On this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Vantiq’s Vice President of Marketing, David Sprinzen, joins Ryan Chacon to talk about how 5G, IoT, and low-code development work together. David begins by introducing himself and Vantiq, along with providing use cases of the technology his company works on. They then transition into low-code, IoT, and 5G roles in the industry and how they all work together. David discusses what low-code enables and the benefits it provides for customers. The conversation then moves more high-level with a discussion about industries with the most adoption, advice for companies beginning their IoT journey, and what success looks like for these businesses.
About David
David Sprinzen heads marketing, training, and industry solutions at Vantiq. He comes from a diverse technical background in Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Computational Neuroscience. He brings this practical knowledge to the discussion around how technologies like IoT, AI, and edge computing can drive business transformation, address the growing societal needs around sustainability, and make the world operate more efficiently.
Interested in connecting with David? Reach out on Linkedin!
About Vantiq
Vantiq is the leading low-code platform for building and deploying real-time distributed solutions. Built on a next-generation event-driven architecture, Vantiq enables highly scalable and low-latency analysis of real-time streaming data from IoT devices, cameras, and enterprise systems to drive situational awareness for safety, security, and operational efficiency. Vantiq was founded in 2015 by software veterans Marty Sprinzen and Paul Butterworth, co-founders of Forte Software.
Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:
(01:25) Introduction to David and Vantiq
(03:00) Use cases of the technology
(04:31) Low-Code, IoT, & 5G
(06:37) What low-code is enabling
(10:04) Benefits on the customer side
(12:00) Industries with most adoption
(15:55) Advice for customers looking to adopt
(17:38) What does success look like?
Transcript:
– [Voice Over] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.
– [Ryan] Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All Podcast, the number one publication and resource for the Internet of Things. I’m your host, Ryan Chacon. If you are watching this on YouTube, we truly appreciate it. if you would give this a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel. If you’re watching this, or sorry, if you’re listening to this on a podcast directory somewhere else, please feel free to subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they are out. All right. On today’s episode, we have David Sprinzen and the vice president of marketing at Vantiq. They are a company that is providing a leading low-code platform for building and deploying realtime distributed solutions. On this episode, we talk a lot about how 5G IoT and low-code development works together to talk about like what low-code actually is. If you heard that term maybe you’re unfamiliar and unsure what it means. We talked about how low-code is enabling, or what it is enabling for businesses, benefits of it, what it’s helping businesses do, challenges that they’re seeing in the space and what you can really do to help achieve success when it comes to an IoT deployment. So all in all, a ton of value. David is fantastic guest, so I think you’ll enjoy a lot of what you’re listening to; but before we get into this episode, if you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market but don’t know where to start, check out our sponsor, Leverege. Leverege’s IoT solutions development platform provides everything you need to create Turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go iotchangeseverything.com that’s iotchangeseverything.com and without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All Podcast. Welcome David to the IoT For All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.
– [David] Hi, Ryan. Great to be here.
– [Ryan] Absolutely. I look forward to the conversation. Love to kick it off with you having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience.
– [David] Yeah, absolutely. My name is David Sprinzen. I run marketing for a company called Vantiq, and what Vantiq does is we build realtime distributed software applications.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. And as it relates to kind of more of the IoT specific side of things, talk about your role in the space and what you all do.
– [David] Yeah. So what we’re doing is kind of taking IoT devices, sensors, also kind of IoT adjacent things like AI cameras and connecting them into integrated business systems that drive more than just the detection of things; but actually, how are businesses effectively responding to what’s happening in the real world as it happens? So that often takes the flavor of smart-city, smart-space, smart-building type solutions. It can also do things like being able to have advanced security systems, access management, creating better customer engagement and visibility. We cover the gamut across a lot of different digital systems, most of which are taking IoT sensors and AI systems and connecting them into one data-layer to understand what’s happening and drive business reactivity and intelligence.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. Any specific use cases you would mind sharing to kind of show how the technology and your offerings are kind of being used in the real world. It kind of acts as a way to kind of bring everything we’re talking about full circle to see what can actually be done.
