 This is JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perine and on behalf of my team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual CEO roundtable. We're bringing together top industry experts talking about topics important to our industry in our monthly series available right here on JSA's YouTube channel and on JSA Radio, the only tech and telecom podcast on iHeart Radio. These monthly roundtables lead us up to our on-site CEO roundtables at our industry networking events, the telecom exchange. Our next telecom exchange is due here on June 20th and 21st in New York City. If you'd like to learn more about the telecom exchange, you can go to thetelecomexchange.com. Today's roundtable is brought to you on our JSA video platform, which allows our panelists to log in virtually from anywhere, care of our friends at Pinnacle. Okay, we've got a fun, fun show for you today. We are talking technology and the environment, the future of sustainability, and I'm honored to introduce our guest moderator, Mr. Michael Goodenove. Michael is the Digital Transformation Officer of WoW.com, that's W-H-O-A.com. Michael is the Catalyst for Digital Innovation and Technological Transformation within the company. He is also the co-founder and VCTO of the Cognitive Consortium, a well-known cloud visionary. Michael designed the consortium to provide market research expertise around the integration of networks, cloud computing, and big data. Michael, thank you very much for joining us today. Would you please do us the honors of introducing the subject matter and our expert panelists? Excellent. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Dean. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. Throughout our course of history and working and personal history and the avenues that we end up taking, we're really oftentimes caught asking ourselves, what are we doing to make a change? What are we doing to really help impact the future? At WoW, we focus very much on cybersecurity and protecting that individual entity that's out there and the corporations that are out there focusing on threat prevention and threat detection. We really get caught in asking that question often. We find amazing people like the panel that we have today and organizations that we have today. Today, we have a group of people who are not only looking towards the future of that sustainability for our kids and our children's children, but they're actually taking the action and being a part of major, major innovations and change. We're really lucky and I'm honored. I personally just want to reach out and say thank you to all of you folks for being here today. It's a real special thing for me. We have with us Dawn Rossini, who's the chief creator and head of strategy at the Cognitive Consortium. The Cognitive Consortium is working on some amazing projects that start all the way out end point in Mars and coming back and then as we come back more to our nucleus and the Earth and a lot of the work that's being done with Zachary DeMotto and Zachary is with a company called Niwa. They're at gitniwa.com and they're an organization that is looking at the sustainability with hydroponic growth and their water conservations of hundreds of gallons to one and really giving us that ability to look towards a future. We also have with us Ken Owens, who is with Cisco and he has been a thought leader in this industry for quite some time. He's innovated things like virtual data center as a whole and is now moving on through the Cisco world as a CTO over in that space focused on the cloud side of it and I'll let him deal with his introductions. But I really just wanted to say to all of you, you are the change makers. You are the future makers doing it and I appreciate it extensively. And so with that, why don't we take a moment and let Dawn, would you like to do an introduction for a minute and realistically you are focused very specifically on some projects that are literally out of this world. So why don't you go ahead and let us know a little bit of the fun things that you've been working on. Thanks, Mike. A little about my background, I know I'm coming from marketing and analytics. I got into the IT industry in around 2004 and I came in as a pricing analyst and I just like using data to solve problems. And that's what led me to what we're doing today with the Cognitive Consortium and to what we're doing today with the Mars project. My latest collaboration right now, we're working with the company in DC called DOBIS and what they do, they consult and manage global businesses and governments actually by leveraging the power of outer space. We're currently working on a product and a project that's going to do space-based manufacturing. We're bringing 3D printers to outer space so we can do not only space-based manufacturing but actually print pods that people can live in when they arrive in outer space. And we're using some great materials and it's a really exciting project because we get to use the applied sciences that we're all involved in right now which is IT and science on the engineering side with the space program to just really innovate things that we're using today like sensor technologies and things like that. It's awesome. That's just absolutely astounding. So you're doing the things that we dreamed of as kids, right? We sat back and heard about traveling to the moon and you're actually creating space-based manufacturing. That's just absolutely fabulous. It's astounding. At the end of the day, I think that a lot of people are afraid of the technology. They're afraid of what technology innovation is going to do and if they're able to hear stories of what comes to us from Zach I'd love to hear some of the stories that you're doing with the improvement of our waterways in Chicago and some of your floating gardens and hear about what you're doing with NEWA because what we do here on Earth is the number one focus, how we protect this planet right now. And so would you like to talk just a little bit of how that, and it's IoT, right? It really is a connected device touching the Internet, giving data again through the analytics and the importance of this technology and use of this data. So would you just kind of step us through a little bit of what you guys are doing and how that's really affecting us? And I know it's been in the news and we've been wildly successful recently, so congratulations to you. