IoT Insider Podcast | Episode 9: IoT in 2020 – Predictions and Preparations

Dan Cunliffe
Welcome, Hello, everybody. And thank you for joining us for our November podcast. My name is Dan Cunliffe, Managing Director of Pangea. And today we have ourselves a triple threat of Pangea Directors, I’m joined by Chris Romeika.

Chris Romeika
Hello, Dan Cunliffe.

Dan Cunliffe
Thanks, man. Our lovely Ops Director, and Bernie McPhillips.

Bernie McPhillips
Hey, Hey, everyone, how you doing?

Dan Cunliffe
Very well thank you as our Sales Director. We’re wrapping up the year it is getting to that time of the year where eggnog, Christmas trees and presents are starting to join us. We’re wrapping up the year with our top IoT predictions for 2020. And how to prepare for them. We’re gonna take a look at what sectors and solutions are booming. What new connectivity tech is on the horizon and how the markets are going to look next year, including some of the best investment opportunities. So definitely something for our partners and anyone who is fresh on the IoT scene who would like to get involved to to have a listen. And just at the start. Thank you very much for those tuning in again. We’ve got some avid followers, David Dungay, being one of them. Thank you so much to everyone for joining and to listen. So we’ll begin with our illustrious Sales Director Bernie McPhillips. Who maybe we want to start tackling some of the solutions and sectors? Bernie, tell me where would you kind of say some of the solutions or sectors are going at the moment?

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, I’m just going to kind of caveat that question initially Dan, if you don’t mind, because it’s something that I’ve spoken a lot about in recent podcasts and events etc. that we’ve presented is that that are genuinely opportunities in every single business sector, you could possibly think of. A lot of our partners are traditional telecoms resellers, for example. And they’ll often say, Well, what in order for me to build an IoT strategy? What sector should I be focusing on? Which customers should I be selling to? And the fact is, you don’t need to reinvent your business wherever you’ve been successful before, either by sector or geography, based on your business, your business might be in a rather rural location, you sell largely to agricultural or logistics and manufacturing companies, you’re not going to just completely reinvent your business to try and develop an IoT strategy. Equally, if you’re in the middle of a city in the finance and legal sectors, banking, retail, you’re not going to start focusing on a completely different set of customers. But that said, you know, there are absolutely some sectors that seem to be accelerating and growing even more quickly than some others. And so you’re exceptionally excited about I think, I think one of the first ones is kind of transport and logistics, largely because it is kind of ahead of the game adoption rate, according to recent analysis, is suggesting that it’s up from 27%, last year, 2018 to 42% this year. So that’s a huge, huge increase. And it’s no wonder really, when you think about it, because transport and logistics, it’s highly competitive, they’re always looking for ways to kind of stay ahead to reduce costs to stay safe. But it’s also an industry that kind of touches every other industry. Because regardless of what what, what kind of market you’re in, you need to you need to get your stuff around the country, around Europe, around the world, wherever it may be typically transport, you need logistics to get your things around and getting them into retail stores to get them in the hands of customers. So exceptionally busy. Today, you’re looking at the likes of asset tracking, route optimisation, driver behaviour. And obviously recently, our own opportunity is our Smart Container Solution. We announced just a couple of months ago back in September, our triple partnership with Loginno, and The One Solution that will provide connectivity to the world’s first smart container fleet. So today, I know you’re massively massively involved in that sale. So well done again, that’s all about kind of trying to reduce the amount of damaged goods, which can then cause to be a loss of reputation or loss of loss of revenue or loss of margin. And customers face with delays and waiting for things to be replaced and that kind of thing. So I’ve got a huge amount going on over there.

Dan Cunliffe
That’s a great that’s a great analogy that especially where we find that you You know, looking for markets that touch many other markets, I think does help people think about where they can probably take their IoT strategy or their IoT ideas, you know, find markets that you know, are able to touch each other at the right points.

Bernie McPhillips
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think you’ve got within transport, then you’ve obviously got smart cars then as well. And now you get more pull from that market as opposed to push customers want a lot of the a lot of the features that are now common with smarter cars and not to the full, not necessarily to the full extent of, of driverless vehicles, but even now just assist the driver and things that make your journey more comfortable, a little bit more straightforward, to real time, traffic updates, real time satellite navigation, that big kind of big opportunities as well built in entertainment, streaming, content, music and infotainment into a vehicle for the for the for the pleasure of passengers etc. And again, you know, huge market and I don’t think I’ve spoken to you enough yet Dan about my car that I got myself recently. I’m sorry. I think that you told me awhile ago it was your favourite car. But one of the features that I genuinely love about it, is it’s connected, it’s got a SIM in it, so everything is in real time I could stream content, I could stream music, the satnavs updated with real live traffic information through an app on my smartphone, I can see where my car is, I can see if I haven’t locked it up, I haven’t set the alarm, if I haven’t closed the windows, I can do all of those things remotely. So I can lock the car and set the alarm, I can close the windows, one of the really cool things, especially that you mentioned that the festive wintery season that we’re now approaching, I can heat the car from wherever I am. Nice. So if I’m shopping, if I’m in the house, the cars on the drive, if it’s frozen solid, I can at the touch of a button I can heat the car to a target temperature. So by the time we get the set to 20 to 22 degrees all the windows are defrosted the heated seats are on and it’s ready to just literally get in a drive away. So more and more people are going to want these convenient features. No one wants to be stood on the driveway. You know, scraping the cars. Kids going to be late for school going to be late for that first meeting. Especially when the weather catches us out. So the technology now is it’s just improving our everyday lives.

