The speaking faculty here at IoT Evolution Expo is loaded with industry leaders and revolutionaries from the biggest companies and hungriest upstarts, and the cream rises to the top with the Keynoters.
In addition to Coach Joe Gibbs, who talked about building teams to make innovative companies successful, we’ve had speakers from IBM, Intel, Cisco (News - Alert) and Sikorsky, to name a few, and each of them dropped nuggets of wisdom on the jam-packed keynote theatre at Caesars Palace.
We thought we’d let you in on some of our favorites.
Simon Gharibian of Sikorsky Aircraft, maker of the Black Hawk helicopter, said that the company uses a flight system OS called Autonomy (News - Alert), not always to field fully unmanned aircraft, but to incorporate autonomous-like features into the choppers. This practice makes Sikorsky a smarter company. “We’re taking data from sensors to improve operational parameters,” he said. “Being able to predict performance of the aircraft is harder to do than it seems, so we connect data with aircraft control and the pilot in a live matrix.”
At AT&T (News - Alert), the IoT is a key focus of strategic development. Michael Troiano, VP, Industrial IoT Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions, in his keynote warned about rushing to market before a product is ready. “Many IoT solutions stall because companies don’t think about execution and how to get the devices connected,” he said. And that can stall the industry. But the industry has a future beyond devices, he said. “It’s more than tracking the things. It’s about the people, connecting the assets and the people.”
Atul Mahamunni, VP, Architecture, IoT Group, Oracle (News - Alert), said the IoT isn’t even about the “things.” Instead, he said developers have to look in a different direction for strategy. “IoT is all about the services, not necessarily the things,” he said. Those services will come out of “transforming data from collection devices into valuable insights and strategic actions.”
Senior Technical Leader at Cisco, Rodolfo Milito, advocated for the importance of Fog Computing in the future of the IoT. “The more we know, the more we can divide up the data in specific spaces, and from that we can get good answers,” he said, while talking about how computing at the edge can make weather patterns more predictable and provide weather-dependent industries with mission-critical intelligence.
Thanks to this faculty, these attendees are now very much in the know. And knowing is half the battle.