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, so my background is in food and technology. I took a little detour in the kitchen and distribution, but then I came back full circle in my career to really focus on how does technology in fact impact the environment in different ways? So with NEWA we're using IoT and smart software and hardware to enable people to learn how to grow for themselves. We will be putting a system in 50 different countries and what that does is that we're able to learn about the different indigenous crops around the world and how they can conserve water and how they can use a mobile phone to grow for their families everywhere from Ukraine to Chile to Chicago. So that's really exciting because we've got to expand what we know and use data and IoT to push that envelope even further. On another note, we're part of Urban Rivers, which is a nonprofit here in Chicago, putting artificial wetlands in the Chicago River, which is just basically floating gardens, but we're actually going to start testing what open water hydroponics really means on an IoT stand. So we're putting sensors to test the water quality, the contaminant levels, what are the plants uptaking. And then one of my dreams next spring is to actually test the edibles and open water hydroponics, but that has nothing to do with IoT. However, the data that we derive on the indoor and on the outdoor air cultural sense allows us to learn more of what it can be moving forward in the future and how innovative it really can be. So it's really exciting because that allows us to understand areas that we didn't really know much about say 10 years ago. Yeah, and so from the layman's perspective, the reality is you're giving the average homeowner the ability to grow a crop that's indigenous to any other country or any other ecosystem than their own and you're actually giving them the ability to have a green thumb, which that's 40 years worth of tribal knowledge to a farmer that's been working those fields. And so you formed a community around that to take that knowledge and to take that information and share it. And you set across 50 countries within your launch. That's absolutely astounding. I mean, that's amazing. It's amazing. And with that comes water conservation. With that comes the ability to not ruin crops or whatnot and so forth. So I mean, again, it's such a commendable value. And then we have Ken Owens, of course, and Ken being the top tier of Cisco's food chain. Ken, you're experiencing some of the most amazing projects and innovations that are coming out right now. Why don't you step us through just a little bit of how that IoT and how that community is really thriving, especially under a lot of the value that Cisco brings and a lot of the consumers, whether it be partners or whether it be actual customers, loving the work that you're doing in that space too. But yeah, fill us in. Yeah, definitely Mike. Thanks for having me. It's great to be on this panel with Dean and Don and Zach. It's an honor. So at Cisco, we've been looking at, you know, to the impacts of IoT and all of these devices connecting to all these other devices. And to the point that Zach was making some of the security aspects around this. You know, we look at drones and some examples and mapping out terrains and waterways and looking at, you know, sort of the pollution in the air and some of the other issues around, you know, things in the environment that the drones are great at detecting. To connect those drones back in, you need architecture and you need designs that allow you to communicate and connect these devices together. And so we joined a consortium called OpenFog. And OpenFog is trying to sort of look at how do you take IoT and the networking and the security and the concerns around device to device communications and how do you address some of the architecture and some of the governance around those. Which then leads to, you know, another area that Cisco is really involved in investing in is cloud. How do we look at these edge nodes and these cloud environments, both public clouds and, you know, sort of IoT type of clouds. And then lastly, when you kind of put all that together, what I've been looking at a lot lately in my job is what I've been calling the Internet of Dynamic Things or IODT. And this is this concept of trust and governance around, you know, we just today accept a smart phone talking to some end point app that that end point app is really a good actor and is really doing what we expect that app to do. And these devices have the same issues in some of these manufacturing plans. Some of the fields that we work in with our drones, you just sort of expect that you're getting real data that it's valid. And there's nothing, you know, men in the metal tacks are pretty easy when you're talking about open air communications. And so trying to figure out how do we secure these dynamic things? How do we allow these devices to communicate securely is a really big part of what we have to work on in the future for IoT. Yeah, it's a major concern. Obviously, we