– [David] Yeah. So smart buildings is an area in particular that we’ve done a lot of work in, and that can be buildings kind of a pretty general landscape, right? That can be things like a smart-office. It can be a factory, it can be a hospital; but talking more generically, in a smart-building, we’ve done work where they’re able to use sensors on doors to just know access management, right? How many people are coming in out of a door at any period of time, connecting that to cameras that some sometimes can do facial identification, but oftentimes are just knowing is there a person there or not. Non-identifying camera systems and then knowing where people are located, what their status is, if they’re known as an employee, if they have a badge, if they’re a guest, giving real time visibility into who is where, and if there’s an incident, right? Being able to automatically detect if there’s a security incident. We’ve also done things with auditory sensors; for example, being able to hear noise that’s suggestive of a problem that needs to be addressed. It can be yelling, it could be a gunshot, but that’s a common example of trying to build technology into being able to manage and respond to situations before they escalate.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. I know one of the topics we wanna talk about today was around low-code development, kind of how that works in with IoT and even they have the kind of growth of 5G. Can you kick this part of the conversation off by talking a little bit more about what low-code development actually means for kind of the layman and then how that really fits in with the IoT space, 5G and so forth to provide, a new kind of offering and enablement for the industry?
– [David] Yeah, so low-code is a compromising a trend that’s happening in the entire software and technology industry, which is how can we make it easier to build these systems, right? We’ve done a lot in terms of the advancement of hardware, of sensors, of AI systems; there’s a disconnect that’s happening, and I think where people are running into challenges is, how do you actually turn that into something that’s of business value? And it’s not just building something, it’s how can you do it so that you’re not sucked into a multi-year resource pit of you trying to figure out exactly what to build all of the levels of expertise involved; and being able to decrease the risk of actually getting these things operational. So low-code can be, there’s kind of two different pieces of it. One is it’s giving access to tools to a larger audience, so being able to take IoT, for example, and say, business units that might have a need to implement IoT but don’t have either in-house IT or technical skills they wanna be able to figure out how to do a lot of that on their own; and then the other part of it is how can we make it so that the time it takes to build and deploy, and operate and evolve these systems, isn’t so much of a lift that we’re getting stuck in the ideation phase, and we’re not able to ever move into the actual deployment and seeing the business value.
– [Ryan] Absolutely. I would like if you could kind of elaborate a little bit on what low-code, and it’s role in IoT is doing to enable, what is it really enabling for businesses? I know you mentioned kind of the technical requirements needed and maybe not as much needed with a low-code type solution, but even like deeper than that, what is it enabling for organizations? Is it kind of helping them get to market more quickly? Is it helping enable other use cases that maybe weren’t a possibility before? What is it really kind of truly providing from a value standpoint there?
– [David] Yeah, so I think it’s that they do not need to have the depth of expertise to developing enterprise-grade IoT systems, right? That’s a big challenge, is technical resources are a sparse commodity, and being able to have the ability for non-technical or, only semi-technical groups, being able to really deploy IoT in a way that is enterprise-level production; that’s a major benefit, right? I think that the other part of low-code is that you don’t want to have to recreate what has been done elsewhere, right? And that’s, I think a big challenge with IoT in general, is there’s a lot of really great ideas out in the world of how you can leverage these sensors and devices, and cameras; and how you can create new value out of them. But it’s much harder if you’re saying, “here’s an idea, I have to build this from scratch.” Or if you’re saying, “this has probably been developed in some form or another already, and how can I maybe take what other people have done and figure out how to leverage that into my own environment;” and that’s one of the things that we’re doing. We have this idea of composability, and composability is kind of in the low-code domain but it’s the idea, is instead of it. So low-code, what that means is you’re not having to go into hard programming languages to develop something, it often is you’re you have drag and drop pre-built analysis patterns, pre-built integration points. You’re doing a lot in like a visual graphical interface, And that’s very powerful, but to take that a step further, what we’re doing now is creating application templates and application components that it’s not even where you have to start from, from a low-code, you’re actually starting from something that is 80% of the way towards the complete application, right? So for example, so for example, right now we’re working on a lot of retail and smart retail initiatives, and what we did is we created a handful of pre-built retail use cases. So that is doing customer analytics: knowing where people are located in store, doing inventory and pricing management, using IoT sensors to locate high-value objects, and being able to manage the location and status of your inventory and supply chain; and then also being able to use AI to detect if there’s something like a bill has occurred, or if there’s too many people waiting in the cashier line. All of those are pre-built so that you’re able to then implement it using just customization and not having to develop from scratch.
