What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Harnessing IoT for Operational Excellence with PwC's Guidance
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the power of IoT to revolutionize your business as Rob from PwC's Connected Solutions Group shares his expert insights. Prepare to be enlightened on how integrating smart technologies into everyday objects can drive efficiency, innovation, and substantial financial rewards. Our conversation with Rob is a deep dive into the strategic process PwC employs to transform operational data into actionable insights, ensuring businesses stay ahead in industries as critical as healthcare. With PwC at the helm of one of the largest private IoT networks in the U.S., we explore the real-world applications that are not just reshaping businesses but also streamlining compliance with stringent regulations.
This episode is a treasure trove of information on the latest trends in IoT, especially the advancements in consumer sensor technology and battery chemistry that are extending device longevity and slashing costs. Rob gives us the lowdown on how these technologies are not only making waves in the private sector but are also catching the attention of government agencies. We also get an exclusive glimpse into PwC's SignalGraph platform and its upcoming operational AI features, set to take the industry by storm. And for a touch of relatability, we share a chuckle over the universal experience of being the go-to tech whiz in the family. Join us for an engaging session that promises both to educate and entertain.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, what an interesting guest today. Honored to have PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC's Connected Solutions Group today. Rob, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. How are you doing, Evan?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. Look, I was intrigued to learn that PwC has an entire technology and products arm in addition to its services, and we're going to talk all about IoT and transforming business through the Internet of Things, but maybe before that, introduce yourself your role, your sort of mission within PwC.
Speaker 2:Sure, so I'm Rob Mesereau. I'm a partner located in Washington DC, but we do business all over the world. As you stated, I lead our Connected Solutions IoT practice for the world. As you stated, I lead our connected solutions IoT practice for the firm, and really our mission, as we continue to evolve here, is really about data intelligence as a service and we provide business outcomes for our clients using private networks for our clients using private networks, sensors, sensory data where we're able to pull operational data out.
Speaker 2:We run it through our intelligence engine and then that creates the outputs we're looking for.
Speaker 1:Well, you make it sound so simple and straightforward, but I mean there's a lot of complexity behind that. So explain how the group is put together. And you know, helping businesses succeed with IoT is kind of a different mission. Usually it's all about the technology and bits and bytes and speeds and feeds. But how do you engage with a client around your capabilities? I mean, you're right, there is a lot of complexity there.
Speaker 2:We like to just simply state we make dumb things smart because that's what that operational layer really is.
Speaker 1:But there is a lot of complexity around that.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, we are the one of the largest private IoT network operators in the United States.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:But there is some complexity there. We actually have warehousing, quality assurance, shipping a two-hour truck roll from any client in the United States and Canada. So there's this whole machine that sits behind this IoT practice to make all of this stuff happen for our clients, wherever they are.
Speaker 1:So let's get into some of the benefits. You know there's so many technology vendors in the Internet of Things area, almost every level of the stack, from service providers to device makers and the middleware and applications. So you know how do you look at building solutions and solve problems Like what's the front end of a typical project? What does it look like?
Speaker 2:So generally, where things start is we'll get a call from a client or we're engaged with a client and they're like we have this problem. And you know that's essentially at our core. That's what we're doing is we're solving problems with technology. So then we go in and we really unpack that problem. So there's a lot of advisory and strategy up front. So we're full of strategy through execution. So we'll go in, we'll really dive deep, then we'll architect the solution, then we'll source it, we'll build it, we'll test it and then we'll deploy it. Then we'll source it, we'll build it, we'll test it and then we'll deploy it. And then at the end of that, what we're doing is a managed service. So we're managing the solution on behalf of our client. The majority of the time I'd say 99% of the time we're running and operating the network ourselves, this private IoT network that I mentioned earlier. We're dropping the sensors, we're doing all the deployments. It's really turnkey. So really all the client cares about is the business outcomes.
Speaker 2:What's the data I need? And then you know getting that data and being able to really pair it and bring it together with other types of data. So that would be on-prem data. So I like to refer to that as dump storage, because everybody's got a mountain of data inside of their enterprise. But how do you get to it? Normally you've got to do a query. You're only going to get the data that you're actually looking for, and it's not really that useful, but it's just sitting there.
Speaker 2:Then there's the third-party data. So you think about, like ESG applications that may be weather, weather patterns, things like that. So we're able to fuse all of this data together with this new data set, this IoT data set, which is temporal, which means it's time-based, so it's allowing us to create this new sort of record and way of looking and analyzing the data. So then what we do is we pour all that data into our unified data platform. That really brings it all together, aligns it, configures it in a way that it can be pushed into SignalGraph, which is our intelligence engine. So let's think about it in a way that it can be pushed into Signalgraph, which is our intelligence engine. So let's think about it in sort of the old database analogy right, garbage in, garbage out. So the unified data platform turns the garbage into gold and then it pushes it into the intelligence engine. We're able to look for patterns and anomalies 24-7.