focus on our cyber secure cloud platform. So we really address that cybersecurity layer too with you, you know, these organizations, much like your own Zach and Dawn and others that are out there, you're collecting a massive amount of data, which is feeding incredible analytics, giving us the ability to do all that you're doing right now and know how to dial that information in. And we're dealing with lots of environmental variables right in every direction. And I think that's the value that the data brings it identifies for us all values so that we can actually bring an even keel or a measurement that we want to be consistent within that space. And the security of that data is ever more important today than it is anywhere else. And for me, you know, my biggest message out to the CEO level is don't wait. You can start implementing security plans now, especially around the cybersecurity layer as easily as moving into a cyber secure cloud platform like mine, or by bringing in your own layers, which obviously have pop pros and cons to both sides of it. So with that said, Dawn, you know, environmental variables, I mean, space for goodness sake, what larger place could have more inconsistencies, especially from Earth to Mars? How are you guys kind of dealing with that? What are you can you kind of explain what you're running into there a little? Well, right now, one of our biggest challenges is the latency between Earth and Mars. There's so much research that goes into an endeavor this big, the latency between Earth and Mars is the reason why we want to embed cognitive neural networks into the machinery. So that something out there can self heal without human interaction. It could take 24 minutes to communicate back and forth. So we're trying to solve that problem with machine learning. But that's just one practical application. There's so many other companies out there that are doing things with outer space. And again, the innovations that come out of having a stretch goal, like manufacturing on Mars or even manufacturing on the International Space Station. That's the kind of thing that'll give you really great technological innovations that will have practical applications here on Earth well before we get there. So that's why it's it's a great endeavor to really, really reach literally for the stars or the planets because the innovations that'll come out of something like that will be able to solve some problems really early on here. Awesome, awesome. I'm kind of reversing the order of interview just in case you guys didn't catch that. So can I pop back to you and then obviously Zach finally, you know, come back to you in the in the end stretch here but can, you know, with the world of IOT right so I baked my turkey this weekend with my IOT device that that monitor its temperatures so I went to the store and I knew it was still good. And, you know, I installed lights literally the light bulb itself carries IOT and I'm personally monitoring the watering systems and other pieces of my greenhouses. IOT is exploding I have 50, 60 different objects in the house that are IOT today. What is important for you from you to CEOs to the executive levels of these companies. What part of IOT is not being adopted today or how do you discern what is not really being successful in that space is that is that a or should I go with that question differently for you. No, I think I think I get what you're asking, Mike. So I think the two areas that I talk with CEOs, the most about security. So the trust aspect, the, you know, the privacy concerns that they need to be aware of and they need to work with their employees on. I think it's probably still number one. And then the top, top discussion we have with CEOs. I think the second one, even though, you know, I don't have my Star Trek theme on for Don, I think, you know, looking at, at how we take advantage of some of the new technologies that are going to be coming out, driven by companies like Don's and driven by, you know, things that we do in the research communities and a big part of any sort of a technology like IOT is going to be the academic efforts that are underway. So a lot of the universities are doing interesting research in this space. And so it in general CEOs and their employees have a difficult time understanding what trends are going to be important, what what aspects of research they should care about. And so I would think, you know, in my opinion, taking a look at the security aspects first and then how do you take some of these new technologies and adopt them is the second thing. And with that comes to two smaller components of kind of an open fog architecture. If you will that we've been working on, one is the programmability. As you kind of mentioned without programmability, I think Don mentioned right if you don't have the ability to sort of manage and monitor this information and make corrective actions in real time. By the time you identify something smells bad, or something has gone wrong is too late right you have to sort of be able to pick these things up before you get to that point of a human involvement because otherwise is too late in most cases and the last piece then is the sort of the scalability of a solution. So too many times I think enterprises take this idea of a new technology and they put in a very small little package and they say let's take this little piece of the technology and deploy this. And then it just sits there until it's, you know, out of date in two or three years right and so being a sort of deployed the solutions that are coming back in from from academics and from these open communities into your enterprise and then put it in a manner of continuously integrating and continuously deploying and updating that