This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Stephanie Atkinson, CEO, Founder, and Principal Analyst/Consultant at Compass Intelligence. For more than 25 years, Stephanie has provided strategic insights, key trends, market intelligence, industry modeling/forecasting, and advisory services to technology companies, enterprise executives, and government leaders across the globe. In this episode, Stephanie talks about the hype behind edge computing, the future of IoT, the importance and applications of automation, and provides advice for women working in technology.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Stephanie Atkinson, CEO, Founder, and Principal Analyst/Consultant at Compass Intelligence.
For more than 25 years, Stephanie has provided strategic insights, key trends, market intelligence, industry modeling/forecasting, and advisory services to technology companies, enterprise executives, and government leaders across the globe. She is the founder and CEO of Compass Intelligence, a leading tech advisory and market research firm based in Texas, and recently founded vMarque.com, serving SMBs with branding, web design, and marketing. Her knowledge base and expertise are centered around telecom, IT, mobile, IoT, emerging technology, and various high-tech topics.
In this episode, Stephanie talks about the hype behind the variances of edge computing, including the results from her Business Edge Report that give insights on the thought processes of business users and technology decision makers, and where money is being spent and how it is being used in the world of technology. She also talks about the future of the Internet of Things, the importance and applications of automation, and provides advice for women working in technology.
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“The one thing that I like to just hammer to my customers is I think that we over-hype technology each and every day and we need to be simplifying it. So the biggest takeaway is that we need to simplify not only how we're communicating with the customers, but we need to do our homework to better understand their ecosystem and the vendors that they're working with. That’s not just technology vendors, but their entire ecosystem. Because, if we don't understand their industry and what's going on with their day to day work, then that technology is something that over-complicates some of the things that they're working on. They don't want to hear about some gizmo or IoT. They want you to help solve problems.”
“We as an industry have to get away from the technology jargon and really start getting closer to our customers, applying it to their use cases, and speaking in their language. We continue to have a massive gap there. That's a big area that we help our customers with today.”
“We are looking at patterns. We're applying machine learning and artificial intelligence. And, we're working to bring together the human and the digital world, as we continue to automate businesses and operations. This is the evolution that we're in right now.”
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(02:10) Stephanie’s Background
(04:03) Branching out into other Technologies
(07:13) Benefits of IoT and Machine to Machine Communication
(13:10) Compass’ Client Base and Needs
(14:10) Biggest Trends Not Obvious to Others
(16:36) The Metaverse isn’t a Brand New Took
(17:25) Getting Closer to Understanding, Supporting, and Communicating with the Customer
(18:55) The Business Edge Report Results and Findings
(23:49) Getting Smart with Value Added Reseller Relationships
(26:30) Efforts in Edge Computing
(28:52) Examples of Real-time Data Intelligence
(31:26) The Importance of Security on the Edge
(35:50) Hybrid Approach to Edge and Cloud Computing
(37:55) Simplicity of Implementing Plug and Play Solutions
(38:60) Seamless Exchange of IoT Data On a Global Scale
(43:40) Having a Strategic Perspective and Plan
(45:36) Advice for Women in Technology
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn
Connect with Stephanie on Twitter
[00:00:00] Matt Trifiro: Hi, this is Matt host of Over the Edge, the only podcast focused on teaching you about edge computing, the grid and the future of the internet. On this show, I interview experts and practitioners with deep knowledge and expertise in digital infrastructure and the software and technologies that support it. We'll even throw in a little metaverse web three and cryptocurrency to keep it on trend.
[00:00:18] Matt Trifiro: Join us each episode for a mind expanding romp through the vast technological and business landscape that is quickly defining our new digital worlds.
[00:00:28] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge. Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Stephanie Atkinson, CEO, Founder, and Principal Analyst and Consultant at Compass Intelligence.
For more than 25 years, Stephanie has provided strategic insights, market intelligence, industry modeling and forecasting, and advisory services to technology companies, enterprise executives, and government leaders across the globe. She is the founder and CEO of Compass Intelligence, a leading tech advisory and market research firm based in Texas and recently founded vMarque.com, serving small to medium sized businesses with branding, web design, and marketing.
In this episode, Stephanie talks about the hype behind the variances of edge computing, including the results from her Business Edge Report that give insights on the thought processes of business users and technology decision makers, and where money is being spent and how it is being used in the world of technology. She also talks about the future of the Internet of Things, the importance and applications of automation, and provides advice for women working in technology.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
[00:01:41] Narrator 2: over the edge is brought to you by Dell technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions, from hardware and software, to data and operations across your entire multi-cloud environment. We're here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:02:02] Narrator 1: And now please enjoy this interview between Matt Trifiro and Stephanie Atkinson, Founder and principal analyst and consultant at compass intelligence.
[00:02:12] Matt Trifiro: Stephanie, how are you doing
[00:02:13] Stephanie Atkinson: today? I'm doing really well based in here, Bandera, Texas.
[00:02:17] Matt Trifiro: So I wanted to start by just getting an idea of how you even got into
[00:02:22] Stephanie Atkinson: technology.
[00:02:22] Stephanie Atkinson: I've been in tech since, I guess I got out of college, so have started off working for. USA, which is changed hands quite a few times now it's Nokia. And there I was in the R and D group working on electronics and semiconductor design. They're so stuck with it and then got into working for a competitive local exchange carrier out of Texas, which they're just a small time telecommunications provider.
