Earlier this summer in New York City, innovators in the world of IoT security gathered and compared notes at a roundtable as part of the always awesome Telecom Exchange (TEX) NYC event, produced by Jaymie Scotto Associates (JSA).
Founder of JSA, Jaymie (Scotto) Cutaia, is one of my favorite women in tech leaders who often puts herself and her team behind the scenes while driving visibility around the many evolutions and revolutions underway in a "telecom" world that has become an "IT" and "IoT" world. I was delighted to find that the JSA team included IoT in their latest community gathering in Manhattan, and while I was unable to attend personally, have enjoyed watching the videos and learning from the panelists their P-O-V on the big challenges that the hyperconnected world continues to grapple with.
"It's going to take a little longer to get the ultimate of Internet of Things than people expect," said David Erickson, one of the panelists on the TEX NYC IoT CEO Roundtable. Erickson is the founder and CEO of FreeConferenceCall.com, a company that started with a $10 URL, which went viral and today supports 40 million users across 160 countries each month, offering a multimedia audio, screen sharing and video conferencing platform connecting up to 1,000 participants - for free. Erickson knows a bit about how quickly the right innovations with the right value for users can take off, and is now seeing massive money-making potential for innovators in IoT.
"Putting proper infrastructure out, dealing with security issues and other things sometimes take a little longer, but the momentum is gaining and that's the key. There is plenty of money to be made," Erickson said.
Erickson is also founder of CarrierX, and one of the world's experts in disruption when it comes to the dramatic transformation of the PSTN and next generation IP networks, interconnected with each other, which is key to the fulfillment of the potential of IoT on a grand scale. Erickson sees beyond traditional "carrier" models and has been minting his most recent fortune by simplifying enterprise networking, providing an easier way and less expensive way for enterprises to connect people and applications - which we're guessing are about to include enterprise IoT deployments.
In addition to Erickson, the IoT roundtable included Nancy Green, Global Healthcare Business Development and Strategy Executive Leader at Verizon. Another top woman in the industry, Green shared her excitement for the value of data coming from connected things, and the opportunity for that data to be consumed in analytics that can improve the way everything is done. "Data from the analytics is really the power of IoT. The assets are getting smaller and less expensive. There is no lack of ideas of what can be monitored and why; it's an opportunity for the industry to provide the enablement of putting them all together to create the service," Green said.
"Healthcare, energy and data centers are viewed as a data aggregation point [within the IoT]," according to Tamara Budec, Vice President of Services, Digital Realty, a global company offering data center and colocation services to IT, Internet, manufacturing and financial services companies in over thirty markets. "IoT is low margin technology looking for cost efficiency, so it's driving a shift of how this tier of markets is playing itself out." She sees regional markets - Tier 2 and 3 - getting more competitive as the IoT continues to grow.
"The Internet of Things is obviously evolving but it suffers presently from platform disintegration and lack of technical standardization that in turn makes integration a lot more challenging. These issues will solve themselves over time; it's just a matter of going through the cycles," Budec predicted.
Another panelist, Jonathan Martone, Director of Data Center and Ecosystems at Cyxtera, said, "Security and interconnectivity are two most important elements for IoT sustainability. Security has to happen at the edge, in the access networks, in the cloud and applications, so a layered approach makes sense and is worth the industry coming together to figure out.
"In terms of infrastructure, we need to take advantage of existing hardware that's out there. With our technology, we can take advantage of stuff that is already capable of sending and receiving audio," added James Nesfield, another IOT roundtable panelist and CTO of Berkeley-based CHIRP Microsystems, a company creating all sorts of innovations, including producing sensors that respond to 3D actions, using hand motions to bounce back an ultra-low audio wave, allowing a reader, for example, to flip the pages of a book on an iPad without ever touching the iPad.
"There are already billions of devices that are compatible with our technology and can send and receive data," Nesfield said, reinforcing the benefits of being able to "interoTp" with not just new devices, sensors and networks, but with legacy hardware and systems as well.
You can watch the
full panel video here but you're going to miss the always fun and productive networking in "3-D" that the JSA team delivers at every one of their events!
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
