Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rob Tiffany, Executive Director at the Moab Foundation, and Founder and Managing Director at Digital Insights. A bestselling author and frequent keynote speaker, Rob serves on multiple boards and is routinely ranked as one of the top IoT experts and influencers in the world by Inc Magazine, Onalytica and other outlets.
Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Rob Tiffany, Executive Director at the Moab Foundation, and Founder and Managing Director at Digital Insights. A bestselling author and frequent keynote speaker, Rob serves on multiple boards and is routinely ranked as one of the top IoT experts and influencers in the world by Inc Magazine, Onalytica and other outlets.
In this episode we delve deep into how Rob went from a life of driving submarines, to being self taught in technology, and eventually becoming a leader in the world of IoT. Rob explains the value of IoT and the best ways to sell and explain it to the average person in real world terms, so they understand how embracing technology can save them time and money. Finally, Rob talks about how edge computing, IoT, and automation can be used to help with sustainability around the globe.
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“All that R&D and the rise of arm based processors are making things smaller that we would not have ever built. The chips, the sensors, the technology at a low cost - if it wasn't for this mega trend of smartphones forcing us down that path. And so a side effect of all this work, and you know how things like the most expensive version of the thing you make is the first version. And then it gets cheaper and cheaper. Well, IOT, the thing part of it, the device side of it, benefited from the whole planet going all in on smartphones.”
“When I talk about IOT and value, I try to stay away from saying AI and things like that. And I say, there is so much value just doing the stupid stuff, the low hanging fruit. I think we oftentimes do our customers a disservice because I hear people say IOT and AI in the same sentence over and over again. And I go, you know what, you really need to get in your car and I need you to drive to Omaha, Nebraska. I need you to drive to St. Louis. I need you to go to Oklahoma City, and I need you to meet real people who are just trying to get their job done. And they have no idea about your neural nets and stuff like that. And they don't understand it. And I think we scare customers. It turns out what my experience, not only at building Azure IT, but even more importantly building Lumata industrial IoT at Hitachi; I'd say that first 10 to 20% of value, whatever that means, saving money, making money that comes from the easy stuff. It really does. Just being connected, just not having to visit simple KPIs, simple thresholding; like stuff that manufacturers have done for a million years. It turns out that's the most of the value.”
"So my big recommendation to the world is start to crawl before you run. Do the basics, because it turns out you might get tons of value that you never realized just by doing the easy stuff first. Don't feel pressured to do something you don't even understand."
“When you talk about poverty, it turns out most poverty and hunger are related to farming. They are all correlated. Most of the poorest people in the world are in farming, and they're also starving. So when you can start knowing, remotely knowing in real time and doing it low cost out there where it happens, and then combined with automation, what's the action I'm going to take to make this better for someone, right? There's so much you can do. It's mind boggling.”
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(01:12) Time in the Navy
(03:25) Getting started in technology
(04:06) Getting started in Visual Basic
(04:29) Getting started in IoT Career
(10:17) Defining the Internet of Things
(15:77) Connection between IoT and Smartphones
(17:33) Power of Wireless and IoT
(19:09) Briefing others on IoT while at Microsoft
(21:36) IoT and Value
(25:05) Edge Computing
(33:08) Alternatives to on premise equipment
(34:49) Automation strategy
(43:49) What makes edge harder than the cloud?
(44:31) Edge, IoT, and Sustainability
(47:50) Digital Twins
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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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[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.
[00:00:26] Narrator 1: Hello. And welcome to Over The Edge. In this episode Matt Trifiro interviews Rob TIffany, Executive Director of the Moab Foundation
Rob talks about how he went from a life of driving submarines, to being self taught in technology, and eventually becoming a leader in the world of IoT. Rob tells us about how his first job working in real time data collection for vending machines was the starting off point to his career in technology and automation. He explains the value of IoT and the best ways to sell and explain it to the average person in real world terms, so they understand how embracing technology can save them time and money. Finally, Rob talks about how edge computing computing, IoT, and automation can be used to help with sustainability around the globe.
[00:01:08] Narrator 1: But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsors
[00:01:12] 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.
[00:01:33] Narrator 1: And now, please enjoy this interview between Rob Tiffany, Executive Director of the Moab Foundation, and your host, Matt Trifiro.
[00:01:41] Matt Trifiro: Hey Rob,
[00:01:42] Rob Tiffany: how are you doing today of good man. That's going to be here. Super. Where, where are you calling in from?
[00:01:48] Rob Tiffany: I'm in the Seattle Washington area and the Pacific Northwest. I'm actually close to Redmond wash. I
[00:01:54] Matt Trifiro: used to live there. I lived on orcas island for
[00:01:56] Rob Tiffany: five years. So dude. Yeah. That's it. Well, it's such a nice, neat place. A [00:02:00] place in the world. That is a neat place. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's cool. So, Rob, thank you for
[00:02:06] Matt Trifiro: joining us on over the edge.
[00:02:08] Matt Trifiro: I'm super interested in knowing how you even got started in tech.
[00:02:12] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, well, I probably did some stuff in high school. I think I had one of those little Sinclair computers that, of course in the U S it was called a Timex Sinclair. Right. And you can hook it up to a TV set or whatever, and do basic programming.
[00:02:26] Rob Tiffany: But I think it really happened for me is what I used to be in the Navy, which is another Pacific Northwest thing. Not far from work is silent on your Olympic peninsula. I understand that you spent some time. Yeah, I did. I did. I was on a seal team delivery vehicle submarine, which is like an old ballistic missile sub where they took out the ICBM's put little mini subs on the back, like total James Bond stuff, a little James Bond.
[00:02:52] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, it was. And then more boring after that, I was on a Tri-Net submarine up here in the Pacific Northwest, near Silverdale, Paulsboro [00:03:00] that area on hood canal. And that's a much more boring thing. You've got your 24 ICBM's and you just cruising around slowly waiting for the message from the president to blow up the planet.
[00:03:10] Rob Tiffany: So it's kind of chill. Yeah, I can understand like a vacation it's like a vacation absolutely. That you can't leave. You spent
[00:03:18] Matt Trifiro: some of that time learning about and getting into
[00:03:21] Rob Tiffany: technology. Absolutely. Yeah. So in my off time, when I wasn't driving the sub or whatever, yeah. I was buying tons of computer books.
[00:03:29] Rob Tiffany: So teaching myself programming. Databases networking, all that kind of stuff and just went all in with that stuff, which was great because then it meant I could actually get a job when I got out of the military instead of watching videos or all day and not being prepared. It's like, I couldn't tell you.
[00:03:47] Rob Tiffany: There's lots of people, you know, it's like, well, I'm really good at sonar and torpedoes and missiles, but, and I can't find my. Match. So, yeah, I drove into visual basic back then. I was going to ask [00:04:00] you,
[00:04:00] Matt Trifiro: like, what was the, what was the, your
[00:04:02] Rob Tiffany: toe in the water? Yeah, exactly. So visual basic. So it got lots of sand kicked in my face for not being a real program.