[00:02:51] Stephanie Atkinson: And then from there, I got into the market research side. So working
[00:02:55] Matt Trifiro: in a Silicon, so hardcore engineering, like you have an engineering. I
[00:02:59] Stephanie Atkinson: do have an [00:03:00] engineering background, but at Alcatel, I was actually working on more of the supply chain, the logistics side. That's my background is engineering technology, but most of the program or the degree program that I studied at a and M university was focused on industrial distribution.
[00:03:17] Stephanie Atkinson: So that's kind of my background. It's a good combination of engineering and business.
[00:03:21] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, and I bet your supply chain knowledge may come in handy these days with what's happening with the pandemic. So you, you mentioned that you shifted into market research. What, what drove that?
[00:03:30] Stephanie Atkinson: I was really wanting to stay until the communications and I was with that ceiling for a few years.
[00:03:36] Stephanie Atkinson: And then the, the owner was an Aggie. The Aggie network is strong by the way we, we hire and we hire other Aggies, but he passed. And so when he passed away, a lot of changes were being made at that particular C lek. And so I was just looking for something different and something that still kind of kept me in that technology realm, where I could use my, kind of my professional [00:04:00] skills and at the C like I was an information services manager.
[00:04:04] Stephanie Atkinson: And so I had quite a bit of extensive technology background from just from my education and from working there and now at Alcatel. And so. Just interviewing there and just figuring what let's take it, take a big leap of faith. And it was something brand new to me, never even heard of market research, but I jumped in
[00:04:22] Matt Trifiro: to go right into founding compass intelligence.
[00:04:25] Stephanie Atkinson: No, actually, when I first joined kind of the whole market research industry, I worked for frost and Sullivan and they have a pretty large group in San Antonio, Texas, and I went to work for their telecommunications.
[00:04:38] Matt Trifiro: Got it. And so when did you found. I
[00:04:42] Stephanie Atkinson: founded compass intelligence in June of 2005. So we're coming up on our 17 years anniversary.
[00:04:49] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. Well, congratulations, congratulations. And obviously you're still in the telecommunication space largely, but you've also branched out into IOT and [00:05:00] robotics and some other merchant technologies. How do all those 15. I
[00:05:03] Stephanie Atkinson: think with the telecommunications background, a lot of the telecom providers were starting to get into the M to M space and they were branching out.
[00:05:13] Stephanie Atkinson: And so it was a natural evolution for compass intelligence to start our own internal research programs, focusing on machine and machine communications. And so that's how that kind of first evolved. And of course the industry. Calling it IOT probably about three or four years after we started our MTM research practice.
[00:05:35] Stephanie Atkinson: And as we've kind of evolved, the whole industry has been embracing other automation technologies specific to the enterprise, robotics being one of them, artificial intelligence, edge computing, which all of these things have a very strong focus in and around enabling the internet of. And I'm
[00:05:58] Matt Trifiro: going to ask you sort of a naive question and I have [00:06:00] my own answer, but I imagine you have a more sophisticated one.
[00:06:03] Matt Trifiro: What is the benefit of IOT and machine to machine communication? Where are we seeing the benefits or where do you expect us to see the better.
[00:06:11] Stephanie Atkinson: You know, if you put it in its most basic terms to an enterprise or a government customer, it's either to save money, to make money or to comply with mandates or some kind of compliance issue that the industry might be imposed, or they have to actually embrace as part of regulatory type actions outside of that, it really comes down to building efficiencies.
[00:06:38] Stephanie Atkinson: Automating very mundane tasks, mundane, repetitive operational activities that might, we just may not need a person or a manual person to come in and do those jobs anymore. And we're, we're really looking at ways we can become more efficient in the back office on the operational side, all the way to changing the [00:07:00] way we deliver new experiences to customers.
[00:07:03] Stephanie Atkinson: So you
[00:07:03] Matt Trifiro: mentioned three things, save money, make money, and. Comply compliance. Can you help us understand each of those with like a really specific example, something you've actually seen in the field? So let's start with, let's start with, with save money. The
[00:07:17] Stephanie Atkinson: same money is probably the one that we see most of the activity around.
[00:07:21] Stephanie Atkinson: I think a lot of people get excited about the making of making money, providing some, some new revenue stream, but on the saving of money, it's really. Some of these IOT solutions might have 24 month ROI, but just take, for example, the factory floor. Right. But we are implementing sensor networks to tell us when a particular temperature.
[00:07:46] Stephanie Atkinson: Hits a certain point. And instead of us manually going and testing or ourselves and having to go into the factory floor to go do that, we are now taking that human element out of that. That's a very [00:08:00] simple sensor measuring activity that we're automating now. So we, we do not have to have that person. We can actually move that person to more beneficial tasks.
[00:08:13] Stephanie Atkinson: Some of these examples might have a very quick ROI. Some of them might have two three-year ROI, but that's a very small minor example of it's saving money, right? Because we no longer have to pay that salary person to come in and do manual inspections, manual checks, and to manually go in and add on that data or that information.
[00:08:35] Stephanie Atkinson: That's. We now can automate that and trigger something that happens with the machine to automatically act and change. So that's the saving money. So making money, I think there are a whole host of new revenue streams with smart cities. I mean, that's an example, you know, I think a lot of folks have been.
[00:08:58] Stephanie Atkinson: Bummed out about how we [00:09:00] just really hyped up smart cities, but yet we're not really seeing the monetization of that, but there are small things that have happened in the cities that have automated things like sick traffic studies. And in the past, that would be something that would you think of that was saving money, but now they have systems to where a ups or a FedEx truck can be driving through a city.