environment to keep it real and to keep it active and to keep it updated. That has to go into the first days they plan for the CEOs I believe. Awesome, awesome. I think you know it brings me directly into the question for Zach right so you know Zach obviously there's there's issue with as you roll something out as you want to test something new. You might be building a prototype a sensor a device that doesn't necessarily have communication to a larger size platform, or the need for a cloud because it's individually connected at this moment. But as you grow into a grander scale, those needs and those domain demands kind of change right so as you move towards the enterprise version of what your product stacks are, or the different other potential markets that are out there. You know, generally a product that comes out has a tough time finding the natural progression of where it should go within the marketplace. I think you guys have found a very natural progression with that the concept of scale that Ken was just talking about a moment ago. That is really your next step and although you've you've chosen a cloud platform that cyber secure. You know at the end of the day I think there are other things like how do you communicate with a rover secure Bluetooth or over another protocol that's available with that statement right with that with that with that. What are your thoughts on that scale what are your thoughts on the need for that scale, or the need for that that hierarchy of communication and aggregation of data. Well I mean one of our biggest concern is like the durability reliability of the network because like I was mentioned earlier we're going to just from our launch we're going to put a system in 50 different countries. Now obviously like there's big carriers that allow us to have a strong network, but we don't we don't know really what to expect because some of those customers may be in rural areas. So there's number one so connectivity as we scale the platform from just enable one to a larger size system or even enterprise. Now we have people that are uploading information from all over. And so like for us like the reliability is on my our biggest concern security is definitely concerned but I don't know if you want to be hacking and someone's cherry tomatoes and want to like you know ruin their harvest. I think that's definitely something we need to think about if we are like enterprise. So we're an enterprise level. I feel security be something that will come into a more a higher priority because they may have a lot more money at stake and you know when there's more money at stake there's more opportunity for you know situations to come about that are negative. And so like for us the platform of reliability is my biggest concern. And number two is how do we how do we organize all the information that we give it back to the community. Right. So like if you're uploading a repeating from Italy or something from you know I don't know you know Ukraine or something. We have to make sure that's like streamlined. It's simple and it's it's obviously fast because people want you know they want it to be quick they want to be convenient. So reliability is still at the end of the day like the number one fact that we have to think about as we scale out security feel will be maybe further down the road. So that's that's what we think about and that's what we do a lot of our testing on that are outside of plants. We test reliability. I mean I can probably turn on a light with the system in Spain now but what if we have like 250,000 people on the network. Half a million. So that's a different it's a different level. Absolutely understood. And as as one of the folks who who work with you diligently out on the side. I got to say security's got to be a top priority but this is a common theme. This is a very common theme across an organization who's on that ramp up right you don't have the security expertise what you have is the expertise around. Agriculture what you have is the expertise around technologies you guys have an amazing platform you have an amazing development team. The reality is this is the fort this is the shortfall that a lot of organizations come to. But my statement oh my statement to you is and this is everyone out there. Realistically it can be put into place rapidly by choosing that platform which is the reason you made the choices that you did with us but. You know that that is a you need to implement right away you need to start that focus right away. Your comfort is where you do your things well right but a security person needs to be a part of that total picture. For a lot of those other organizations you're right now again nobody's going to be hacking in others tomatoes. But you are not limiting anyone to the crop that they can grow with your technology and so you never know where that ends up going and so again. You know you don't you don't advocate for people to take pictures of certain areas because it's not a positive application right if you're building an app that wants to take pictures of something you know. So with that though let's shift into a conversation real quick with Ken and on that security boundary. Ken blockchain I mean I've got to bring it to the to the forefront here right the reality is is every major bank that I'm dealing with. Are utilizing and starting to implement blockchain implementations. It is a community based transactional model that allows us to have a true chain of custody. The CEOs that are going to be keying into this how important really is that blockchain and environmental policy and disruption from your perspective from a Cisco perspective. Definitely from from a Cisco perspective and working with large financial institutions and with some