[00:04:08] Rob Tiffany: Back then, oh, access databases and VB back in the nineties. Right. But you know what? It actually worked out. It turns out there was lots of jobs to be had doing that for windows and everything. And so well, yeah. And you ended up at Microsoft
[00:04:21] Matt Trifiro: where it seems like that's where you really started driving T
[00:04:24] Rob Tiffany: career, is that correct?
[00:04:25] Rob Tiffany: Actually, I started it much sooner than that. I've been at T way too long, you know, it's like your grandpa here of. Literally when I got out of the military in the mid nineties, I joined a startup. I probably should have joined Microsoft then because I would have had a lot more stock, but I joined a startup instead, literally it was called real-time data and it was doing vending machines and bringing old vending machines to life.
[00:04:50] Rob Tiffany: We didn't have smart anything. This is the internet of things before the. Yes, it was, it was absolutely, you know, I like dial up modems. It was, it was a little better [00:05:00] that we did some dial up for a few things, but you know, the guy who started it was like a Motorola guy and like Motorola, right. First responder radio, Motorola that one.
[00:05:10] Rob Tiffany: And so it was interesting. We had, I'd say we have three different teams. So we had the embedded team that was. Embedded C code and a black box inside of any machine there's spit cabling and stuff. Cause of any machine, use a spirals to turn, to move like your chips and candy bars out, and then Coke cans, Coke, machines, Pepsi, whatever.
[00:05:31] Rob Tiffany: So we had people who were figuring out how the mechanical stuff inside those machines worked and translated that to digital and captured. We knew. Okay. White donuts were just dispensed. Someone just bought them. We can see this many quarters are in the quarter change, you know, or the exact change light is on.
[00:05:49] Rob Tiffany: And so they built that we had RF engineer. Radio-frequency engineers, actually, guys from allied signal, like the same guys who built the black [00:06:00] box for aircraft, because you had to invent everything back then IOT is so easy today, but back then you had to invent every aspect of it from scratch. And so we were literally building our own wireless modems and we were bouncing packets off of these.
[00:06:14] Rob Tiffany: They're like these community business for 50 radio towers. We'd bounce packets off of that. We use Mogadons. We. Yeah, there's. Early days of any technology, there's tons of players. And then it shakes out after awhile. So if you can remember the early days of wireless data, there were all kinds of players trying to make a go of it before cellular kind of took hold.
[00:06:38] Rob Tiffany: Right? And so we used a lot of the same technology stuff like. Blackberry folks were using and some other things to create coverage. And so we went and put antennas on the vending machine, and then there's the kind of the PC that you'd give to the customer who owns all the vending machines. And they had a visual basic running on windows, graphical interface that looked like they're [00:07:00] looking at a vending machine and they could see all the candies and drinks and everything and numbers.
[00:07:03] Rob Tiffany: How many been dispensed and level simple KPIs, green, yellow, red, when time to restock things like that. And yeah, it was just an early kind of typical IOT use case. It was really around, I'd say inventory management and optimizing like a route driver gets up. Yeah. And it probably pushes all the way back into
[00:07:23] Matt Trifiro: supply chain and
[00:07:24] Rob Tiffany: it does.
[00:07:25] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. That's,
[00:07:26] Matt Trifiro: that's really, that's really interesting. have like onboard analytics back then or just doing analytics. So this is all like fresh.
[00:07:35] Rob Tiffany: That's really, it we're all dumb, fully mechanical vending machines, no tech that came years later. And so you're out, we had to invent everything. And so we, and also, you know, how people think somehow think of inadvertently the cloud with IOT, which I think is a misnomer.
[00:07:50] Rob Tiffany: Well, we didn't have a cloud or any stuff. We actually, from our PC running windows three, one. Digi board to give us more comports, to have more [00:08:00] modems hanging off. We would pull the vending machine directly across the city wirelessly and the black box had logged in store. The information there and we'd grab it and pull it back into our database, literally on the PC so that you could see the current state of each machine.
[00:08:16] Rob Tiffany: And, but this ultimately, yeah, it was to optimize a route driver instead of them having to mindlessly fill their pickup truck with everything and visit all the machines. Now we're saying you only need to go here, here and here. And this is exactly what you need to bring to optimize that. That worked out really well.
[00:08:34] Rob Tiffany: That was a fun experience. And then, you know how sometimes you stumble upon things that you didn't plan most of my life, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So we thought we were about route optimization and making things more efficient and saving money for the people who owned the vending machines. But all of a sudden we realized that we were doing merchandising and because we had real time.
[00:08:53] Rob Tiffany: Information on the preferences of the people's buying habits that we just, we were just [00:09:00] like, oh, look at that. And you know how a lot of times vending machines or like a bank of vending machines, like three or four of them together. So imagine vending machines that were monitoring test yes. All over the city.
[00:09:12] Rob Tiffany: So in this particular skyscraper at these offices that all these people were. We found out a real time. Boy, these people sure do love Snickers or white donuts or whatever it is, and we'd see them moving. Faster and then going empty faster. And so you're like, well, what if we doubled up the number of Snickers and before you knew it, the vending machine was making more money than it was making before, because we could identify the consumer preferences in real time.
[00:09:39] Rob Tiffany: We're a bunch of idiot engineers. We just stumbled upon that stuff. And then later on the people who actually made it. Brands. They started to want our information. Oh, totally. Yeah. And so it happened
[00:09:52] Matt Trifiro: in the grocery
[00:09:52] Rob Tiffany: stores too. That's really neat. Yeah. And so, yeah, it was really cool. So yes. You know, you're right.
[00:09:57] Rob Tiffany: You're bumbling stumbling your way through life and going, [00:10:00] oh, I guess this is important to somebody. So yeah, it was really cool. That's like the
[00:10:04] Matt Trifiro: prodo internet of things, as we said before the internet. So. How would you define, you know, the things that I think about it, like, everything's a thing, my smartphone's a thing.
[00:10:14] Matt Trifiro: My laptop's a thing. My desktop is a thing, my Alexis, a thing. How, how do you think of the internet of things and how you distinguish it from the internet of
[00:10:20] Rob Tiffany: everything? Yeah. I tried to shut some of that stuff down. Everybody has their own opinion. Like for instance, a lot of people say, oh, your smartphone is part of IOT and all these other things.
[00:10:34] Rob Tiffany: I and other analysts firms tried to go, well, you know what? This could get crazy. And we could call everything a thing, which you could. And so I was kinda thinking of it is a headless device where there's no human interaction that can make it work like you can with your smartphone. Fair enough, where this is.