[00:09:28] Stephanie Atkinson: And what that is doing is it's turning those brands. Signals on as they drive through the city. So that particular truck can save on fuel, but also deliver on experiences and make more money and satisfy the customer. Yeah, that's
[00:09:41] Matt Trifiro: a real thing. Like, like I, if I am a business and I can pay the city to, to bias the green lights for my truck.
[00:09:50] Stephanie Atkinson: Well, the interesting thing about that particular business model is what we've seen is not, everything is about a monetary exchange. The city is giving some [00:10:00] kind of rider right of ways or reducing the. Compliance requirements on some kind of industry, right? But in return they're providing other services.
[00:10:11] Stephanie Atkinson: So there's an exchange of services. Not everything is about a dollar bill being exchanged. In some cases, there are non-monetary exchanges that are taking place within the city, but in the end, that particular technology company may want to enable that technology and down the road, look for new revenue streams to, to charge some kind of monthly recurring fee.
[00:10:31] Stephanie Atkinson: To the citizen to deliver better experiences with the city. Yeah,
[00:10:35] Matt Trifiro: I see. That makes sense. That makes sense. And that's, that is a form of making money, I guess, is exchanging it for some other, some of value bartering. It is, is I would say that that's a great example. And then what about compliance? What's an example of, of using machine to machine communications to help with compliance?
[00:10:50] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah. I like to use this example because it was one that kind of hit the supply chain hard and that was the RFID requirements that Walmart. Put on [00:11:00] its own supply chain. And so all of the vendors that we're delivering products and goods to Walmart, they enacted, this was, gosh, it's been a long time since this happened, but they required their suppliers to place RFID tags on certain types of products.
[00:11:18] Stephanie Atkinson: And. On trailers that were delivering goods to Walmart. And so there is such a behemoth that there one compliance or requirement for, to, to be part of that supply chain had that trickle down effect where I think a lot of the vendors that were doing business with Walmart were kind of, whoa, we gotta, we gotta do what.
[00:11:38] Stephanie Atkinson: So it was kind of a big eye-opening experience. There are big companies like that, that are placing requirements in order to do business with them that are embracing some, some type of automation technology and RFID was just one of them. Right. But it was all, it was all about compliance. Another good [00:12:00] example is the electronic logging requirements of fleet.
[00:12:05] Stephanie Atkinson: And tractor trailers or trailers or tractors that, or semi trucks that are having to deliver goods and services. Those ELD requirements came down from the federal government and now the logging of the mileage and the safety and security requirements that are part of that dashboard, or even that monitoring system within that semi-transparent.
[00:12:29] Stephanie Atkinson: Is something that is a compliance or a regulatory requirement. And so what, what happened was ELD the monitoring of these tractors and trailers now became something that was required of drivers, of commercial drivers that were out there on the roads today. W
what
[00:12:46] Matt Trifiro: does ELD stand
[00:12:48] Stephanie Atkinson: for? Electronic logging?
[00:12:51] Stephanie Atkinson: ELD electronic logging devices, electronic logging
[00:12:56] Matt Trifiro: devices, devices. Okay, cool. [00:13:00] Yeah. It's it's whatever you want it to meet at the time. Right? So, so compass intelligence does market research in this, in other areas who, who are your clients and what kinds of questions are they asking?
[00:13:13] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah, for the most part, we have a range of plants, but most of our customers are technology providers themselves.
[00:13:19] Stephanie Atkinson: Right. They are looking to better understand. Yes, the vendor. We do quite a bit of work with the big consulting firms like McKinsey and Oliver Wyman and Altman villain. A lot of them have their own technology divisions, but they'll come to us and sometimes they'll put their own brand on it, but we do a lot of work for them to help them with forecasting and modeling and sizing the market and helping them better understand the key trends.
[00:13:48] Stephanie Atkinson: But again, most of our customers, our technology vendors, they're providing telecommunications IOT and an emerging technology solution to the enterprise or [00:14:00] to a government.
[00:14:01] Matt Trifiro: All right. I'm going to try and get some free consulting out of you. What are the biggest trends that, that you're seeing that, that are maybe not as obvious to people that don't study the market like you do, like what's, what's exciting to you and potentially a differentiating opportunity.
[00:14:16] Stephanie Atkinson: The one thing that I like to just hammer my customers is I think that we, we over-hype technology each and every. And we need to be simplifying it. So the biggest kind of takeaway is we need to simplify not only how we're communicating with the customers, but we need to do our homework to better understand their ecosystem.
[00:14:39] Stephanie Atkinson: W the vendors that they're working with. Not just technology vendors, but their entire ecosystem. Because if we don't understand their industry and what's going on with their day to day, the technology, is this something that this over-complicates some of the things that they're working on and they don't want to hear about some [00:15:00] gizmo or IOT, they want you to help solve.
[00:15:03] Stephanie Atkinson: Real problems. And so I know we talked about solution selling. I think that's been kind of a trend now we're really moving into what's your value proposition? What are you going to do for that in, in customer? What are you going to do to help enable their back office? What are you going to do to help change the whole customer experience that their customers are facing?
[00:15:25] Stephanie Atkinson: So we, we like to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and I think that's how we're differentiate. Is that we want to simplify the complex technology and really make it make sense for the enterprise and for government customers.
[00:15:42] Matt Trifiro: That's really insightful. I mean, I'm a marketer and I've spent the last five years marketing and potentially over-hyping edge computing.
