CRN IoT Roundtable: HPE, Cisco And Forescout Execs Highlight The Biggest Opportunities For The Channel

The Biggest Opportunities In IoT

The Internet of Things market is poised to reach $1.7 trillion by 2020, according to market research firm IDC, and vendors are set to work with their channel partners to bring customized IoT solutions to vertical markets.

During an IoT roundtable hosted by CRN, executives from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems and Forescout Technologies discuss what they think the biggest verticals, service opportunities, and channel trends are for solution providers. The roundtable, which took place during the XChange Solution Provider 2017 conference in March, included Tom Bradicich, vice president and general manager of servers, converged edge and IoT systems at HPE; Bryan Tantzen, general manager of Cisco's connected industry and manufacturing business unit; and Todd DeBell, vice president of worldwide channel sales at Forescout. Following are excerpts from the IoT roundtable.

Where are you placing your bets in terms of the hottest vertical markets that solution providers can start off with in IoT?

Bryan Tantzen: So, in terms of where to put the bets, I would say two areas. From a vertical point of view, we're prioritizing manufacturing as the biggest opportunity. Something where we need lots of help, lots of partners, to go after it. Connected products is a second one that's really huge. And that's everything from connected cars to connected washing machines. And then the third one is, I'd say smart cities. It's really going through an amazing digitization. I was just at one of the top two cities in the U.S. We're seeing everything from the U.S. to India-based cities. I've got dozens of RFQs coming out of Asia right now around digitizing cities. So that's a huge opportunity that's happening.

And then the final one I don't want to miss, it may not be a traditional vertical, but what we call 'smart spaces.' Which is really, how do we enable not just the non-carpeted IoT spaces, but how do we go after reinventing IT leveraging IoT?

Where are you placing your bets in terms of the hottest vertical markets that solution providers can start off with in IoT?

Tom Bradicich: The manufacturing vertical has, in many cases, an airtight business case. There's a lot of activity going on in oil and gas and energy. The whole smart grid to the power plant. One that revolves around machine-conditioned monitoring and the prognostics of a piece of equipment that is expensive, and if, indeed, it fails or performs sub-optimally, it will have detrimental effects on the business' customer satisfaction. And then smart cities, or smart automobiles, or the famous autonomous automobile.

We have a point of view that I think sets us apart a little in that we don't separate the autonomous vehicle from the smart city. Because, metaphorically, like cellphones and cell sites, where the phone device has to connect to cell sites as it moves along in mobility and traveling, we believe the car will have to do that. And that will drive a tremendous amount of edge computing as opposed to all the information going back to a cloud somewhere.

Where are you placing your bets in terms of the hottest vertical markets that solution providers can start off with in IoT?

Todd DeBell: I think a couple areas that are really driving us, from an industry standpoint, is regulation. So the more regulated industries, whether it's medical or financial, is a big deal right now. I think the other thing we're seeing as a big driver is transit devices. So If you're in a spot where you have a campus, and you have a lot of different students coming on at different times of the day, or different folks coming in and out of the business at different times of the day, that's also driving a lot of the activity.

What skill sets or other areas should solution providers build up that will better position them to take advantage of these verticals?

Tantzen: I see a huge gap in the market right now for what I would call 'total system integrator.' We have thousands of IT partners, we have thousands of OT partners, we have almost nobody who can combine the two worlds together. I think that's the place to put the bets. Build those skill sets. Build a bridge. IT, connecting down to the IoT devices, down to the line of business. That's the place to focus.

What skill sets or other areas should solution providers build up that will better position them to take advantage of these verticals?

Bradicich: So, we see edges being built with IT technologies and OT technologies in cities to handle smart cars. Autonomous vehicles, whether they be buses or trains. And also the utilities that a city might provide from sanitation, to other types of utilities. Water and power as well. But, according to IDC, 40 percent of the data at the edge will be processed at the edge, not the center of the cloud. It will be acted upon and processed at the edge. So then we see a second market of deep, high-performance computing at the edge, which is untapped and pent-up right now.

What skill sets or other areas should solution providers build up that will better position them to take advantage of these verticals?

DeBell: So, from a channel perspective, we're seeing a lot of the business going today to that midsize to large business, on the commercial side. We are seeing the public sectors, as has already been stated here within the group. So, we're seeing it, really, at a channel level, looking at those spots first, and seeing a lot of success where folks are having challenges, too. We keep that under control and make sure they can see the devices that are hitting the network, and secure those devices, and secure their network from anything that's an outside threat.

Can you give a specific use case where your partner base could make money bringing your IoT products to market?

Tantzen: So, a conference room, for example. And it's a perfect fit for the channel partners because they're already providing those domains. But how do you know which conference rooms are being utilized? The utilization rates are so very, very low, of conference rooms. So how do we change, actually providing analytics to know which ones are utilized, what's the rate over time, how do you optimize that? How do you tailor using IoT technologies experienced when you walk into that conference room and tailor it to that specific individual using these new capabilities? Things like that we can really use to reinvent both productivity of the building, as well as productivity of the people.

Can you give a specific use case where your partner base could make money bringing your IoT products to market?

Bradicich: I think right now there's companies, and I'll pick one, a partner of ours Tech Mahindra, that is an SI and a channel partner, and they have expertise in IT and OT, but they don't necessarily, and I'm generalizing to make a point, work together. Now's the time. They can leverage that asset together. We are selling tremendous amounts of servers into clouds that are taking on IoT data. So in many ways, this is a business-as-usual approach. We literally don't have to invent new security, we don't have to invent new opportunities. We just have to get the correct assets together to make that investment.

Can you give a specific use case where your partner base could make money bringing your IoT products to market?

DeBell: So, for instance, medical is a good example where we've had a couple opportunities where channel partners have went in on the medical side and all of a sudden, when they've turned on our product, they've been able to see different devices that were on the network that they didn't see before. For example, we had a number of heart pumps that were in a closet, that apparently somebody cleaned out or moved to the closet, and were off the grid, nobody could find those. All of a sudden, they were on the network, they were in a situation where they could identify what those were based on the footprints and the items that we had helped them with. So, right out of the gate, that hospital had an inventory situation as well as a security situation, as they knew what it was and they knew how to secure it, and they knew what it was from a footprint standpoint.