[00:10:50] Rob Tiffany: You have a device and associated sensors and there's no human to help you. On the other side, they're just autonomously sending its telemetry and receiving commands. To do [00:11:00] stuff. And that's kind of like an 80, 20, 90 10 thing. Most of the time, you're just getting telemetry about health and state and what's going on with that thing, whatever it is.
[00:11:09] Rob Tiffany: And then maybe 10 or 20% of the time, you might send a command to it for actuators. And it's, it's interesting, depending on the space, you know, IOT is pretty broad and then people have sliced that up. Clever use of marketing to say that there's different areas of IOT. So when IOT got hot, obviously we've been doing this stuff forever, but it probably got hot 20 10, 20 11, where, and I think it was a perfect storm that came together that made that possible.
[00:11:37] Rob Tiffany: It's not like we didn't know how to get telemetry from machines. It was just really expensive and always proprietary. Right. Obviously we were. Getting telemetry from Apollo 11 and astronauts health and their suits on the moon. So it's not like we didn't know how to do that. And we send commands to deep space probes, but doing it using IP networks, the internet, trying to [00:12:00] standardize a lot of things and then having costs of devices and sensors go down more ubiquity of networks.
[00:12:06] Rob Tiffany: Instead of having to roll your own all the time. And so you had, I don't want to say you have totally ubiquitous wireless networks, but outside it, at least in people populated areas. And then of course, indoors, you had ethernet and wifi and lots of other things, Bluetooth, a million other ways to talk. And so when all that came together and the costs came down and also we can't forget analytics because you have to figure.
[00:12:29] Rob Tiffany: The what, you know, the insight that you're deriving from all this, you know, how early on you think all this stuff you're building is magical. And then after a while, you'd get over it and you go, I just built a bunch of plumbing. The magical stuff is how you derive insights and take actions on those insights.
[00:12:45] Rob Tiffany: And so that's really whatever the analytics are. And so if something else came along too, anybody after awhile could go to a patchy.org and just download for free advanced analytics tool. Open source databases, message, [00:13:00] queues, machine learning tools, all kinds of things, things that like everything else in IOT where previously the domain of wealthy companies, governments, stuff like that, those technology insisted, but they were proprietary.
[00:13:14] Rob Tiffany: They're very expensive. So now all of a sudden it's kind of a, like a loving level playing field. We've democratized the world there, because now it was affordable. Everybody had the analytics and they could start deriving insights. You've got Hadoop, you've got all kinds of crazy stuff. And so people are like, wow, I can do stuff now.
[00:13:32] Rob Tiffany: And so, yeah, it was kinda, it was kinda magical. And so that's. That perfect storm came together a little over 10 years ago, and then people started talking about it and it was hard to distinguish it because in the moment there was a much bigger mega trend happening back then, which still goes on today.
[00:13:48] Rob Tiffany: And that's the smartphone revolution. A lot of folks have thought, well, IOT is the next big thing after the smartphone revolution. Just me being jaded here, [00:14:00] the tech companies need something to sell. And so they, um,
[00:14:05] Matt Trifiro: my, my day job is marketing. I get that.
[00:14:07] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah. Nothing, nothing before, since the smartphone revolution that even comes close to.
[00:14:14] Rob Tiffany: And there's no CB my, that the amount of money they'll met, excitement, the amount of instantaneous by a customer saying, I've got to have this thing, you know, in marketing, we try so hard to convince people. They need to buy something that they don't want to buy. But because of this thing, which is the single most successful, biggest selling product in the world of all time, trillion dollar plus product, people's like, I gotta have it.
[00:14:38] Rob Tiffany: People are lined up outside. That's mad. We don't have that with anything else.
[00:14:42] Matt Trifiro: No, we don't. And that's absolutely true. In fact, I was a student of this consumer adoption, and I remember that it took the, the banking industry over a decade to get half of us using ATM's. Yeah. And that's like talking about the benefit.
[00:14:56] Matt Trifiro: Like you go get cash anytime you want. You don't have to wait in line, talk to a teller. [00:15:00] Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. And so, so the idea that, that something could go from zero to 80% penetration in just a short amount of time is incredible. And how, how do you relate that to IOT though? What's the connection between the smartphone and the
[00:15:15] Rob Tiffany: internet of things?
[00:15:16] Rob Tiffany: Well, the smartphone, because of the smartphone and all the investment in R and D, not just obviously by apple, but Samsung and all the other players, I used to be on the windows phone. And windows mobile at Microsoft. And so I'd take a thick skin as you can imagine, but all that R and D all the research and the rise of arm based processors, the making things smaller, we would not have ever built.
[00:15:41] Rob Tiffany: Never say never, obviously. The chips, the sensors, the technology at a low cost, if it wasn't for this mega trend of smartphones, forcing us down that path. And so a side effect of all this work and you know, how things like the most expensive version of the thing you make is the first [00:16:00] version. And then it gets cheaper and cheaper.
[00:16:02] Rob Tiffany: IOT the S the thing, part of it, the device side of it benefited from the whole planet going all in on smartphones, right. Obviously you had the wireless networks happening and everything else. And so it made the idea of having this low cost microcontrollers and all kinds of sensors, widely available from all kinds of manufacturers.
[00:16:22] Rob Tiffany: Because obviously we talk about data and insights. That's, you know, you gotta start somewhere, right? You gotta start with the. Some things have that innate capability baked into them, old stuff. Doesn't you have to retrofit. So it's interesting. So yeah, w we really owe a lot to the smartphone revolution to make the thing.
[00:16:41] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, I just sent the thing thing happened. Well, we're in, we're
[00:16:45] Matt Trifiro: in this state now where, you know, as you say, the cost of a microprocessor or even a system on chip has been driven down the cost curves that potentially pennies you've got wireless modems that are relatively inexpensive, and you've got [00:17:00] these sensors, whether it's motion, sensors or gyroscopes or all these things that are relatively inexpensive and can be combined into a small device that can be connected.
[00:17:08] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. How do you see that
[00:17:10] Rob Tiffany: changing the world? Well, it's certainly a facilitator. If nothing else, to, to make some of this happen, how it changes the world. A lot of times I feel like people overthink IOT or industrial IOT or the edge, no fence, or the cloud it's IOT is just remotely knowing something.
[00:17:28] Rob Tiffany: Normally in the past, a human being would have to walk somewhere. Drive somewhere, fly on a plane somewhere to physically inspect something and see its current state and health. And that might mean walking around a chemical plant or an oil refinery and looking at gauges and writing down on a clipboard, the current, what that value is.
[00:17:48] Rob Tiffany: And then I go back in and I type it into some computer system. I always tell people you're just competing against a guy with a clipboard, but people overthink it. They spend all their time talking about AI and stuff that people don't [00:18:00] understand instead of realizing the tremendous value. Because of the power of wireless and having instantaneous, remember, we used to talk about real-time enterprises long time ago and the whole rise of the whole API economy.
