Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has that got to do with IoT?

David Parker: When you look at IoT, my view of IoT is just another data artifact. Unfortunately, the market does get hung up on terminologies. It was Big Data a couple of years ago. Before that, you had enterprise service architectures. There’s always a terminology. The term that’s right right now is Internet of Things.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not true. Big Data and Internet of Things are not the same. They may be interrelated. Big Data works from data and data can be generated from a lot of things. It doesn’t have to be generated from Internet of Things.

David Parker: This is the point. I’m talking the hype. The hype was that Big Data came along – big volumes of data, velocity of data, variety of data. After that, IoT became a component of that as it relates to the thing itself. It started with machine to machine, which has been in the industry for many, many years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 1)

David discussed IoT in the context of SAP customers, and also points out open problems that entrepreneurs can work on. Very interesting discussion on the nuances of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you to our audience. What is your role at SAP? Where do you come from? What kind of background and perspective do we have here?

David Parker: I’m a Global Senior Executive at SAP responsible for Big Data and Internet of Things go-to-market, which revolves around supporting customer interactions, deciding our partner ecosystem and strategy, and more importantly, helping customers transform and re-imagine their business to come up with new business models. In terms of my background, I’ve been in the industry for the better part of 35 plus years. I started out in financial services. In more recent times, I’ve been in other industries such as oil and gas, mining, utilities, pharma, retail, etc. As you know, we focus on over 24 different industries. My role is to work with executives, understand their current state, and advise them on what the future state looks like, both from an industry perspective and more importantly, how they can leverage their SAP footprint or non-SAP footprint to build out new business outcomes and decisions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there other really interesting, far out there, use cases that you’ve encountered that are worth discussing?

Michael Martin: We have one going on in the lab right now. It’s an interesting one. It is a replenishment application. We have an innovation lab where our engineers work on thought provokers that we bring to our customers to show them ways in which that technology can be used in different aspects of their business. For example, we’re working on a weight sensor to place under a water cooler in the office. As the water gets used in the water cooler, the weight obviously becomes less. You could trigger a replenishment for the vendor who comes and delivers the water bottles to ensure that we get just-in-time delivery of that office supply. It’s a pretty simple example but it shows that if you start to use IoT technology in a manufacturing or logistics environment to trigger replenishment, it’s just another way in which that technology can be used to support the business. By getting more lean, that definitely has more value in the business. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. You were a services and solutions company. It sounds like you have built this whole system from scratch. How is it that there aren’t off-the-shelf systems out there from the people who do retail enterprise software?

Michael Martin: There are and they’re coming. For us as an integrator, we’re not as interesting in being the sole provider of the technology. Our interest is either helping people figure out how to apply existing commercial technology to their business and being their integrator. We help them deploy in a secure manner and also to deploy it at scale.

One thing that we do to add value to customers is, we’re very good at doing projects that involve lots of people in lots of places touching lots of things. That grocer, for example, had hundreds of stores. Once they decide the technology that they want to deploy, they need help in actually getting it in their stores as quickly as possible in a predictable way. We don’t try to be the sole conceiver, constructor, and deliverer of the technology. We’re happy to assist whether we’re helping build it from scratch or helping them use commercial off-the-shelf solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to understand what are good interesting Internet of Things use cases, not the process of how you service clients.

Michael Martin: One interesting use case from the experiment stage is we work with a large grocer who has typical business objectives that a large grocery retailer would have. In that experiment phase, we developed a prototype application to showcase for them what they could do in the store with some location-based mobile technology. What we did is, we used some technology that communicates with the mobile phone through Bluetooth. We showed them how they could integrate a grocery shopping list app into their existing customer application, and how as the customer moves throughout the store, that would filter that shopping list to show customers items that were close to them. Again, in that stage, that was a very quick prototype that we built. We showed them that just to stimulate some ideas around things that they could do with IoT technology in the store. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Michael Martin, CTO of nfrastructure (Part 1)

If you think large enterprises are readily rolling out IoT solutions, think again. They are not, they should not. Find out why.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Michael Martin: I’m the CTO and CIO at nfrastructure. nfrastructure is a technolgy services and solutions company. We help customers design, build, and operate infrastructure and application solutions from the core of their enterprise all the way out to the edge. We do a lot of technology services to support that mission— everything from networking, collaboration services, cloud, edge device services, IT service management, and a variety of services that are aligned with helping an organization connect their technology to their users in support of their business.

Sramana Mitra: So this discussion is about Internet of Things. What do you do within that space?
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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How does your identity work? From the perspective of each unit that is being identified, people are capturing different types of data. The parameters that are being captured from that identity point of view is different. Is that something that is customizable in your solution and that’s up to the industry vertical to configure?

Daniel Raskin: We approach that from a conceptual standpoint. We are making a different assumption around identity data than people have been making in the past. In the past, they’ve been saying, “You need an identity store where you store everything in one area.” This isn’t realistic. You go into enterprises and they have data that they have to pull from databases, directories, and all kinds of things. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m not convinced about what you’re saying. The horizontal stuff is commodity, but the real differentiation of what the user experience can be for an automobile that is IoT-enabled is where the interesting opportunity is.

Daniel Raskin: It’s going to be companies like Toyota or others like that who are building those next generation platforms using the software platform of the future.

Sramana Mitra: You can say that but the automobile players suck at designing software and user experience.

Daniel Raskin: I can only judge from the experience of what I see at ForgeRock. There may be other conversations you have where you see that happening. We’re very engaged with the analysts on who the players are and who’s part of the conversation and who’re the thought leaders in terms of building out these use cases. It’s not coming from verticals. We’re spending a lot of time educating. They want the APIs to be built around their specific use cases. They don’t want to be responsible for building the stack itself. >>>