of the fortune 500 we definitely see a huge interest in blockchain. We were doing quite a few proof of concepts and code development efforts with our customers in the space. And there's three areas that I kind of like to talk about with blockchain so the CEOs sort of understand why they should care right. The first one is just the breach proof of that communication channels that are being opened up in each of these different sorts of financial trades. Personal information is being exchanged across different transactions that are happening in the larger enterprises so it definitely has an impact in helping to secure that communication line. There's also something we've been working on and it's a Linux foundation project called Hyperledger. And so we feel like creating a distributed ledger database technology that will help you not only enforce the trust that you're putting in place with these devices, but also hyper blockchain gives you the ability to have the accountability and the audit ability which is everyone on this call understands without audit accountability and audit ability. You don't only have a strong technology solution and so for those three areas, communication, trust, accountability and audit ability, those are sort of the top things I mentioned to CEOs. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, you know, 100% realistically, you know, compliance is number one. Well, we're PCI compliant, ISO, we have a HIPAA audit, we stand on a regular basis with our third party auditors. That security value, that policy driven layer is so imperative in order to be able to really continue from a, again, from a sustainability perspective in order for me to sustain my technology which is helping us sustain as human beings. You know, I keep getting caught on the fact that that's so far a policy, writing a policy is only after you understand the actions, the roles and responsibilities and the steps that get you there. For Dawn, I mean, you know, you guys are starting in an environment where you don't even really know what variables you're going to be working against. What sort of materials? I mean, you guys are starting at the beginning again, right? You're even starting with the discussion around materials and what materials to be used up in Mars. How is technology helping you in that space? How is that cognitive side helping you? Well, thankfully we are working with so much just decades and decades of research. At least we've achieved enough to understand what the environment is. We understand what kind of materials would be possible in a place like that. So that's where we're starting. We're starting with the existing research and then we're innovating the existing tools. I mean, right now we went from 3D printers that were just printing carbon. And now they're printing with titanium. So that's the kind of thing that we're doing. But I actually want to go back to build on what Ken is saying. Good, thank you. Yeah, no, I really love the idea of blockchain. I don't want it to get lost on any of the CEOs out there that right now we're in the sharing community. And Cisco, I bow down to Cisco for, I think, leading the charge so long ago in open source and allowing the community to always innovate. I think that it really endures to our benefit to really democratize technology. And then to go back with what Zachary was saying, what he wants to do with, he wants to do exactly that through agriculture. And we've got people that are working with satellite telephony and launching low orbital satellites into outer space so that they can just pick up pings from sticker sensors all over the world. And, you know, there's a company that I really admire Helios wire. They're innovating, they're building these satellites, and they're on track to be able to track five up to five billion devices in the future that with their satellites, they're launching every I think 18 months, tracking these getting sensor technology and getting the information to the entire world to these rural communities that can't even access the internet right now. It's going to cost him cost us $1 a month for that sort of data. And he's doing it already. He's working with Nigeria right now he's working with Asia. So it's really incredible to know that there are companies out there that are into extreme connectivity and want to really democratize this technology. That's absolutely amazing, Don, it really is. You know, I think the bottom line, and really the key to the message for a lot of the CEOs that are key in for us today. You know, it's really about shifting into action, right, it's got to be about shifting into action and you all are so successful at that. You've taken ideas that most would have, you know, Walt Disney was scoffed at it a lot in the very, beginning right so it's been very short amount of time that someone would have been scoffed at for their ability to just dream and think big. How do you guys shift into action. I guess, let's start just at the top Zach will go from Zach to Ken and back down to Don Don if you don't mind being the tail end of that. Can you guys just give a shift to action, whether it's really a plug back to your own organization or not but how do our CEOs start taking that next step without it being a huge cost to that. That's a great question. I was just actually talking to my partner in the rivers of the day because you know we've been at it. Four years meet two years and now finally putting something in the water and I know it has to do with new water IOT, but it's like there's enough. Well, there's two answers. One is enough resources that can be distributed that we all can benefit from number one. And number two, is that in the areas that you know Don was saying like rural areas that you