[00:18:15] Rob Tiffany: I know we've all said that before, but it's all, they're all kind of co-mingled, but it's like now I know instantly current state of all my stuff and I can make decisions or better. Real IOT is I'm going to automate the decisions and magic is going to happen. Right. And so it starts with incremental improvements.
[00:18:35] Rob Tiffany: It's like, what was the value of the vending machine thing? We saved them money. We made them more money. They've saved fuel from traveling places and trucks. But when we started to build Azure IOT at Microsoft, and so I was on that team and when we built it and incubated it, I got to be one of the co authors of the reference architecture for that technology.
[00:18:56] Rob Tiffany: And that was a lot of fun building a global cloud perspective. So [00:19:00] yeah, it kind of worked out so that's good, but. Interesting stringing that together. And I would do the majority of the executive briefings also. So Microsoft's got that big at Greg executive briefing center on the campus. And every week planeloads of CEOs from every company on the planet would come flying into Seattle and go out to Redmond for kind of a two day thing.
[00:19:21] Rob Tiffany: And it was basically product managers from each of the product groups telling them here's what's going on, roadmap, blah, blah, blah. Why was the guy doing it? 50 to 75% of all our IOT ABCs. And so I'd sit there on a whiteboard and do that. Cause I didn't like doing PowerPoint all the time, but it sounds a lot like marketing.
[00:19:41] Rob Tiffany: I just want to point that out. It is, I am a marketer. I didn't, I don't have any education in that, but yes. In fact, I would say the executive briefing center is arguably Microsoft's most powerful marketing and sales tool that they have because they get the exacts in there and blow them away with futuristic stuff.
[00:19:59] Rob Tiffany: Right. And [00:20:00] so totally get that. Absolutely. And also don't do the PowerPoint thing because the bad stuff happens is when a customer flies 6,000 miles away on the other side of the planet and they'd get, they see the same presentation from a PM that was given to them in their home country. And they're like, we flew all the way here for this, but I would hear stories about.
[00:20:22] Rob Tiffany: I'm trying to do IOT or what people were doing. And so I talked to oil and gas companies and they would literally, and after a while, you start to get an epiphany about things and, you know, you're always assuming the best of all these customers, they're advanced. They really know what they're doing, but more times than not, I kept hearing about, well, Jed would drive in his pickup trucks out to the oil tank fields and put a big stick in there to find out how much oil is in there.
[00:20:46] Rob Tiffany: And I'm like, surely this isn't real. But over time, More and more of these ABCs, I would find that's what most companies were doing. Not that exactly, but similar crude, primitive ways to discover the [00:21:00] remote state of something. And in your mind, you're like, you don't even need what we're selling you. This that's like the most dumb thing ever, you know?
[00:21:08] Rob Tiffany: Well, I mean, you can save some money on pickup trucks. You could. Exactly. And then I remember reading a story. I don't know if it was. Oil or whoever they were doing something in Nigeria. And they literally, the w the way the operation was going, someone was flying out there once a month to take measurements and stuff like that.
[00:21:28] Rob Tiffany: And then when they went to using an IOT system and wireless and stuff like that, It saved him like $20 million a year. And they're like, wow, that's like magic. And I was like, it seems obvious to all of us. Right. But in the moment. And so when I talk about IOT and value, I try to stay away from saying AI and things like that.
[00:21:47] Rob Tiffany: And I say there is so much value just doing the stupid stuff, the low hanging fruit. And I think we. Oftentimes do our customers a disservice because I hear people say IOT and AI [00:22:00] in the same sentence over and over again. And I go, you know what? You really need to get in your car. And I need you to drive to Omaha, Nebraska.
[00:22:07] Rob Tiffany: I need you to drive to St. Louis. I need you to go to Oklahoma city and I need you to meet real people who are just trying to get their job done. And they have no idea about your neural nets and stuff like that. And they don't understand it. And. I think we scare customers. It turns out what my experience, not only of building Azure IOT, but even more importantly, building Lumada industrial IOT at Hitachi is I'd say that first 10 to 20% of value, whatever that means, saving money, making money that comes from the easy stuff.
[00:22:38] Rob Tiffany: It really does. Just being connected, just not having to visit simple KPIs, simple threshold, being like stuff that manufacturers have done for a million years. It turns out that's the most of the value. When we started doing ML models on classes of machines in factories, and sometimes you could get it to work in the lab.
[00:22:57] Rob Tiffany: And then the holy grail is, well, once I nailed this [00:23:00] model for this class of machine, the instances of those machines, it's all going to work. Well, guess what? It almost never worked, or if it did, the incremental value was like one, 2% after the big 20% you got from the easy stuff. So my big recommendation to the world.
[00:23:19] Rob Tiffany: Start. Crawl before you run, do the basics because it turns out you might get tons of value that you never realized just by doing the easy stuff. First don't feel pressured to do something you don't even understand.
[00:23:30] Matt Trifiro: Right? That is, that is very Sage advice. I get asked all the time, what's driving this mega trend of edge computing and why is it so important?
[00:23:37] Matt Trifiro: And I think I'm fond of saying, it's like, look, it's very simple. The internet we grew up with was all about. Content to humans and maybe humans talking to machines. I'm topic typing into my Google doc. So everything's happening in a once of seconds. And now we're moving to a world where it's machines talking to machines and machines.
[00:23:57] Matt Trifiro: Second is glacial. Yeah. [00:24:00] And so the infrastructure that we have built, it's not capable of ingesting processing. Consuming and otherwise acting on the de luge of data that is coming when billions and billions of sensors come online. Right? And as you say, you can start with this very mechanical view of it matching you have a person in a clipboard right now.
[00:24:24] Matt Trifiro: Imagine you got a million people in a clipboard, and now imagine that that person has to go back and forth on a rocket ship and you can sort of demystify absolutely all this stuff. And I really appreciate that point of view. So let's talk a little bit about. Edge computing. I sensed you were a little skeptical and I'd love to sort of tease that out of you if that's true.
[00:24:43] Matt Trifiro: It's funny.
[00:24:44] Rob Tiffany: Tell me a little about edge computing. What's that the cool thing is, is that I'm not an analyst or some guy pontificating. I actually built all this. With my own hands. And so I didn't, I was late to the party. Well, I don't know if I was late to party with edge computing, my, my first kicking, the tires and building stuff [00:25:00] at Microsoft, we had kind of a open source, early, early edge thing, 2015, I think it was 2014 or 2015, just to, because.
[00:25:11] Rob Tiffany: Especially, cause I done a lot of the, you know, a lot of these ideas came from manufacturing and factories and stuff like that. And so there was a lot of stuff that was just kind of really obvious. I say obvious to those folks, right? Not every state, everybody. And so that there was this notion of gateways, field gateways, all this discussion and the thing was well, and again, early days, Microsoft.