[00:15:50] Matt Trifiro: And as, as, as computing has mature, Into a thing that people are making money at now, it's actually disappearing. And, and what [00:16:00] I mean by that is exactly what you're saying, which is the hospital cares about tracking their devices. They don't care about where the computer is, as long as it's, it's, you know, it's auditable and compliant and safe and, and, and so on.
[00:16:13] Matt Trifiro: And I imagine every business is that way. Like you want to move the trucks faster, you want to lose less, less inventory. You want to comply with Walmart or whatever those things are. That's a really good lesson for all of us in technology. You know what I mean? I'm watching some LinkedIn threads with a marketing friend of mine who is really berating the telecom industry for talking about six G.
[00:16:35] Matt Trifiro: He was like, why are we talking about GS at all? Like, we're just solving problems. And it sounds like you could have said something.
[00:16:42] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah. I mean, my big one right now is the metaverse. It just is. I mean, it's augmented reality. It's virtual reality. It's, it's the things that we've been doing for a long time, but now we're calling it the metaverse as if it's something brand new and it's not, and to an enterprise who's looking at [00:17:00] augmented reality.
[00:17:01] Stephanie Atkinson: They don't talk about AR they talk about how can AR or, or leveraging some kind of simulation. How can that help me with training or how can they help me with inspection? How can that help me with providing some new way that the customer is maybe trying on clothes or serving their patients? All of these things.
[00:17:23] Stephanie Atkinson: More sense when we put it into perspective. And so we, as an industry have to get away from the technology jargon and really start getting closer to our customers and really applying it to their use cases and speaking their language. And I feel like we still, we continue to have a massive gap there and that's, that's a big area that we help our customers with today is just okay.
[00:17:48] Stephanie Atkinson: Let's let's, let's take a step. What industries are you really focusing on today? And do you have a very good. Landscape of that industry and [00:18:00] those sub industries that layer underneath that. And do you understand that ecosystem? What are they dealing with today? Who are their competitors? And then you take get all the way down to the customer level and okay.
[00:18:13] Stephanie Atkinson: What is their makeup? Do they have an it department? What are they doing operationally? Where are, and then you got to communicate as a vendor. You need to communicate to them different areas of their business and how you're going to support them with your technology and your solutions. They want you to get away from.
[00:18:32] Stephanie Atkinson: Speaking about, I have an IOT platform or I have this edge computing solution for you in, and really start to talk about how it's going to make sense for their business and, and really apply it in more specific terms. If that
[00:18:47] Matt Trifiro: makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It makes, it makes a lot of sense. Now you recently published a report, the business ed report.
[00:18:54] Matt Trifiro: Can you tell me what that's all.
[00:18:56] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah. So one of the reasons why we launched that particular [00:19:00] survey is, again, it's similar to what we just discussed is we, we know that edge computing has been hyped. I think 2021 was a very big year for edge computing. And we, we see that expanding. But I also see that the telecommunication carriers talk about edge, edge of network, edge computing, you know, the IOT vendors, talk about sensor networks and, and analyzing and collecting real-time intelligence at the end point device or close closer to the equipment or whatever it is.
[00:19:33] Stephanie Atkinson: And then we have all of these other flavors what's in between until you get to the cloud. We're talking distributed architectures versus centralized architectures. So there's just a lot of variances out there. And so we were like, aside from all of that, and we felt like there was a lot of noise in the industry and we wanted to go out and survey the industry, make it a mass survey across size of [00:20:00] business, across industry.
[00:20:02] Stephanie Atkinson: We wanted to ask questions. Business users and then ask questions of those that are actually making technology decisions, right? Whether it's it or OT, those that are actually buying edge computing or that are buying internet of things solutions. So that's what we did. And we surveyed late last year, 5,000 plus in users and about 2,700 decision makers, those that were actually purchasing.
[00:20:27] Stephanie Atkinson: Technology. And so that was really the whole beginning stages of the research program. And we really wanted to dig further into. Use cases, application, are they really spending money in this? And where, where is it going? And so that's what we probe with this particular survey. Can you
[00:20:46] Matt Trifiro: give us any nuggets, like things that, that are, you think that you were surprised by, or, or had just incredibly reinforced that maybe you didn't expect to be so reinforced by the, by the
[00:20:58] Stephanie Atkinson: research?
[00:20:59] Stephanie Atkinson: I mean, we had [00:21:00] a lot of hypotheses that we were thinking about in terms of where a lot of. The early kind of wins and the early adopters were, you know, really it's a lot of that has been taken place on the industrial side, manufacturing, supply chain, hardhat industries, oil, gas, energy, a couple of things that stood out from a segmentation perspective.
[00:21:20] Stephanie Atkinson: One is the mid market seem to have a higher appetite. For the use cases there they're purchasing their plans to purchase compared to the enterprise. And so we thought the larger the company, the more likely edge computing was going to be of interest, right. And applicability would be much higher, but that mid market, those, those particular businesses that have between 100 and 999 employees, that was a sweet spot in an always an underserved.
[00:21:56] Stephanie Atkinson: For technology. And so we find that a lot of the [00:22:00] edge computing vendors out there are working and they're targeting these large global multinational corporations. They're looking at the larger enterprise accounts. So we can't forget about those mid markets because they are a sweet spot based on this research.
[00:22:13] Stephanie Atkinson: And they are there. They're ready to spend as well. What
[00:22:16] Matt Trifiro: do you think their desire to spend money? On this kind of technology or these kinds of solutions is greater than the large enterprises. Do you, do you have any clues as to what's causing that? Yeah,
[00:22:27] Stephanie Atkinson: I don't think that it's anything particular around the fact that their businesses are any different it's that it's, that, that they are often underserved and under targeted from a vendor perspective.