know just the fact that they can use their phone to like pay for their bus and their banking is like a simple thing for us who take for granted that like is monumental for them. They're not looking to use AI. They're not using to have driverless cars or self driving cars. They just want to have the ability to like pay for stuff in their everyday life in like in a world that's in the 21st century. So, you know, taking action is about technology you're working on that's kind of bigger than yourself bigger than the company. And that's kind of why the two projects I'm involved in. I mean, it's just me personally is that it's not about number of rivers when you want it's about giving people ability to grow food and improving the rivers but using technology that impacts not me but generations after so the action I feel like it's more like a necessity because it's not about just us and it's not just about our generation. And I know it kind of came from two different angles that just like my kind of my gut reaction to that question. Take action where there's necessity. I mean, absolutely. I absolutely love it. Can it just just add to that. I think there are two things I would add or actions for the CEOs. One is realize that that iot isn't just a fat it is it is sort of transforming all of our industries. It's not just a local phenomenon. It's going to be a global marketplace as well. And so get involved. Educate yourself now educate your company today. I wouldn't wait at all. And then if you're looking for resources, you know, Cisco has tons of resources in this space. We're willing to partner and help you in any way we can and then in open source communities as open fog and those you know, hyper ledgers so that there's a lot of open community opportunities to get involved and then Cisco and other large companies are happy to help and help drive and educate what we can. Excellent. Don. And I'd like to say with the CEOs we meet so many of the cognitive consortium that just don't even know where to begin, because they're so tied up in the wearables. I think that's the way that everyone's understood iot. So they're tied up in trying to understand how do I innovate when I'm just, you know, a chain restaurant or something like that. So I just sit there and think of ways that I can get them to stop worrying about missing out and start really dreaming big because the great thing about this technology is they can go for their pipe dreams and their pie in the sky ideas, and it's so inexpensive. And I don't know I guess I'm probably going to really touch a nerve with Zach and can and I know you Mike. With this one right here. How many dev ops professionals are sitting in a country. I mean in a company collecting dust, because their companies don't realize how valuable. They can be if they just handed over a sandbox and a Cisco environment or well environment or something like that, where they can play and tinker and innovate without breaking anything. So let them play let them play and let them grow is that what you're saying. Awesome. No, that's that's absolutely outstanding. You know, I think and then just as a final end all as a final end all key value to this you guys I I again personally want to say thank you for all the efforts you folks are putting in on a regular basis and really helping the sustainability that's happening out there for for my kids and then my children's children because that's really what it for me. It's about the community. It's about the people around me. With that, can each one of you let me know you know for our viewers that are out there. Where are you going to be next. Where can we see is there a place where we can catch up a show is there a lecture that we're going to be where can I catch you next. Well, I mean, you could go for us on Neewa and urban rivers. We're heavily integrating social media. There's no like upcoming speaking events. Those have been more impromptu but always reach out to us, you know at Neewa at get Neewa or at Urban Riv. We are always here to talk to people that want to do something that has to do with environmental technology because that's what we focus on. Brilliant. Ken. I'll be at the open source leadership summit in Lake Tahoe in February and then Cisco live in Berlin. So you can always reach me there at Ken Owens 12 on Twitter. Brilliant. Don. I can't say that I have any upcoming projects right now that are confirmed. So I would just reach out to us on at you can actually direct message us through Twitter or reach us at the cognitive consortium website cognitive consortium.com. And I'll keep all of our upcoming events advertised on that. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Yeah, we have a number of blogs that are launching over at woe.com. And we have a whole multitude of different announcements PR PR Newswire has a big piece out on us and so forth. So you guys, I look forward to the next one to doing this. I so appreciate your time. Dean, thank you to you and to your organization for being such awesome hosts. We really, really truly appreciate it. And back to you, my friend. Thank you very much, Michael. And same to you, panelists. Thank you very much for being here. I feel like we have only just begun to dip our toes into this subject matter. So let's do this again real soon. If you want to see see this and other monthly virtual roundtables on demand, plus the calendar for upcoming roundtables, both virtually and at the telecom exchange, check out Jamie scott.com. That's J-A-Y-M-I-E-S-C-O-T-T-O.com. And for the telecom exchange, that is the telecom exchange.com. Thanks everyone for tuning in to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals and JSA Radio, your voice for tech and telecom. Thanks again. We'll see you soon.