is your business tracking?

What critical business functions are out there that you guys need to make sure you’re staying on top of monitoring? And it can be in a manufacturing environment or or something totally different. So those are all great questions to ask.

We are getting very short on time, but, Vaseline Mac, just brought a great question in here. Let’s tie it back to AI for just a second and machine learning and how that is going to continue to affect deployment and maintenance of these IoT, ideas, operations, and innovations that we come up with.

Yeah. I think AI has really just tremendously improved the capability. Right? If you think about what makes IoT devices useful, it’s the information that they are gathering and bringing to the business to make decisions with.

And what happens when you involve AI is that you can bring in so much more information and calculate it. I mean, think about video cameras. I love this example because it always illustrates well. There’s only so many monitors a human can watch at one time.

Only so many things that I can see and react to as a human. AI does not have those limitations. So one of the reasons we’re seeing an explosion in video analytics and computer vision is that those camera feeds can now come back to an AI module that can watch them all at the same time and react instantaneously to what you tell it to react to. So I think part of the reason we’re seeing such an explosion in IoT and we’ll continue to see that is because of AI.

And, Josh, I don’t know if there’s anything you wanna add there.

Yeah. Just a quick note. So, I mean, AI is great. Machine learning is great on all these devices and surveillance and whatever, but a lot of a lot of people forget the the one thing. Right?

Life safety. That is as a CEO, that is my number one goal is human and life safety. What if I got a guy walking around my manufacturing plant without a hard hat on? That that that a regular surveillance can’t really gonna tell me or alert alarm that.

But worse, I’m working on one right now. They wanna see no movement on a manufacturing floor. Because what does that alert and alarm mean? Somebody fell down in a back corner.

Somebody’s still asleep on their lunch break. Somebody had a heart attack or a stroke in the middle of the floor and is no longer moving. I need to see these things instantaneously.

Yeah. And just a last point on that. When you’re talking about a manufacturing environment, before we called it AI, we called it what? Machine learning. Right? And I think a lot of this, was driven from those manufacturing environments where we’re learning. So definitely a huge, correlation there between the rise of AI and the rise of IoT.

Great job, guys. Graeme Scott, Josh Haselhorst, we’ve gotta stop it there. But, hey, this will be recorded. You can listen to it again later today.

If you have additional questions, Graeme and Josh will hang around. Adam Edwards is also in the background. If you’d like to add additional questions in the chat, they will respond to those there. Thanks, guys.

Great presentations today.

Thanks, Doug. Appreciate it. Josh, thanks for jumping in with me, buddy.