Dan Cunliffe
Do you think we can take it the other way around and chill a certain part of the car? So we can keep our beers cold before we get in? Obviously not to drive but just to enjoy.

Bernie McPhillips
Or soft drinks? Of course, yeah. Maybe a glass of squash after Chris has finished playing tennis or something like that. Actually. He wouldn’t be against that.

Dan Cunliffe
Well talking about Chris actually, our illustrious Operations Director sitting next to me. Probably want to talk a little bit about some of the new trends in 2020, particularly some of the connectivity tech some of the some of the fascinating things, I think it’s safe to say that we will be at Mobile World Congress at the end of February again, taking in the sights and sounds of Barcelona and particularly learning some really interesting things we bring back to our partner channel. I think it’ll be probably even our fifth year going this year. Maybe take us through a couple of ideas. Mate, what do you what do you see on the horizon?

Chris Romeika
Yep, we’ll be at Mobile World Congress, like clockwork, fourth or fifth time, I think now, every year without fail. Yeah. So I think some of the things that’s going to be quite interesting coming into 2020, one of them, one of the big ones. Let’s put aside 5G for a second, but one of the big ones coming up is going to be what everyone’s calling Wi-Fi 6. Yeah. So technical version called 802.11ax from whatever the previous one was, I think it was? I think it was AC or something like that. Yeah. But that’s coming out sort of around now. So you know, hardware manufacturers are starting to, to put the chipsets in put the technology in now. Sometimes, you know, it’s even kind of dormant until you know, people just start using it. And then you know, well, you’ve already got an 802.11ax type connectivity available to you. So one of the interesting things about Wi-Fi 6 is that, you know, with every iteration of technology, you know, you’re always going to get stuff like faster speed, of course, you know that that’s like a guaranteed type of thing. But in this case, we’re also getting some good stuff. So the protocol, and the technologies has been designed to give a much better battery life for a lot of applications. So, you know, with everyone going mobile now, you know, battery life is a consideration for everything. Everything’s wireless. Nothing’s like plugged in anymore. So having a longer battery life is great for products and for IoT devices in general. Things can last longer standing on their own You know, in all those those type of things, you know, which which aren’t plugged in for IoT and M2M devices, the other thing we’re getting, we’re getting with Wi-Fi 6 is going to be much better speed and performance, particularly in congested areas. So if you’re in like, you know, a building or a function, or you know, a stadium or something like that, the protocol is designed to give you according to Cisco anyway, up to four times better speed. So that’s gonna be that’s going to be great for users and going to be great for smart IoT devices as well. Yeah, and I could probably bet as well, you know, while they’re saying you’re gonna get better speed that probably also means more reliable connectivity. You know, because you, we’ve all been in places where there’s a Wi-Fi network, you’re connected, and, you know, nothing happens, or it takes 10 minutes, and, you know, something slowly starts showing up on the web browser. So that’s gonna be really good to see. Going into 5G as well. So everyone knows all about 5G now, but 5G in, when we talk about in respect to Wi-Fi 6, they’re going to be really good buddies, they’re going to be really good partners together. Yeah. Because they actually use some common underlying technologies. And they’re both been designed from the, from the ground up before they were designed with, you know, very similar use cases and very similar requirements, you know, which was all about, obviously, all around high speed for everyone, but also use cases, once again, about the battery life. So, you know, 5G’s, you know, got a lot of advancements in that area, as well. And also things like, you know, like handing off of data and services. So, as an example of that, if you’re moving on a train, you know, with, you’re happily moving along at 200 miles an hour, on your 5G network, and then you stop, and you get into the terminal or something like that, you will immediately like seamlessly trends, you know, just move over to the Wi-Fi 6 network. And from a, you know, from a user perspective, you just get to sort of see the same speeds, everything’s going to be consistent. Like right now, for example, you know, there might be a drop out period, you might have to wait, you might have to find the Wi-Fi, you know, the devices thinking, What do I do? You know, flounders around for a bit, and then it starts connecting.

