 on the ground. Presented by theCUBE, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. We are on the ground in San Francisco for a special CUBE on the ground segment with Maribel Lopez, with Lopez Research. We are talking about Dell's IoT special 1510 event. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Great to see you, John. Happy to be here. All right, so we just had Andy on. He's the GM, he's Dell. He's putting the plugs in. Dell's got a good vision. But you're out there talking to customers. You're analyzing the space. What's your thoughts? What's your analysis of Dell, the players on the field? And what are customers doing? Is there value being created? How early are we? What's your thoughts? Okay, first of all, we get a ton of hype. That should be no surprise to anybody. Lots of big numbers being put out, right? I think the thing that was interesting about this event is we talked a lot about what's hype and what's potentially real, right? I think what we're seeing, yeah, there's value in it for customers. I look at the value three ways, right? The first thing you do is you make yourself more efficient. I think the gentleman from GE, Greg, spoke a lot about he had things instrumented and he just made them more efficient. So that adds one layer of value. The second layer of value is data you didn't have before. So you put sensors on things, you put connectivity on things, you can get access to data you didn't have before, context you didn't have before, make your business processes better. I think we're a little early on phase two, right? Phase three, brand new business models created out of that. That's where you get the, you know, house, cook, beef, Pepsi, right? What's the new models, right? You got freestyle machines that are happening, all kinds of great things like that. So I do think there's value. I think we talked a lot about security and how security is still a challenge, but I think we've always had that challenge. So IoT just makes it more challenging. I like your analysis that security is kind of like cut across all layers of those evolutions. Low hanging fruit now, instrument what you got, get the data and then figure out how to disrupt whatever industry you're in to be competitive advantage, got that. Where are we though? Are people scared right now? I mean, what's your take? I mean, you know, we're hearing kind of like, I love IoT, it's certainly intoxicating, it's transformative, it's certainly a long vision. Where's the reality? Yeah, I think we're evangelizing right now. I think when I talk to companies, most of them don't know what IoT is or what to do with it. What does it mean to me? So the biggest question is what does it mean to me? You know, can I save money? Can I make money? Can I improve my net promoter score? Like how does IoT help me, right? How do I make more cash in my business? Yeah, and I don't think there's like a nice logical chain where we say A equals B equals C, right? And there's usually a lot of investment that's perceived to get there, both from technology and cultural change. Are they on their own then? So like what you're saying is okay, there's might not be a turnkey general purpose commercial applications. So it sounds like it's almost the mobile trend we saw. You gotta be in the game and you gotta figure it out. You're kind of on your own. Is that kind of what you see? You're tired kicking. I think one of the things we learned in mobile late was the ecosystem game. I think in IoT they're looking at the ecosystem game earlier, right? So we're starting to see, you know, the people that are networking like the Cisco's teaming up with the people that are in say industrial like the Rockwell's teaming up with the software companies that are the SAPs. We're seeing, you know, Dell come in with gateways at the edge, right? So we're seeing packs come together to say, okay, here's a solution that's semi-integrated, you know, not integrated, but you can at least say, these are my strategic vendors and what do you guys think I should be doing? So they're trying to help drive the vision. So it's not a consumer thing per se. Consumers win or take all Android, iPhone platforms. IoT not so much, but it's winner take most, right? I mean, because you have to have a platform. Who's the platform for all of this? Is it Cloud Foundry? Is it Amazon? Is it IBM? Oracle? I mean, these are the whales. They're fighting for the battle. What's your thoughts on the platform wars? Yeah, okay. So the platform wars are actually really interesting and really early. And I think the surprise of the year actually has been Microsoft, just a tremendous turnaround, right? Azure's got some good stuff going on. In terms of what they've been doing in Azure, in terms of the cloud vision in general, right? So I think that they've kind of kicked Amazon in the pants and that's starting a little interest. I think that- Or in the ankles. Or in the ankles. Yeah, I mean, I would say Microsoft's putting that much of a dent in Amazon. Do you? Oh, I don't think they're putting a dent, but I think that, you know, maybe you could rest on your laurels or you could say, hey, there's going to be some real stiff competition, right? With big brand names that people trust, right? So I think Microsoft's going to be in the game. I think Amazon's still going to be in the game no matter how many people try to throw them under the bus. I think that, yeah. Oh, no, they're definitely in the game. Yeah, I think a lot of people think they're in the game. Who's running the bus? Oh, the new entrance. The FUD factor, right? So we got a FUD factor. IBM, Oracle, SAP. We don't need to name names here, you know? We name names on the cube. You name names. Well, you named them, so there you go. Yeah, so I think for the other ones, it's a little early, right? I think that there will be some people that look at Oracle, but is Oracle going to be it? I mean, IBM's got a really good chance, but I don't think they're playing the game the same way. I think IBM's playing a bigger analytics game. I think they're going to play a lot of data access as a service where they have a lot of the data that you want and they can analyze and give it into your systems. So I think they're going to create a slightly different niche in that space. You know, knowing you and what you've covered, you've been in the software collaboration space, you