– [Ryan] Absolutely, yeah. How about on the customer side? What are other benefits that you’re seeing? Like, what is this enabling organizations to do in the relationship they have with their customers? Are they able to offer different kinds of solutions for them? Are they able to engage with them in different ways? Like, what is this kind of enabling on that side of the conversation?
– [David] I think it depends a lot on who the customers are and their maturity level in terms of IoT and what they see as the initial value, and it also obviously depends a lot on the industries, right? So for example, retail is just now really starting to figure out what IoT can do for them, and it’s been, a push there has been we need to figure out strategies to get people back into brick and mortar environments, so can we use technology to help give us visibility into those environments and then also create better customer experiences when they’re in there and make the environment more efficient in general, So how can we optimize the resources we have On kind of the other side of things. So for example, customers in energy and utility space, so we’re working on things like smart-water meter projects, and the challenge there is there’s device manufacturers that have created incredible smart-water metering systems, or water-meter devices, or sensors that can detect flow-rate, and that a lot of interesting pieces of data about the system but it becomes really hard to implement that at scale. So what we got involved in is creating a system where it was actually able to handle 10 million water-meters; all IoT devices that were integrated into one shared networking system to manage it.
– [Ryan] Fantastic, yeah. That’s, that’s pretty impressive. You mentioned retail, you mentioned utility space, are there any other industries that you’ve kind of you’ve seen really get drawn into or adopt more of low-code type solutions or be a better fit for low-code solutions than perhaps others? Just kind of curious, who’s kinda leading the way in adoption when it comes to low-code type solutions that they’re being adopted?
– [David] Yeah. I think defense and federal actually is Is very open to that as well and we’re working closely with all sorts of interesting defense contracts, how to implement, like for example, biometrics on infield staff trying to create kind of out-of-the-box security systems. So I think that’s space where there’s been a lot of interest in how can we build these systems more readily and test them without having a huge amount of a technical team that’s constantly required for every project. I think, let’s see, another domain is shipping. So, and transportation in general, so we have a handful of projects in the automotive and shipping domains of trying to be able to track location of objects. Understand, so here’s a good example: we have a project with an insurance company that has low-power IoT sensors that they put on the doors of shipping containers, and the entire sensor, the only purpose of it is detect if the shipping container was opened or not, But that over millions of shipping containers, what they’re able to do then is understand patterns of where things get opened. If they’re opened in an area like out of sea or in a port where they’re not meant to be. So being able to do theft detection, being able to understand maybe areas that they need to avoid because there’s higher levels of theft. So giving them visibility into all of their right supply chain in terms of low-power sensors. And then another domain that I think has become really interested in building these kind of rapidly developed low-code solutions is in the public sector, doing things like emergency detection and disaster recovery or disaster response; and so, what I mean by that, is we’re working with companies on doing AI and low-power IoT sensors that can detect fires in the wildfire planes of California, and being able to have access to cameras that are able to survey in 360 degrees some of the mountain ranges of California, and then they have ultra low-power or even what are called Scavenger, which means that they’re not powered themselves. They’re able to pull the power from the sun and solar or from vibrations, but those kinds of sensors where they can deploy them and never really worry about having to go pick them up again. And they’ll send a single-time radio signal if there’s a fire; and if they catch on fire then you have now visibility by connecting all of those into an early fire detection system that can serve the wildfire groups, the CAL FIRE. For example, being able to understand how that data is serving, not just the detection, but then also in real time. Where is the fire spreading? How are we addressing that spread? How are we getting visibility into the status of the fire? So I think IoT is absolutely necessary for tackling some of those challenges, and then the question becomes, how do you make it so that it’s feasible for a fire department to implement those kinds of solutions; they do not have the technical talent to build something custom.