Dan Cunliffe
Are you thinking that, like, Is there then a difference between how we would approach when we’re indoors or outdoors when Wi-Fi? Because you see Wi-Fi as a? Well, in most cases as an indoor technology? Yep. Right? Where, unless you’re maybe in a stadium, but then again, it’s a blend of both what Yeah, how does that kind of work?

Chris Romeika
Yeah, I think, I think Wi-Fi 6 is definitely going to be something that’s really great for indoor, so it’s still gonna, you’re still going to preserve that kind of, you know, that perception of what Wi-Fi means to us. But I do think in the future, maybe not in 2020. But even beyond that, you know, just like the, the Amazon sidewalk protocol that we talked about in, in a blog post, and other things like, you know, things which have been around a bit like Bluetooth, low energy, you know, some of these sort of, you know, personal area, or sort of, you know, local area network wireless network stuff is starting to expand and touch on the heels of, of mobile networks, like LTE networks and 5G networks, like sidewalk, which I mentioned in the blog post as well. They talked about people using sidewalk to make sort of a city level network, just from devices relaying traffic and sort of meshing together with each other. Yeah, so that’s anyway, so that’s Wi-Fi 6 and 5G. The other thing, which I’m seeing a lot of buzz about, you know, from reading websites from hearing industry talk and from seeing news feeds, is the continuous or the continuing proliferation of edge devices. Yeah. So edge devices and edge computing, rather, is something that’s still been around, I first got light of it at the last Mobile World Congress. And there’s a fair bit of blurb about sort of, you know, moving, moving computing power out from the cloud, and back out to the edge. Sometimes they call it cloudlets. So they just coming up with new terms for a lot of hours. It’s cloudlets. Like, like droplets. Yeah. You know, the traditional thought was, let’s say five years ago, that, you know, you’d have sort of a lot of power and a lot of computing power in the middle of the cloud, ie. in big data centres and stuff like that. But what what sort of, you know, the market or maybe like, well, the manufacturers and the researchers have started to realise is that like, you know, IoT we all know is gonna have billions of devices but you know, There’s no real reason to sort of just send all that IoT data up to the cloud, you know, in a raw format, as in, you have to have the cloud process it. So when they mean an edge device in edge computing, they mean, basically making the device more smart at the edge. So for example, like, you know, a sensor from a sensor, like monitoring a temperature, was the temperature the same as the temperature yesterday, if it is like, don’t bother sending this Don’t bother sending the temperature because it’s just going to be the same. If it isn’t, then send the update. But you know, it’s a really simple example. It just saves on computing power and saves on data transfer. But it could be mapped to more complex things like facial recognition or something like that. Why have the cloud computer? Yeah, do it when the little edge device can do it anyway? Especially with things like, you know, Raspberry Pi’s like the Raspberry Pi, version four. They’re becoming as powerful as normal desktop computers. And I think, yeah, we’re gonna see a lot of this sort of, you know, I’m going to call them these cloudlets. From now on.