[00:22:40] Stephanie Atkinson: So they're not feeling the outreach. They're not learning. A lot of the core applications and the use cases to their industries as quickly as the enterprise segment might be because they are generally the ones that are being targeted for a lot of the vendors are targeting them more likely than they are [00:23:00] targeting the mid-size market.
[00:23:02] Stephanie Atkinson: There are some smaller, or even some mid-size fast growing IOT type companies that get the mid market and they tend to grow organic. Based on their customers, but we feel like that the industry has long forgot about the mid market. And they're a very prime kind of market opportunity across the board for IOT and edge computing solutions.
[00:23:25] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. That's really interesting. And you know, the challenge as a vendor to reach the mid-market is. It's a very different sales process than enterprise, right. It's usually tends to be regional. You tend to be it's more mom and pop businesses, you know, a hundred percent business could be just one facility in north Las Vegas or something.
[00:23:43] Matt Trifiro: Right. How do you think about the sort of sales and distribution? Challenge for these new services.
[00:23:49] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah, I think you have to get smart with the VARs. The value added resellers tend to have the closer relationships with the mid market. And if you, if [00:24:00] you don't have a good kind of VAR or Alliance strategy, A lot of these mid-market companies are already working with these bars.
[00:24:08] Stephanie Atkinson: They usually have two or three that are very close to them, or that are, that w what we would consider to be their preferred vendors. And those preferred vendors are the ones that you as an IOT solution company, or are you as an edge computing provider that you may need to look at? Differently than your enterprise partnerships and alliances that you might set up with the big guys to kind of go to market.
[00:24:33] Stephanie Atkinson: So it is a different go to market strategy from a conversational perspective. You're right. It's a wide slot of in wide range of varying buyer characteristics. If you're moving downmarket, then you're you're right. You're looking at more and. Those personal conversations are going to be more important as you move up market, you may have franchises in different locations.
[00:24:57] Stephanie Atkinson: You're more likely to have different [00:25:00] locations spread, but they also might look more regional in nature. So it might be, you might need to change your strategy from a regional sales perspective and how you go to market and really. You know, converse or set up those meetings. So again, you gotta do your homework, you really need to understand the customer and their industry in.
[00:25:18] Stephanie Atkinson: And how big are they? How many locations do they have? So let's talk some more
[00:25:22] Matt Trifiro: about, about edge computing. W we, we definitely, I agree. I, I saw the same thing. We, we saw tremendous rise in attention, but also implementation of things that might be called ed related. What efforts in edge computing are you seeing that are enabling these end user solutions?
[00:25:40] Matt Trifiro: Like what of all the things that are happening? There's lots of things. People are doing the wireless companies, deploying 5g there's companies like mine that had pointing micro data centers. What, what are you, where are you starting to see traction and,
[00:25:51] Stephanie Atkinson: and convergence? I think that it comes down to, uh, speaking the enterprise terms and that is just real time data intelligence.[00:26:00]
[00:26:00] Stephanie Atkinson: When you lead with that, each industry has. A different need for collecting information, storing that information, analyzing that data or that information and acting on it in different parts of their business are critical. Some are critical communications or alerting maintenance issues, something that stops operations, something that just dis could disrupt.
[00:26:24] Stephanie Atkinson: The way they're delivering goods and services or the way they're delivering an experience to a customer. When we think about it in those terms, the real-time data intelligence is a big pool for edge computing. And like you said, it doesn't matter if it's. The endpoint device. If it's at the building, if it's at some kind of micro router that's placed on the edge of the building or close within the mile of the building, it really comes down to what is that going to do for me?
[00:26:55] Stephanie Atkinson: And how does that change my business? Because we can go through and [00:27:00] line item action after action. In what pieces of information for a business is important. That really should be leveraged through edge computing. And then there's always going to be data that needs to be pushed to the cloud. We're not leveraging and using all of that, but the whole idea behind all of this is that.
[00:27:17] Stephanie Atkinson: We no longer need to be collecting data, just to be collecting data. We should be doing some things with this data. We should be looking at anomalies. We should be looking at patterns and trends and things that we think are going to really provide some level of intelligence to our business operations that we're going to make.
[00:27:37] Stephanie Atkinson: We're going to act differently because of it. We're going to maybe alert our team. We're going to maybe dispatch someone to that location, or maybe we're going to have a piece of equipment or a robotic actually do something about something that's going on in the operational side. So all of these things is kind of wrapped up into one.
[00:27:56] Stephanie Atkinson: It just comes down to real time data until. A
[00:27:59] Matt Trifiro: [00:28:00] that's a great phrase. I don't know that I've I've, if I've heard it, I haven't paid attention at that way because you can actually decompose it into three parts, right. It's real time, which means as fast as you need it to be probably faster than, or at least as fast as humans, if not faster.
[00:28:16] Matt Trifiro: So ones of milliseconds, I think are one certain less than one, one second. And then if. Like lots of data. I mean, in everything spins off data, now your microwave spins off data, right? Your refrigerator spins off data, your car spins off data and then intelligence, which is largely the artificial intelligence machine learning that benefits from all that data that it's trained against.
[00:28:40] Matt Trifiro: What's like the coolest use of real time data intelligence that you can think of that you've
[00:28:47] Stephanie Atkinson: seen. Well, to me, there's a lot of cool. I mean, I mean, I'm kind of. Techno nerds. So I think most of it's cool to me, so, but I get excited about a lot of things. [00:29:00] Yeah. So one of the things that we found in the research that I think that I got excited about, because I think a lot of movement that we see now, IOT space is really driven around asset tracking and monitoring fleet tracking and monitoring.
