Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That is the direction I was going in earlier.  You talked about your Internet of things business in a range of about $100 million.  What is the size of the current Internet of things industry?

Joel Young: In the commercial business and in the commercial space, where we play, it is a billion to a billion and a half dollar industry. It is difficult to count, because you can’t count every microprocessor there is.  I counted cellular modules companies which specifically target cellular modules for internet of things applications.  It is easy to calculate a number of ways, but the question is, what is the most meaningful way? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Putting a wireless chip or a sensor into a device is a commodity business, but it is more of a disintegrated solution with which you differentiate your offer.  Is that correct?

Joel Young: That is correct.  What we always did was looking for ways to create additional value.  When we first had to go wireless, we added wireless.  When people understood wireless, we moved on to the broader cellular.  When people figured out how to do cellular, we added management capabilities.  As we moved up and added value we continued to broaden ourselves.  Now we make hardware – we make a lot of widgets and radios – but our value is to put together the full solution.  It never gets to the discussion about buying a radio from our competitor for five dollars less.  It is a losing battle when you end up in that kind of business. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you are trying to transmit data from those devices into a centralized cloud environment for debugging, technical support, or customer service?

Joel Young: Yes.  It even extends to consumption and auditing purposes.

SM: Are those devices then spitting out information that you are putting into the Salesforce.com cloud?

JY: The devices tend to spit out a lot of information.  We store that in long-term storage within the iDigi device cloud. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is cloud computing affecting your business? Which are the major trends you are tracking?

Joel Young: As I mentioned, we provide iDigi, a device cloud which connects devices to the broader Internet. Anybody who wishes to get information can access the device through standard HTTP web services into the cloud. We store all device information through long-term storage in the cloud, and we provide vehicles for controlling devices in the cloud. This is a critical component of what we do and how we extend our product and connectivity to the world. Salesforce.com are a good partner for us. This has blossomed over the past six months, as we find that the Internet of things marketplace is more and more about cloud connectivity. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Joel Young, Senior VP of Research & Development/Chief Technical Officer of Digi (Part 1)

Joel Young is the senior vice president of research & development and chief technical officer of Digi International, a machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions expert for improving business efficiencies. In this interview Joel talks about the integration of the company’s systems in businesses like Salesforce.com and future trends of “the Internet of Things.” According to Wikipedia, the Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects (things) and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure.

Sramana Mitra: Joel, let’s start with context about Digi and also context about your background.

Joel Young: First of all, you probably haven’t thought of Digi as in cloud computing. We have been in business since 1985, and we were always in the device connectivity business. We make things that connect devices – originally, to servers or computers. As the world has evolved, we have evolved with it, so we started putting devices on networks. Our goal, since we were founded, has been to connect devices into an application. The world has evolved from serial ports to networks like Ethernet and local area networks (LANs). >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have a lot of e-commerce customers, does that mean you are building in the capabilities of running a full e-commerce shopping cart, for example, into your portfolio?

Joe Langner: With the number of customers we have and the time we have been on the market, we either produce those capabilities ourselves from our core products, or we work with business partners who complement some of those additional features.  Shopping carts, web stores, e-buildings, or digital signatures are using technology to automate processes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where does BlackBerry fit into all of this?  This is a segment that has high BlackBerry adoption.

Joe Langner: The devices we are writing to are those two [Android and iOS] at this point.  I haven’t seen the BlackBerry adoption as much.  They lost a lot of mind share in the marketplace. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bottom line is that you provide mobile app content to the entire ERP suite.

Joe Langner: Yes. The change within our business is that we change the apps once, but then they work with the multiple solutions we have. The customers don’t have to change their whole backup by turning off their systems; they can just add this if they have the need to extend the use of the tool. >>>