Dan Cunliffe
Chris Romeika defines proliferation of cloudlets. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So you reckon Wi-Fi 6, obviously, 5G, I can see those two working pretty close together. We’ve obviously done a lot of work on 5G this year with Dr. Arslan and focus on healthcare, the ambulance project, and obviously the world first with Kingston University. And then obviously, edge devices, it kind of feels like we’re going like a lot of these things. The trend just kind of changes from one side to the other side. As you said, before, edge devices were sort of put on the back burner for, you know, higher, I suppose CPU power at the core. Now we’re flipping it around, because probably because we’re trying to measure more things on the edge. Isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. All right. Well we’ve gone through that? Thanks, man. Some of the other things that go on at Mobile World Congress, and this isn’t really a podcast about Mobile World Congress, but it is about next year in 2020. What you can be seeing is a little bit about sort of, you know, what, what sort of markets or trends are we going to be focusing on? And if you are already a Pangea partner, or you’re just looking to get into the market? Like, what about the investment opportunities? Like where should you be focusing your time, and the resource of your business to go forward? Look, I mean, I think some of the main bits that I’ve seen over the last four or five years is that IoT, and some of Bernie’s caveat does affect a lot of industries. But some of the trending ones that are coming up, you know, things like IoT, and warehousing, I think there’s going to be a sort of a mass focus on what are we doing to optimise this incredible demand for on demand services across our entire life. So Amazon, for example, been around a while, but every time we’re looking to shop online, we’re looking things to be delivered to us, our on demand, requirements are only increasing, and, and IoT has to support that potentially through how we warehouse and how we look after the goods before they get to come out towards us. And I think that’s quite an interesting topic that might start to crop it in in the near future. There’s also a lot of improvements that IoT can really bring with the way that we commute to work, commute to school, kind of commute anywhere, you know, I don’t think anyone has ever not used Google Maps, maybe there are one or two who’ve never used it. But for example, I was in lucky enough to be at the Rugby World Cup, just as I mentioned that South Africa are the world champions now. But I was at the Rugby World Cup recently. And as a foreigner in a country like Japan, if there was no kind of sensory information going around from the from the bus telemetry, for the weather situation, and kind of where I needed to be, I would not have made it to the games on time. And I think IoT that’s just a very small piece that IoT helps the commuters I think it’s going to get even more important. And when we have more accurate time and more information, allowing us to, you know, just optimise the way we commute so that could be quite an interesting one coming up in the future maybe one while mentioned as well. I think Smart City applications are gonna take a massive leap forward. Chris mentioned edge device improvement, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, all of those actually do support a very strong, smart city improvement I think you need a vast vast majority of devices to be connected in order for a smart city to truly be smart and to work in cohesion. You know right now we’ve got better telemetry bits we’ve got, you know, smart bins or we’ve got the bus connecting to the way commuters work around as I mentioned before, but for true Smart City environment, everything has to work together and that means everything from the drain covers to working with the way the weather is going to come in, to talking to the police services or the emergency services to help people out and I think 5G helps that you know, we start to get like Dr. Arslan mentioned in previous podcasts we did which is all about Massive Mobile Technology connecting many, many more devices, Wi-Fi 6 might enable that as well, in terms of what we spoke about earlier. So those are the kind of the three trends, I think, I think IoT warehousing, to help support on demand requirement from just the human race. Definitely improvement in Smart City, and the kind of leap forward, we’re looking to get there. And obviously, I think IoT is going to help just the way we commute going forward. Just to add to that a little bit about where can we, you know, put ourselves in terms of investment or where else, we’d like to maybe go, I think there’s gonna be a consolidation or there really is a consolidation, but even even more in terms of network benefits. You know, right now, in the UK, we’ve obviously got our four key networks all talking about whose 5G is better and when it was released different times and who’s got who’s going to have the better outcome. But one of the things that we’ve cotton onto earlier is obviously, you know, why, why offer one network when you can offer multiple networks, I think the consolidation of services, particularly on things like we offer, Multi-network is going to continue to grow. And that’s not necessarily just the pitch. I think that’s just fact. I think that’s just a way to think about why do I need to rely on various networks when I can have one connection allowing me to do all of those networks available to us. So that’s kind of the trends I think to be going after, I definitely suggest that the resource and the focus is into how you enable your partners to understand more and more about how the Internet of Things is going to drive additional revenue from your customers, potentially even unlock new opportunities in the sectors we mentioned today. I’ve kind of sort of gone through all that. But I don’t know if Chris or Bernie anything you guys want to add about? Maybe some markets or investment opportunities?

Chris Romeika
I think, well, the only thing I quickly said, I think we’re it’s going to be very exciting in the next few months when 5G you know, not 5G phones, but 5G devices, devices and routers start coming along. You know, I think I think most all of the networks now said there’s 5G rolled out in the UK, I mean, in you know, probably in one High Street in eight of the main cities, but that’s gonna expand really quickly. So it’s gonna be very, very interesting starting to get those 5G routers out to out to the partners out to the market.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, absolutely. Before we sign off anything else, from you, Bernie, anything else you want to add on?

Bernie McPhillips
I think that you’re just interested talking about investment, etc. And where those bets might best be placed? Yeah, I think we’ve talked a lot again, in the past about the various types of plays in IoT, so those that would play while the vertically and specialise in an end to end solution. So it could be in telemetry or retail, security, etc, I think there’s a lot of investment to be had going forward to kind of the horizontal players as well. So you’ve already mentioned devices, and how exciting that’s going to be in the future. But then there’s also going to be big investment opportunities and those that then choose to specialise in platform, whether that’s analysis or operational, etc. Software. And all of the other kind of all of the the pieces of the IoT jigsaw I suppose because they’re the people who kind of specialise in a more straight up solution, or something that is a slightly more horizontal; connectivity, software, platform, analytics, devices, and all the things that go with that. So we, the reason why we love this market so much, and why it’s so exciting to me is because it is so vast, and at times difficult to predict. But I don’t think what’s not for debate at all is how huge it’s going to be, and how much how exciting it’s going to be and hopefully how much fun we’re gonna have along the way as well. Right?

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, look guys appreciate both your times and the listeners. Thanks again, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. If you would like to head over to our blog for IoT tech guides and sector insights, I’d really suggest you do that. There are some more information there that you can maybe you know, using your own team conversations or kind of with your customers or if you want you know, give us a call informations on the website Pangea-group.net. Or maybe, you know, follow us on LinkedIn, or even better, you know, sign up to our to our newsletter, one of your account managers or through the website, lots of really cool insights and information we do thre. So thanks so much, and we will look forward to the 2020 insights this is Dan Cunliffe Managing Director. Thank you.