[00:29:12] Stephanie Atkinson: Right. We're just tracking some type of asset. Well, in the research we found. A great need for edge computing and remote patient care. And a big shift that we've seen over the past few years due to the pandemic was a relaxing of all of the, just hardcore. Requirements to deliver care at home, but HIPAA just made it completely just hard for anyone to exchange patient data and deliver real time patient experiences and monitoring.
[00:29:49] Stephanie Atkinson: Well, a lot of that bureaucracy was lifted due to the pandemic because we were all working from home and many doctors were delivering. To their [00:30:00] patients while they were at home through zoom and through other video monitoring services and video chat services. So that has changed so much. It's almost as if the pandemic opened that door.
[00:30:14] Stephanie Atkinson: And there is a, we saw in the research that there was a great need to leverage and use edge computing technology to deliver at home patient care. So. I think at that, that door, we're just now opening that door. Now. I think there's a really great amount of probably vendor solutions and opportunities that will come from that.
[00:30:38] Stephanie Atkinson: And so that was really, really exciting. The ones that I think are, I mean, outside of asset tracking and monitoring, It just comes down to each industry, right? There are certain things that cause us massive headaches. And I think predictive maintenance is a big one. If we're down or if our trucks are down or [00:31:00] if our pumps aren't drilling or if our vehicles are not on the road.
[00:31:05] Stephanie Atkinson: Because we're not planning and dispatching and repairing when we need to or fixing the issues when we need to, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's big. The other thing is cybersecurity. With edge computing, there are also physical breaches. Something has been turned off, say a USB port has been unplugged.
[00:31:30] Stephanie Atkinson: A sensor is no longer tracking data. And those types of things trigger. Some kind of, there could be some kind of manual action that can cause a breach. But then it can also open up the cyber world to additional security and risk. One of the biggest applications that we were not even thinking of with this survey research, we actually included cyber insecurity risk as, as a, as an [00:32:00] answer or as a solution or an application of edge computing.
[00:32:05] Stephanie Atkinson: And. It was, it actually was amongst the top one or two in different ways that we've asked that question, which we weren't thinking that that was actually going to be a use case. But I think that customers are starting to really think more holistically about the way they network and their architecture.
[00:32:23] Stephanie Atkinson: And there are some security, like risks that are involved with edge computing. And then there are also some mitigation. That might take place because you are distributed. Maybe you're not having a blanket outage because you are distributed. So there's some different ways that we're thinking about security as a result of the survey as well.
[00:32:43] Stephanie Atkinson: And that, to me, that was really exciting. Cause we weren't expecting that to be high. If we didn't, we weren't expecting that to resonate high as a use case. Or as however, we did expect that to be an area of focus for spending and budgeting, [00:33:00] but tying that to edge computing is something a little bit unique.
[00:33:04] Stephanie Atkinson: It, it almost tells me, cause I don't see a lot of things that are driven around the security side. It almost tells me that either one, we need to have embedded security or we need to be addressing security as part of our edge computing solutions that are out there or being. We need to be thinking about security.
[00:33:20] Stephanie Atkinson: If we're looking at tagging and joining in other partners as part of a more holistic solution for an IOT suite of services. And so it just, it just goes to show that no matter what we've got to do better at, at maybe addressing that. Whether we like it or not. And whether we think that we are a security provider or not.
[00:33:42] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah.
[00:33:42] Matt Trifiro: Well, it's really interesting. You may made me think of a number of things that I've heard from customers. So you talk about security. It's. Adjacent to resilience, right? Cause you mentioned, how can you avoid a, a blanket outage? And so by distributing your workloads across [00:34:00] multiple facilities, multiple network routes, you can lose some of your routes or facilities and still maintain others.
[00:34:06] Matt Trifiro: There's another interesting aspect, which is, you know, historically you think. Enterprise is saying, well, the most secure thing is to have my stuff on site, right on premises. And I used to tease people in my industry saying, well, what's the edge computing and on premises you tell me, right. I bet I've only got one good answer.
[00:34:24] Matt Trifiro: And that's the person who said, well, the control plane goes all the way to the cloud with edge computing. Okay. That, that kind of works. But what I've come to realize is that 15 kilometers away to somebody who runs a factory is if they can go kill. It's almost on premises and the advantage of having something that's near premises, not on premises.
[00:34:44] Matt Trifiro: It's not really off premises. It's near premises. Is that in a lot of these new applications, you need to bring in multiple vendors and those vendors tools integrate, and those vendors tools may require. A substantial amount of computing. You don't want to have that computer in your facility because you want to pay for it.
[00:34:59] Matt Trifiro: You want [00:35:00] to consume this as a service, but it has to be nearby because you're like, for example, you've got maybe a video management system for all your security cameras and then you have a different vendor. That's doing the AI inferencing on that. And those two workloads need to be right next to each other because you want that to be real time, but you don't want.
[00:35:20] Matt Trifiro: And your factory. And I, and I think that that's a level of sophistication that the market didn't see. I didn't see it four or five years ago. Nobody was talking about it and it's kind of mundane, but it's also, well, maybe prosaic is the right word. It's prosaic, but it's it's I think you're right. It's it's it's.
[00:35:39] Stephanie Atkinson: It is substantial. And that's one of the things that we asked, we asked about with their plans, for investing in cloud and edge computing, where do they see things kind of playing out in a good majority of them? This wasn't surprising, but we, as an industry have to expect the fact that midsize enterprise companies are going to leverage a hybrid [00:36:00] approach.