[00:25:34] Rob Tiffany: Everyone's like, well, it's all about the cloud and we're all going to the cloud. There's no in-between but then there was like, oh wait, wait a second. What's what's that thing there on the factory floor, you can't talk to the cloud. That's crazy talk. You have to go through some kind of gateway. And I remember, cause you know, I would do these executive briefings and I would have it.
[00:25:54] Rob Tiffany: I have to explain it in ways people understand. And so I was like, I imagine you're at your office or a factory [00:26:00] or wherever, and you've got a network and all your PCs and your Macs and everything around it. And how do you get out to the internet? Well, your internal network probably goes through something called a router that maybe you bought from Cisco.
[00:26:11] Rob Tiffany: And that's how you get out to the internet and said, looks a lot like an edge gateway. That's what an edge gateway is. I go, you got all these machines. Most of them are old. Most of them we're sitting here talking about milliseconds or seconds. Give me a break. Most of them are like RS, 2 32 and stuff like that.
[00:26:29] Rob Tiffany: And SCADA machines and all this other stuff. You've got to interface with a bunch of them locally with an edge gateway and then have a bill to route it out to the, to the cloud. Right. And you talked about the millions of people with clipboards. We designed Azure IOT hub to handle like tens of millions of events per second messages, stuff like that.
[00:26:49] Rob Tiffany: Cause that's kinda where our head's at. But to your point, it turns out the, the edge is the thing. And baby step one is pull those guys together with some edge [00:27:00] gateway that's mindlessly just. I'm just going to wrap the data onto the cloud. I'm not going to necessarily do anything there. And so I remember tinkering around with our open source stuff we had.
[00:27:09] Rob Tiffany: This is long before Microsoft came out with Azure edge IOT. Whenever it was called. But real common sense stuff. I'm at a particular giant aircraft manufacturer that you may have heard of, and I'm on their factory floor talking to them and I'm giving them the pitch about streaming analytics and ML and all this cool stuff like maintenance and yeah, all this stuff that we built in Azure with this new thing we built so that we were, and we were incubating it.
[00:27:38] Rob Tiffany: It was early days and the guy. Man. That is great. That's exactly what we need. So tell me about the version that runs right here on my factory floor. Right. And you're like, oh, and then that's when the tap dancing starts. Right?
[00:27:53] Matt Trifiro: Well, I had a, I had a really fun conversation where, where with an analyst will remain nameless and he was saying, you know, [00:28:00] I'm, I'm really focusing on the relationship and workload placement between the network edge or the infrastructure edge and the enterprise edge.
[00:28:08] Matt Trifiro: And I kind of looked at him. Okay. What's the difference between the enterprise edge and on premises. And he kind of looked at me and he said nothing except maybe the control plane extends back to the cloud. And that gives convenience. I'm sure there is no, there is no difference. It's just the location.
[00:28:24] Matt Trifiro: Despite the fact that this, I don't even think the location. I actually don't think so. Despite the fact that like I put so much of my life into the, the phrase edge, including naming this podcast. Just think we're gonna start calling it all the internet at some point, because it doesn't, you don't care where the workload runs.
[00:28:42] Matt Trifiro: You just care that it runs in a place that meets your SLA requirements on latency and jitter and bandwidth and resilience and all those things. And yeah. Who knows where that is?
[00:28:53] Rob Tiffany: Absolutely. And so they, the aircraft guy on the factory floor, Well, he goes, let me just make it really clear to you. We have these [00:29:00] giant machines that make other machines and these big machines are spitting out terabytes of data per hour.
[00:29:07] Rob Tiffany: And you're asking me to just send that terabytes of data per hour, over expensive bandwidth to your distant cloud. Charge me to get it back out. And then you're going to munch on it for a while. And then, and you're going to give me some brilliant insight or answer. He's like, I don't have time for that and I can't afford it either.
[00:29:26] Rob Tiffany: I, we, we, we spit out too much data to just keep shoveling it over the internet, over our ballot, to your cloud and having it come back. Think of, so it was, it was data volume and expense if obviously it's time and latency. I go, my, my time, my derived insight time is measured in milliseconds. And so it's like, I need.
[00:29:47] Rob Tiffany: Your answers to happen here on the land right here on the factory floor are really close in this building. If you think about factoring. Most of them are ethernet as it turns out. And then a lot of them started [00:30:00] doing wifi and it's, it's a mixed bag with wifi because you have heavy metal objects and things like that.
[00:30:04] Rob Tiffany: And now people are kicking tires with a private 5g and stuff like that. But yeah, it's latency, it's expense and it's security governance, stuff like that. I remember when I went to touchy to build Lumada and I had all these young engineers that were interviewing and hiring. They have their ideas of how we should build Lumada.
[00:30:24] Rob Tiffany: These are all born in the cloud engineer guys, and they're like, let's just build the whole thing with AWS Lambda functions. And I'm like, I get it. We'll get to market a lot faster that way. But let me tell you something about industrial IOT and go. We have plenty of people in Hitachi and other factory owners say the data doesn't leave my factory.
[00:30:44] Rob Tiffany: And I go, in fact, we make nuclear reactors. If you'd like to get fired really fast, why don't you hook your to reactor up to the internet? That's the dumbest thing. Have you ever heard of Stuxnet? And so it's like, we need to build something that's portable. It needs to, [00:31:00] if, if the, if the answer to the customer's problem is the whole thing runs on prem.
[00:31:04] Rob Tiffany: Well, then it runs on prem. Yeah. And to some
[00:31:07] Matt Trifiro: extent, that's the, that's the reasoning behind products like outpost and Azure stack and so on. I mean, among other things, but the idea that yeah, if, if data provenance and security is an issue sure. We will ship our cloud to you that may not be air gapped enough for the nuclear reactor
[00:31:22] Rob Tiffany: company.
[00:31:23] Rob Tiffany: Right, right. Yeah. Cause actually they made these hyper-converged racks of servers and tons of Ram and storage. And so we were able to repurpose. So not only did we build the Lumata software platform, but we also had heart Lumata hardware and we could just roll this thing in and to, you know, in fact we actually had the motto running on bullet trains, getting real-time telemetry from the trains and stuff like that.
[00:31:45] Rob Tiffany: So, uh, yeah. And so before. Uh, portability was an important thing in my mind, whether I call it the edge or whatever, I was just like, and I would say weird things to engineers. Like I need you while you're building this to think [00:32:00] like a salesman and of course they would go, you're a freak. And I go, are you making this harder to see.
[00:32:07] Rob Tiffany: Are you making it easier to sell by the code you're writing. If you're writing bloated lazy code, did we learn the lesson about using Java and then the early days of containers and all that? It ended up just using more resources on servers. And I go, well, then we have to have extra, extra large VM in AWS or Azure.