know software, you know mobility. So IoT is an edge device. It's essentially, not really, it's set up, it's kind of a mobile edge, right? It could be mobile with your wearables, smart phone. What's the enabler? How important is cloud in all this? And what is the software model? Is it horizontal? You bet, I heard you brought up a question, horizontal, vertical. This is an interesting dynamic. Share your thoughts on the software approach, because at the end of the day, the software will define who are the winners and losers will be, and they might have different approaches. What's your thoughts? I think there's two software stacks, right? So if I look at IoT, I see everybody saying, okay, everybody can use energy, right? Is that going to differentiate anybody energy management? Probably not, but it's a really important thing that could save them some money, right? So that's part of the horizontal stack. Security might even be part of the horizontal stack to say, okay, we're going to secure some of these devices, we could use wearables, we could use whatever as a new set of security proximity parameters, right? Then I think where it really gets interesting is, who can take data and use that data in a software application that is meaningful to top-line revenue, right? So are these people that are in ERP and logistics, right? I think the SAPs and the Oracles have a real shot of trying to drive the next generation of revenue on this. I think Amazon's going to drive a data as a service analytics business, I'm not Amazon, IBM rather, service on that, right? The weather data is interesting moving. The weather data, they're Twitter cloud if you're doing marketing, right? So there's a bunch of pricing databases and the like that could come out. So I think that's a different angle that's a software angle. I think we're going to see new entrants, right? Just the way we talked a lot about sort of the Uber transforming industries, right? I think we have yet to see the next IoT software mega player. I agree with you. I think that's a great observation and for the startups out there, there's going to be someone who's going to write their own software, they're going to deploy the cloud and leverage the resources in a unique way, not buying off-the-shelf software to disrupt their market. So I agree with that. So given that, there's going to be some entrepreneurial opportunities. You see a three-phase approach. What do you... I don't see enough investment in that. In what, IoT? In entrepreneurial software-based IoT, that's about a business process, right? I see everybody invest in big and platform, right? Connectivity platform, integration platform, right? Those are great, they're essential, they're not the things that drive the value, right? The things that drive the value what you were talking about is going to be the high-end workflow, getting the process done, getting the revenue in, getting the fuel savings, whatever that is. And I don't see enough investment in that space. Jay Adelson is a VC. If you go see Jay Adelson, he's the former CEO of Founder of Dig, and then tell him John Furrier sent you. You get a 10% discount on your valuation. I'm only kidding, tell Jay that he'll kill me. Okay, so you see the three-phase approach. You see some entrepreneurial activity. Granted, we need more funding in the capital markets. Maybe that gets cleared up or an opportunity for a disruptor. But what are you advising clients right now? Because right now, people want to invest either approve a concept or do R&D. They have some Hadoop, they got some big data. They got some systems in place. What's your advice based on the customer profile? Yeah, okay, so the first thing is if you've got equipment, you've got to think, if you can put sensors on the equipment, can you do predictive maintenance or better uptime or any of that other stuff, right? If you've got logistics, you've already started thinking about this, you're well down the path. I would say anybody could do energy management. It's probably not the best thing. The first thing I'd say everybody do though is try to figure out if you're gonna connect anything, can you secure it? Because that will just screw everything up if you don't get that done, right? So the first thing everybody should do is be trying to figure out what's my IoT security strategy, right? Then you should be talking to all your vendors to see if they plan on collecting any new data sources, right? So are your existing software companies gonna be able to give you the tools you need? It's funny, it's a great point. Totally pregnant, I totally 100% gonna do that. In fact, I threw a haymaker out during the panel here and actually put on my crowd chat and maybe I coined it for the first time. Maybe it's original, maybe it's been used. Shadow IoT. So the IT department has to be involved. It's a fundamental stakeholder, although that's transforming. So you have IT departments changing and you have IoT hitting the surface. So to your point about security, how does IT fit into all this? Yeah, okay, so I think IoT is responsible for the security and the networking capabilities clearly. I think they're responsible for the cloud offering, right? I think that IT should be telling people where they can stand up their software and services, right? And that's something that's like a dead dirt easy for them. Because what's gonna happen? Because they have to secure it too. They have to secure it too. Somebody's gonna come to them and say, I need the solution up in two, three months and if you don't have the cloud presence to do that, if you haven't thought of the security infrastructure to do it, you're gonna say no, then they're gonna go off and do their own thing and that's when you're gonna have shadow IoT. So this is the future trend. Standing up clouds rather than racking and stacking servers, you're racking and stacking clouds. And those clouds could be industry-specific. We could see clouds for logistics, for transportation, for healthcare. It's a big one that everybody always talks about. Governments, so they could be both industry-specific and also vertical-specific. So it could be supply chain for government. Mayor Bacalopas, bringing the signal here amongst the noise and hype of big data. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Appreciate it. This is theCUBE on the ground. Thanks for watching.