[00:36:00] Stephanie Atkinson: And so just because you may be delivering edge computing and another vendor is pushing things. To the cloud, we're going to have to work together. There's going to be a combination. They're expecting to see a hybrid approach to their BA you know, their it and their OT operations. And if you don't understand the other side of it, then you're really going to just be kind of stuck.
[00:36:22] Stephanie Atkinson: But you're right. As a service is where we see things. Leaning. Customers love to have an expectation of what they're going to be spending each month. They like the predictability. They liked the fact that it's spread out and there's not a lot of upfront costs, but then it feels like, like you said, it's on premise or near right near.
[00:36:45] Stephanie Atkinson: And again, they want that near, near to real-time intelligence with their operations and that, that can give them that. And so we do expect there to be some hybrid kind of architectures out there. And we as the vendor community and. The IOT and edge computing [00:37:00] industry, we need to be prepared for that as well.
[00:37:01] Stephanie Atkinson: I
[00:37:01] Matt Trifiro: mean, one of the organizations that I helped found is called the open grid Alliance and it's sort of pays a module to the original sun grid, which was the original cloud competing sun Microsystems before Jeff Bezos was even selling his first book and the vision of that. Back in the day, utility computing, the idea as well, just plug it into the plug, your application and your service into the wall.
[00:37:24] Matt Trifiro: Like you plug the light in, right. And you can get as much compute as you want. And to some extent, I was thinking if I was building a factory today, I wouldn't want to own any computers or I wouldn't want to have any on my factory. Right. I'd want, I'd want, I'd want it to just come through a pipe in the wall, but I want it.
[00:37:40] Matt Trifiro: And so I'm wondering if. If you agree with that, that trend line, that I'm, that I think I'm seeing, but, but I'm interested in your
[00:37:47] Stephanie Atkinson: opinion now, even more so that was one of the things that stood out for S and BS are that as you move down, market plug and play is, is what we're expecting. Right. We want it to be as [00:38:00] simple as OnStar or Sirius XM.
[00:38:03] Stephanie Atkinson: We buy something in. Maybe we even have a free trial. And then we, all of a sudden it pushes to a monthly recurring charge and it's a simple, right. And it's tied to maybe the serial number on the back of that piece of equipment or whatever it is. Right. The reason why I was saying that because I was just now renewing my Sirius Axiom this morning.
[00:38:23] Stephanie Atkinson: So it made me think about that, but it's just so plug and play it's there. It's working. It's embedded. I can use it or I don't have to use it, but it makes it very simple. For the user experience. And again, it is becoming so complex that our it department. It's not that they don't want to manage that, but they, they, they are inundated with more edge InPoint devices being connected to a network, whether it's secure or not, or whether there's some kind of department that's installing something that they don't even know that it's being installed.
[00:38:56] Stephanie Atkinson: That happens all the time. We're seeing more departments [00:39:00] outside of it, experiment and check out things and explore and connecting to, and that work. And sometimes in a lot of times, they're not even on a secure network, they're you leveraging and using wifi or the fixed network or the wireline network that's already in place.
[00:39:15] Stephanie Atkinson: And now we have security risks that we didn't even know we had. So having that visibility of everything that's kind of happening on prim and near prim is going to be very important. And as departments outside of it start to a lot of them are actually being approached and some of the sales conversations are taking place outside of it.
[00:39:36] Stephanie Atkinson: When that happens, we still need to get it involved. There's still security requirements that are in place that we need to make sure that we're adhering to because we're opening ourselves up to risk as we connect anything and everything on that.
[00:39:48] Matt Trifiro: One of the things that I don't remember if I, if you, if you set it in a video or if you wrote it, but you talked about the seamless exchange of IOT data on a global scale.
[00:39:58] Matt Trifiro: And I found that really [00:40:00] intriguing. Can you tell me more about. What your thinking is behind that and what you mean by it and what you think it's going to bring us if, or what's going to happen if we don't enable
[00:40:09] Stephanie Atkinson: it. I mean, to me, it's just a continuum of, we went from kind of RFID to machine, to machine communications.
[00:40:15] Stephanie Atkinson: Now we're talking about IOT and essentially all of these things are sensors and devices that we're connecting to the operational side of our networks that are providing. A better experience. Like I said, real time, data intelligence. We are looking at patterns, we're applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to act, and we're kind of bringing together the human and the digital world.
[00:40:40] Stephanie Atkinson: And as we continue to automate. Businesses and operations. This is just the evolution that we're in right now. I kind of like to simplify things because next year we'll have a couple of new acronyms outside of the metaverse that is probably making [00:41:00] enterprises and those decision-makers scratch their head and go, whoa, what is this?
[00:41:04] Stephanie Atkinson: This is so complex. This is really overwhelming me. And we have to do a better job at simplifying that. From a global perspective in order to compete. I find that in order to get some of these businesses to move, we're going to have to put it in terms of competition or disruption to their industry. If you don't do it.
[00:41:27] Stephanie Atkinson: And this is going to happen. We put it in the terms of look what your competition is doing. Look, what they're capable of doing. Are you on board? Are you moving in that direction or are you kind of sitting there waiting to see what's going to happen? Because if you are, your industry could either be disrupted or your competition could be taking over your market share.