[00:32:26] Rob Tiffany: It costs more money and it impacts the customer. I go think like an embedded developer while you're building your server stuff. And the same goes for things that are running out in the end. Yeah, that's a weird thought
[00:32:37] Matt Trifiro: experiment with you. Yeah, go ahead. So, okay. Let's, let's ignore the hyper secure half to air gap, everything.
[00:32:44] Matt Trifiro: Sure. Situation. Cause that's truly unique. Although more common than most people think. And let's, let's imagine that we take Microsoft data center and we shrink it down to the size of a Volkswagen beetle. And rather than having it. [00:33:00] Seattle or Maryland, we stick it 10 kilometers from the factory and we have a direct fiber line.
[00:33:07] Matt Trifiro: And so I dunno, it's like 75 microseconds. Yeah. Is that, is that an alternative
[00:33:12] Rob Tiffany: to on-prem? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And you can serve more customers while giving them that latency that they're looking for. Absolutely security.
[00:33:22] Matt Trifiro: If it's a direct fiber line that yeah.
[00:33:25] Rob Tiffany: Like the olden days when we provisioned the T3.
[00:33:31] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. You've been in industry long enough. Nothing's
[00:33:33] Rob Tiffany: new. Right, right. No, but exactly right. Instead of the open internet, it's a private circuit. Right. And it's so it's secure. And so it makes perfect sense. And so, and it's also goes back to the same economies of scale people would talk about with cloud economics, the kind of edge you're talking about.
[00:33:51] Rob Tiffany: Still plays in that same game because
[00:33:54] Matt Trifiro: yes. Sort of has a lot of the cloud economics with, without any of the
[00:33:58] Rob Tiffany: absolutely [00:34:00] absolutely of centralization. Right, right. And so you get that latency down and you've got the same security that looking for. Absolutely. Yeah. It makes perfect. And I want to, I want to tap into your
[00:34:09] Matt Trifiro: experience here.
[00:34:11] Matt Trifiro: Um, so there are lots of, lots of people who, especially in COVID, you know, they, they, they, I think nine months into COVID and their board sat them down and said, okay, your tenure automation strategy is now a three-year automation strategy. And so you have everybody like the phone's ringing off the hook.
[00:34:27] Matt Trifiro: How am I going to solve this problem? Whether it's to roboticize my factory or prevent downtime or whatever it is. And I'm sure a lot of these. Common problems that people run today are things you've seen over and over again. And so I, what advice can you give people who are embarking on an ambitious program to automate a factory or some other line of
[00:34:52] Rob Tiffany: business?
[00:34:53] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, I would say. Sometimes, you know, you always hear the same thing, start small and you [00:35:00] know, the baby steps and get quick wins and all that kind of stuff. A lot of times when people try to do something that looks like a point solution, they get beat up for it. And they said, well, you shouldn't waste your time with this point solution, automating this one machine to this process.
[00:35:15] Rob Tiffany: You need to. A blue ribbon panel of architects and come up with a grand design that we'll have in 10 years. And I think that's just crazy. It's okay to do something that looks like a point solution, but it looks like it may be, it doesn't scale or it doesn't look like it's a grand plan because remember most of the world still has clipboards even today.
[00:35:36] Rob Tiffany: And most people that, that value needle, when they see it moved it, the bar is lower than you. And so that's encouraging, right? It is encouraging. It is encouraging. And so don't think that I got to do the grand boil, the ocean thing and the grant MLAI and clipboards. Yeah, you go, let's just solve this one thing.
[00:35:59] Rob Tiffany: And. [00:36:00] High five each other, and then let's go solve the next thing and yeah, maybe we'll do it similarly and we'll learn along the way, but you're right. This, this COVID thing, we're accelerating everything. I'll give you a great example. So working at Erickson Erickson. It's a manufacturer of networking gear for sells to mobile operators.
[00:36:21] Rob Tiffany: Right? So LTE, 5g, all the stuff you see in the cell towers and hidden all over the place. Right. And we built a smart factory from scratch outside of Dallas during COVID and it was to build 5g. Get it closer to customers, kind of like the edge let's get closer to where things are. Right. We were manufacturing them in Europe and shipping them over.
[00:36:43] Rob Tiffany: And some of it was politics. We kept hearing stuff from the president back then. America needs to win. Yeah. What does that mean? How do you win? And so it's like, all right, well, let's build the 5g stuff here, but with the cool stuff, was, is [00:37:00] we got to use, we talk about industry four O we talk about industrial IOT.
[00:37:04] Rob Tiffany: Cause that's, that's been kind of where the money is and that's where the biggest impact has been. And it's just so hard. When I was talk to you, it's like, we're going to spend the next two decades retrofitting old stuff because people don't get rid of things. Like when we saw four, maybe a thousand, 400, maybe a thousand IOT players jumping in the market all at once.
[00:37:23] Rob Tiffany: And they knocked on the door, Joe customer and said, yeah, I'm going to need you to rip all that stuff out and replace it with this new state-of-the-art stuff. And the customer's like, get the hell out of my office. That's not going to happen. And so. Being able to build something from scratch was so amazing and using 5g to build 5g technology was cool.
[00:37:45] Rob Tiffany: And so we had the luxury, we did lots of edge stuff. It was all edge computing inside the smart factory. We took advantage of this thing called CBRS. Individual businesses to get some spectrum [00:38:00] where in the past you'd have to like call up Mr. Verizon or at and T or T-Mobile and say, could you peel off some spectrum for me?
[00:38:06] Rob Tiffany: It's like, yeah, I go pound sand, like the Southern equivalent of wifi. I think it is. And so building that we built it sustainable. We had all these giant cisterns capturing all this rainwater. The whole factory was covered in solar panels. It's like, you know, if you had the chance to build something new from scratch, how would you do it?
[00:38:25] Rob Tiffany: And so it was such a cool experience, but where a lot of the edge and some of the crazy stuff we all talk about came into. Is because of COVID you couldn't have a lot of people together. Right. And so, but yet we had to train and get this thing up and running in Texas. So we had a similar plant that we had in,
[00:38:44] Matt Trifiro: uh COVID in Texas,
[00:38:45] Rob Tiffany: according to the governor.
[00:38:46] Rob Tiffany: True, good point. I don't know what we were thinking. Yeah. It turns out they were good the whole time, but we had a similar plant in Lithuania. No, no Stoney. And so in talent. And so what we had. When you hear the [00:39:00] crazy talk about having the VR AR glasses and everything. We literally did that really? We did.
[00:39:06] Rob Tiffany: We used super low latency. This there's different versions of 5g
[00:39:10] Matt Trifiro: where they wireless or where they hooked up to it.
[00:39:13] Rob Tiffany: What was the really well, just, just to remind everyone, even when you're wireless, there's still wires. Yes. It reminds me of seeing a meme a long time ago when somebody's. Serverless is made of servers.