– [Ryan] So when you work with customers and engage with companies, what advice do you have for them on how to best approach adopting these types of solutions, getting started on their IoT journey; just outta curiosity, since we’ve talked to a lot of companies where low-code isn’t necessarily something they focus on, but with the growth of low-code, I think there are probably some nuances to the approach you take, the way you think about it, and how you can get to market more quickly. So for those out there listening, what would you kind of share with them as advice and thoughts on how to kind of go about this the best way?
– [David] Yeah, well. I think everything to a certain extent is in ecosystem; and by that, I mean, there’s often no one player who has all of the answers, on either on the system integrator side, on the technology vendor side. Everything is going to require a group of technologies and of skills coming together. So what you wanna figure out is who is the team, or who is the the company out there who can really guide you through a very large and complex technology ecosystem; and so a big part of it, so what we’ve been working on is creating recipes so that you’re not having to figure out, okay, what are all of the sensor companies out there? What are all the AI companies out there? What are the use cases involved? Heres a set of recipes that we have seen have success in your industry, and so you’re not having, you’re not having to have all the answers for yourself.
– [Ryan[ Absolutely, and when You do work with these companies, what does success look like? Like how do the companies really achieve success? Are there particular or ROIs that companies are kind of coming to you looking for? Just outta curiosity, kind of how we talk about the best approach and advice on how to get started, but there is that kind of end goal of success and probably best practices in how to get there.
– [David] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think ROI is very much project and use-case specific in a lot of cases, right? So it’s hard to make a blanket statement on that, but I would say oftentimes success comes of just actually being able to implement on the timeline that makes sense to them, right? And I think that, that goes back to some of the low-code necessities. If you say, “okay, we have a great idea, we can build this thing and we can get it operational but it’s gonna take two years, or even a year,” right? That’s a timeline in which, especially in this post-pandemic world, right? We have to have a significant more agility than that for us to be able to show value. And so I think being able to say, “we can have something that’s maybe we call it a pilot but isn’t going to be scrapped. It’s actually the foundation for us scaling this thing up, having something that’s operational in a matter of weeks; that’s where people go, “okay, I can actually use this now, showcase what can be done quickly,” and then all of a sudden I’m able to bring that to the stakeholders involved. I’m able to bring that to the people controlling the way we wanna actually scale this so that we can say, “look, this is how much we’re able to do in a couple weeks here,” and now we see exactly what kind of ROI we’re able to get by implementing this at scale.
– [Ryan] Yeah, I think it’s one of the biggest benefits of all of this is it’s been one of the biggest prohibitors of adoption in the past is just the time it took to get to an ROI, to get the buy in from other stakeholders, to get budget approved, to get to the point of where you can start to scale. So the faster you can get from idea to actually seeing ROI, the better; and I think this, what we’re talking about here today is a really big enabler. That’s going to help drive the industry as a whole forward, as it gets adopted more and more, and make is more widely available for companies to get up to, or get up and running more quickly. So I totally agree. Last thing I wanna ask you before I let you go here is for our audience out there who wants to learn more, kind of stay up-to-date on everything going on at the company, maybe follow up with any questions, what’s the best way they can do that?
– [David] Yeah. So we have a website vantiq.com where you can find a lot more information about our technology, our use cases, some of the projects we’ve been involved in. We have a newsletter where we’re not only talking about what’s going on in our world, but we’re trying to highlight what else is going on outside of us; we are very much aware that we are not the only answer to the world’s problems, and we need to work closely with the sensor companies, the AI companies, and the implementation companies to figure out how can we, at the end of the day, how can we make it easier for these things to drive business impact? And that’s what we’re in the business of doing. So, yeah, our website is probably the best place to get started. And of course, if you’re interested in contacting us, you can reach out to us on our website and we are we’re from right now, we’re in the process of rolling out an early adopter program to figure out how we can find the right companies to showcase what these technologies are able to do at a low cost to them.
– [Ryan] Fantastic. Well, David, thank you so much for your time. And this has been a great conversation, a super relevant and trending topic right now. So I’m really glad we were able to speak on this and would love to have you back at some point in the future.
– [David] Absolutely. Thank you, Ryan. It’s been a pleasure.
– [Ryan] Thank you. All right, everyone, thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT For All Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel, and be sure to hit the bell notification, so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we’ll see you next time.
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