[00:41:46] Stephanie Atkinson: So when we start to think about technology in terms of their bottom line, where they kind of sit in the. They, they tend to perk up and listen. And so from a global perspective, especially as a [00:42:00] large multinational corporations that have these mass supply chains, I mean, let's think about what happened in the supply chains.
[00:42:08] Stephanie Atkinson: These, these past few years, IOT is a very big, big part from a technology perspective that can help solve a lot of just the, the massive amounts of disruption that's taking place, because we have just, we've missed the mark in terms of people fleet. Distribution supply chain and just estimating what what's going to happen next.
[00:42:31] Stephanie Atkinson: We, we can't think that that another pandemic is not going to happen. We have to plan for it now.
[00:42:36] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. And in fact, I was with Pandora. First happened. People say, well, how's this affecting your business? I said, well, it's good. Because every company that had a 10 year automation plan now has a three-year automation plan.
[00:42:46] Matt Trifiro: Right. It's like, we're never gonna, we're not gonna, we don't have to shut our factory down next time. There's a pandemic. So one of the biggest barriers to. 'cause I'm always looking at ways to accelerate our industry. Right. Uh, and one of the biggest [00:43:00] barriers I think is when you pointed out, which is like, learn how to think of your solution through the eyes of your customer's problem, right?
[00:43:06] Matt Trifiro: Like part of it's just marketing and distribution, but from a technology standpoint, like there's a lot of moving parts. I mean, there's wireless networks and there's new network technologies and new security technology and stuff. Like if you could, if you could nudge one. Piece of the puzzle because it would help bring everything else along faster.
[00:43:25] Matt Trifiro: What would
[00:43:25] Stephanie Atkinson: that be? That's a really hard question. I think I'd go back to what I spoke of earlier is that you don't need to hire some mass, these big consultants and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. You need to go to your home. You need to really put a plan in place you need. I think from a strategic perspective, you need to have a strategic sales plan.
[00:43:49] Stephanie Atkinson: And that means you understand what types of companies are going after you to understand what industries that they operate in, what sub industries that they operate in and educate your. [00:44:00] You do not need to go out and buy a ton of expensive market research and hire consultants to do that. You can do that within if you want to ramp up quickly, that's when you go out and you get help.
[00:44:12] Stephanie Atkinson: Right. But if we don't lean more on the customer side, Then we are not going to get where we, we, as an industry thing that we're going to get to, we're not going to scale. We're not going to move the needle. And I see all these market research forecasts out there and they've missed a mark year after year.
[00:44:31] Stephanie Atkinson: And we w w way back when we're like, okay, we're in the millions, we're not in the billions. And we can't call a smartphone. It connected device. It's not an IOT device. It may be provide you with alerting and some information or a dashboard information, but it's it's I think, I feel like we have over-hyped the market to the point to where we've, we've graded out so much.
[00:44:57] Stephanie Atkinson: We've got a lot of work to do, but we can go always go [00:45:00] back to the customer. And if we get to that point and we start leaning more towards the customer side, as opposed to look at my. It's competing an IOT solution. Look at my platform. Look what it does for you. Then I think we, as a vendor, if I'm a vendor doing that, we're going to have our foot in the door.
[00:45:19] Stephanie Atkinson: Whereas our competitor may not because they just don't understand what that customer needs
[00:45:24] Matt Trifiro: as a female leader in technology. And there aren't enough of you. Do you have any advice for, for young girls or young women who aspire to have a career like.
[00:45:36] Stephanie Atkinson: Yeah. One of the things that I do, I'm on the Texas, a and M universities.
[00:45:41] Stephanie Atkinson: It's the engineering technology and industrial distribution advisory. So I do talk with students and I encourage females to get into that degree program. And they're expanding that program. But if you look at the demographics of those engineering, those stem taught [00:46:00] degree programs, that generally is it's very, very few women, but we need more women in that space.
[00:46:06] Stephanie Atkinson: And then here's the good news about that students. If you go and you focus in on getting accepted into a university where they do have a low amount of females to mil, then you're more likely to get accepted in that. If you don't like it, you can change it or you can evolve and you can change the degree, but we're really encouraging kids and students to kind of ramp up in focus on.
[00:46:30] Stephanie Atkinson: And females, like the doors are way more open for you than there are males right now, um, from a university perspective. And we see that that starting to happen in the vendor community. It's slow. And we have a lot of work to do. And especially on the salary side, it's definitely where there is no par there, but we will get there.
[00:46:52] Stephanie Atkinson: And I think that there's a lot of, a lot of, uh, big corporations are starting to, starting to think about that more strategically than they [00:47:00] have in the past. And they know how important. Yeah, that's
[00:47:02] Matt Trifiro: really interesting. I mean, when I was going to college, the rule of thumb was if you don't know what you want to do, liberal arts is where you start and I've got, I can see what you're saying, which is if you're a minority, any minority, but a minority in a, in an, in you've applied to go into science and engineering.
[00:47:18] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. You do have less competition. And so you have more opportunity. That's that's really interesting. Well, Stephanie really appreciate you joining us today. If people want the business ed report, how
[00:47:27] Stephanie Atkinson: can they. Oh, great question. So we made it really simple business edge report.com and you can find all the information there, or you can even visit compass intelligence.com.
[00:47:37] Matt Trifiro: Awesome. And if people want to find you online or learn more about your work, where.
[00:47:43] Stephanie Atkinson: LinkedIn, you can find me Stephanie Atkinson, or you could also find me on Twitter at Steph Atkins. I'm there. I do a lot of Twitter activity, so I would be happy to speak with you there as well. That does it for this
[00:47:56] Narrator 2: episode of over the edge.
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