[00:39:28] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, it's wireless, but of course you had to go across the undersea cables and the ocean to get to Estonia, but yeah, but, and so remotely using 5g and we did a lot of this edge computing stuff there. We trained the people in Texas on how to operate this new, smart factory of the future. And when was this?
[00:39:48] Rob Tiffany: This happens, I'd say spring summer of 20.
[00:39:52] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, that's neat that you actually used it, you know, outside of a, of a trade show floor.
[00:39:58] Rob Tiffany: I mean,
[00:39:59] Matt Trifiro: real [00:40:00] cause most people still think is
[00:40:01] Rob Tiffany: fine. It's fiction. They all it is. But the fact that, and so, and so it was real and it served a real purpose. We weren't just doing it to say we did it.
[00:40:11] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. And so it trained people on how to operate this factory, but yeah. All in on edge computing. Here's the other funny thing I learned about instructor. My view of edge computing was pragmatic actually is where it started. It's just like, like in a factory. I need this here. It's not some magical fantastical reason when I got into joined Ericsson.
[00:40:31] Rob Tiffany: And the telecom folks started to say, Hey, let's this edge thing. Maybe we could co-op this whole edge thing and invent our own version of this. And so they talked about mobile edge computing or multi-channel edge computing or some other variation. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So there's this whole neck thing and they were so late to the party, but there, they had an, a jump on it.
[00:40:53] Rob Tiffany: In fact, a lot of people started saying, well, mech is a feature of 5g. Whatever the takeaway [00:41:00] was edge computing was, I just needed a place to run compute, maybe closer, like to your point with the Volkswagen closer, without being on prem necessarily, but maybe how many milliseconds or microseconds of my way over wireless to the edge of the cellular network.
[00:41:17] Rob Tiffany: And so it's like, Yeah. With the rise of containers inside computers, right. And servers, you know, you could put push logic down to a container. And so a lot of the edge computing companies that, that do that kind of stuff, that's their bailiwick. And so it's like, oh, we could run this in a base ban. If you think about the shack, that's at the bottom of all the cell towers, there's servers in there, open it up.
[00:41:40] Rob Tiffany: It's just an Intel server. Yeah. And so it's like, well, yeah, we could run compute edge compute right there. And we calculated, obviously there's no exact science around wireless. There's the stuff you do at a saturation lab. And then there's the real world, right? Yeah. But anyway, but it's still faster than going all the way to the [00:42:00] cloud.
[00:42:00] Rob Tiffany: Right. And then also a lot of people don't realize all these mobile apps. They have data centers hidden throughout cities, all over the place. They're just whatever. Maybe they're a bunch of Equinix or some of these, some other ones like that. Right. And so there's lots of places. This is your phone call or your data hitting the cell tower with a whole bunch of your best friends going down.
[00:42:20] Rob Tiffany: Maybe you do compute there. Then you have backhaul networks and you go to these urban data centers. This all is before you go out to the open. The cellular network. And so there's lots of places still faster than the cloud where you could do compute. Right? And so a lot of folks, you just probably just read stuff from Verizon at and T partnering up with AWS and Microsoft on trying to make something out of that.
[00:42:47] Rob Tiffany: But edge is hard as you well know, you live at the edge world. There's one thing that makes edge harder than the cloud. What's that orchestration.
[00:42:56] Matt Trifiro: Yeah, well, it just, it just distributed lights out facilities [00:43:00] cause you can't afford to have people there in, but that, but that's what IOT is for. Yeah. I, you know, we're, we're running two to three data centers in six cities, well networks and data centers, six cities and hour, and they're all, it's all automated.
[00:43:13] Matt Trifiro: And our telemetry system generates a billion data points a
[00:43:16] Rob Tiffany: day easily. Right? Totally.
[00:43:19] Matt Trifiro: So we're treating. The network and the data center, like a factory. I mean, exactly like, like you were doing with the, the aircraft carriers. That's, that's, that's pretty neat. One of the things that you, you mentioned in the factory in, in Dallas was the sustainability and the cisterns.
[00:43:33] Matt Trifiro: And I know partly because you're, you're executive director of the mug foundation, but also just having paid attention to some of the things you do online that you're, you're pretty passionate about this. Ask to answer the question. What's the best way to add an IOT could contribute to
[00:43:48] Rob Tiffany: sustainability.
[00:43:50] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, climate
[00:43:51] Matt Trifiro: mitigation, you know, whatever those attributes are that you find important. What do you, how do you think about
[00:43:55] Rob Tiffany: that? Yeah, well, they certainly walk together hand-in-hand and use somewhere it's [00:44:00] appropriate, but yes, if you step away from the world of commercial software and hardware and making money and realize the same technology can be used to help society, because if you remember, what is it, I'm just remotely measuring.
[00:44:14] Rob Tiffany: And so if I need to put a low cost edge compute capability in a village in Africa to monitor things, I can't do the expensive thing. I can't do the cloud thing necessarily. It's all super cost sensitive. And so obviously like lots of us I've been on a journey around that, but after a while, you're like, oh, Well, you know, there's these great 17 sustainable development goals from the United nations that really helped categorize things.
[00:44:41] Rob Tiffany: It made things a lot easier because I started to go, wow, whether it's water. I mean, what is it all it's monitoring, it's remotely monitoring. I'm going to monitor water. I'm going to read, monitor how things are with the, with the climate in certain places. When you talk about poverty, Well, it turns out most poverty and hunger are [00:45:00] related to farming.
[00:45:00] Rob Tiffany: They are all correlated. Most of the poorest people in the world are in farming and they're also starving. So when you can start knowing remotely, knowing in real time and doing it low costs out there where it happens, and then combined with automation, what's the action I'm going to take to make this better for someone, right.
[00:45:22] Rob Tiffany: Anyway, there's so much you can do. It's it's mind boggling
[00:45:26] Matt Trifiro: and you feel that the net contribution of good, that comes out of the result of the sensors and calculations and actions that we take on them is greater than the damage we do by sticking
[00:45:38] Rob Tiffany: more power
[00:45:40] Matt Trifiro: consuming, heat generating
[00:45:42] Rob Tiffany: equipment out of.
[00:45:43] Rob Tiffany: That's a good, you know what, it's, it's always open for debate, but I figure right now when we go help people who are in need, we fly
[00:45:52] Matt Trifiro: there. Starving is, is
[00:45:54] Rob Tiffany: pretty immediate. Yeah. And so it's like, uh, is there an easier way I can't [00:46:00] fly all these people to this place. The United nations does it all kinds of NGOs are doing great, work all over the world.
[00:46:07] Rob Tiffany: Is there a way I can help them and be an enabler to help them do more with less, right. That's what IOT is. I'm going to help you do more with less automate processes. Cause you don't have all the hands on deck to do all that work. And so if I look across those sustainable development goals and. You shouldn't pound a square peg in a round hole.
[00:46:27] Rob Tiffany: I'm not suggesting that IOT and edge and 5g can save everything cause they can't, but there's certainly areas where they can. And so I spend a lot of time building technology. The one thing we haven't talked about is digital twins at the heart of Lumada. I think that should be at the core of everything actually.
[00:46:42] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. So I
[00:46:43] Matt Trifiro: actually actually didn't bring that up because you were kind of saying, well, the AI ML stuff, but let's let's if you could spend a few minutes, I'd love to talk about digital twins. Yeah. Well, so
[00:46:53] Rob Tiffany: what does. That's right at digital twin, doesn't have to be AI and ML. A lot of people say, oh, well, it's this 3d model, [00:47:00] this off shore drilling rig, or it's this AI thing.
[00:47:04] Matt Trifiro: That data
[00:47:04] Rob Tiffany: in a, yeah, that's just, it's, it's just not true. And so I got involved in digital twins building Lumada and we decided it needed to be at the very core of the system. Remember how I said, well, I T's just plumbing. All these things are just plumbing. I got. I got to instrument things or environmental sensors.
[00:47:22] Rob Tiffany: I need data to get wherever point a to point B. I need to capture it, but a great way to S a digital twin as a data structure at its heart, just right. You could build it every cell, if you want it to. Absolutely. Absolutely. Everybody just put on your DBA hat right now are visual basic. Yeah, exactly. So, so it could be your access database or your sequel server or your Oracle, or it could be Mongo or.
[00:47:47] Rob Tiffany: All the different, no SQL databases, but it's a data structure. And so when I talked to people that digital twins, it's important, kind of like we've done this whole talk is talk about, relate it to things that people understand. [00:48:00] So just think about the car that you drive and when you're driving a car, you notice if you have a newer car, there's all this stuff on your dashboard, all this information about the health of your car that you didn't use to see.
[00:48:11] Rob Tiffany: Well, those are just sensors. And IOT is just remoting that to somewhere else, wirelessly woo magic. And so you can imagine building the digital twin of your car. And so there are some static and there's, and I think of it like a programmer, like a base class that you inherit from. So there's the class of the digital twin.
[00:48:31] Rob Tiffany: So like, um, Ford F-150 from 2018. We'll start with that. And then there's 10 million instances of a 2018 Ford F-150 on the road. So the base class of that, that you define it and you say all these properties, this truck has four tires and each tire has air pressure, you know, PSIS and it's got an engine and all this stuff.
[00:48:53] Rob Tiffany: And so you build out the data structure, that's just defining these properties. Some are static [00:49:00] that don't change. Like the truck is 20 feet long, or the gas tank is this big. And then some are dynamic with the sensor sending you real-time telemetry as your truck is really moving. And so. When that telemetry is coming in and you capture the latest state of that, F-150 on the road.
[00:49:18] Rob Tiffany: It hydrates all those properties in the kind of in the data model and you have the latest state. And so you go, oh, I noticed that the right front tire, isn't 35 PSI and the left front tire is at 25. And then you can apply in the twin KPIs. You can say, well, this is what I expected. This is green and this is yellow and this is red.
[00:49:39] Rob Tiffany: So you can assign KPIs to what you expect those values to be as that telemetry is coming in, and then you can start automating. I went so deep on digital twins and trying to assign KPIs and rules and things in the twin itself. Normally we get the data and then we build analytics over here and we act on it.
[00:49:57] Rob Tiffany: I did some crazy stuff cause luckily [00:50:00] there's no standard. And that means I can just invent stuff. And so doing that, and it w it turns out twins are not some esoteric things. It's like, if people talk about asset management or a thing, a twin made it something that people understand. I mean, you
[00:50:15] Matt Trifiro: know, it's, it's really fascinating when you were talking about the car.
[00:50:19] Matt Trifiro: My mind immediately went to an airplane cockpit, and then my, my family was in the, the airplane construction business. And so I know a little bit. A 7 47 and 1976. Okay. There wasn't much digital on there. And the cockpit is like an analog twin with a touch interface. Yes. Where the data is real. The twin data is represented by lights.
[00:50:40] Matt Trifiro: And
[00:50:41] Rob Tiffany: actually lately we did analog to analog didn't we, you know, Wayne is just a digital registered station. Yeah. It was the same thing. And so we're just all we're. And so before we jumped to AI or saying it's a 3d model, it's actually just a day. Structure in a [00:51:00] database and all the properties and everything.
[00:51:02] Rob Tiffany: And you can model that in a database, however you want to do it. And then there's the actual data that's flowing in that fills in all those fields in the database for the engine, the oil pressure, the RPM, a million different things about the car and a trillion different things about a 7 47, for sure. And then you have the latest state and then guess what the historical state, cause it's like time series.
[00:51:23] Rob Tiffany: You hear that a lot. And I. We timestamp everything that's coming in. Right. Well, that history of the latest state of that digital twin of the Ford F-150 is the digital thread. And so this thread shows you the lifetime of that truck from birth to being used until it's decommissioned. Right. And then when you put a bunch of.
[00:51:46] Rob Tiffany: Remember, I say, we start with the base of the 2018 Ford F-150 then there's yours and there's mine. And there's all the other ones. When you aggregate that stuff to. You can start to solve problems like you can say, well, gosh, I noticed [00:52:00] across this fleet of this particular model, the fuel pumps going out at 60,000 miles, we're seeing that over and over again, and you can start to correlate and go, well, maybe we should do a recall.
[00:52:09] Rob Tiffany: And so there's just so many powerful things you can do, but I want people to know that digital twin is simple and it's just a way. And so when people say, well, digital twin is the VR goggles. Right. No, that's just a view of the digital database. That's all it is because to your point, that projection could also just be somebody with a tablet and Excel.
[00:52:30] Rob Tiffany: And that's th that's fine too. So yeah, it's just a data model and the data. Yeah. And then you,
[00:52:37] Matt Trifiro: I love demystifying this stuff like that. It's a, this, this is, it's been a really fun conversation, Rob, for those in my audience that want to track you down online, maybe read some of your books or watch some of your, your podcast or video casts.
[00:52:50] Matt Trifiro: How can people get ahold of you?
[00:52:52] Rob Tiffany: Well, I'm certainly on LinkedIn and, and then it just Rob Tiffany on Twitter, Rob, Tiffany digital is my website. I've got [00:53:00] podcasts on Spotify and all the usual places, apple and things like that. And we'll drop some awesome links in the show net. Absolutely. Yes. So I'm everywhere all at once.
[00:53:10] Rob Tiffany: It's just crazy.
[00:53:12] Matt Trifiro: Thank you, Rob. Maybe, uh, once you figured out what your next gig is going to be, we'll have you back and have you tell us what else.
[00:53:18] Rob Tiffany: It sounds like a plan. Good stuff, sir. Thank you. That does
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