Speaker 1:Wow, what an incredible proposition. Garbage into gold. I love that. And when you talk to business leaders and technology leaders, how do you sort of justify some of the long-term benefits of these investments the ROI, if you will, or other metrics? How do you think about that before you even start a project?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know we're getting more and more into that. You know the good news is with IoT and where the IoT business has evolved is, you know, the sensors everything's getting super inexpensive these days, so the value proposition just keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger, just keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger. So we're seeing massive return on deployments now where, you know, in some facilities.
Speaker 2:I'll just pick on healthcare for a second, just because we're doing healthcare space right now, but per hospital, per year, we're looking at saving hundreds of FTEs and literally millions of dollars per year per facility. So it's really a no-brainer when it comes to adopting, you know, an IoT approach to facilities management or healthcare in general.
Speaker 1:Such an important topic these days, particularly in healthcare. I could spend an hour drilling down on that marketplace for the last maybe we'll come back to that and there's such a vast landscape of solutions. I think a lot of customers, cios, others, are overwhelmed by this landscape. So how do you see yourself on the continuum of solutions? How are you different, maybe, than other companies offerings out there in the market?
Speaker 2:So you know we're very different, I think, from other IoT solutions providers. Most people come into the IoT space and they're basically providing a point solution Like I'm going to tell you it's cold chain, I'm going to tell you your freezer is at X and if it drops below Y I'll send you an alert. That's really the opposite of what we do, because we're looking at really billions of data points. As I mentioned, we take your on-prem historic data, we take your external data. We're fusing that with IoT, we're putting in this new parameter of temporal or time based attribute to all of it, which makes it all super powerful, and we're giving you outcomes that not only that you want.
Speaker 2:That's going to solve your immediate problem, but it's also going to give you a lot more insight into how to better run your enterprise and you know again, this operational data layer which is, you know, really understanding people and things and how they're functioning inside of your business, that you don't currently have any insight into. So it's a brand new data set. It's extremely powerful. What it does is it informs you on. You know how you can more efficiently run your business and, as I said a lot of times, it's actually giving you a lot of time back, giving your employees a lot of time back, because we make dumb things smart. You don't need seven engineers running around your hospital walking around your roof just examining what the ventilation system's doing in the ORs. You're already ahead of that. You're on the predictive maintenance. You're not putting out fires, you're anticipating fires. It just changes the whole dynamic of work.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a great proposition. You must have tons of examples of clients that you've worked with. I don't want to ask you to pick a favorite child, but maybe give an example of a business and how they're using IoT to improve their operations specifically. I don't know if you could talk about an example, I can't mention any clients.
Speaker 2:But since we started with healthcare, I'll stick with healthcare because, you're right, it really does get me out of bed in the morning. I'm very excited about the work we're doing inside of health care. It come in and we'll drop about 12 different solutions inside the box, so that takes care of a lot of their compliance issues. So joint commission comes into a hospital. They basically show up and they say okay, we need to understand these 30 things that are happening inside your building and that's a massive firebomb.
Speaker 1:So it takes everybody off of whatever they're doing.
Speaker 2:You're going to focus on this for the next two weeks or longer, and oh, by the way, if this isn't perfect, we're going to start fining you and we're not going to stop fining you until it gets fixed.
Speaker 2:So it's important and the Joint Commission has an important job. But again, if you're stressed in terms of staffing, this becomes a real headache really fast and it becomes extremely costly. You know very simply and very inexpensively. So if you need to understand if exit signs are lit, you need to understand what's happening with sprinkler systems in the building and make sure everything is the way it's supposed to be running you need to understand.
Speaker 2:you know things that are really important to the operation you're building, like the boiler in the basement, things that are really important to the operation you're building, like the boiler in the basement, and that's also a safety issue too, because buying boilers is essentially a bomb in your basement. Right, you need to understand what's happening with that.
Speaker 2:It can't be serendipitous where the engineer goes down and, you know, checks the dial at the right time. So you know these are simple, simple things. So you know these are simple, simple things. You know we've developed and have a lot of intellectual property around, things like meter reading, where we're able to read any meter inside of basically any building. So think about ESG. I was speaking at an event recently where the Joint Commission was actually there and was announcing a lot of the initiatives that they're now putting in place of more regulation on top of hospitals. Because of the waste in health care has gotten to such an astronomical amount, they need to get their hands around it and it's not wrong, but it's again it's coming at a bad time. So I got up after the Joint.
Speaker 2:Commission and everybody's bummed out noticeably because they're trying to figure out wrong. But it's again, it's coming at a bad time. So I got up after the joint commission and everybody's bummed out noticeably because they're trying to figure out how they do this and I think they strategically put me on after that. But I was just like you know how many of you and this is CEOs, these are people that run hospitals.
Speaker 1:How many of you raise your hand?
Speaker 2:if you understand how much energy your building consumes in a month, or you know what's your carbon footprint I know everybody's like, I have no idea Raise your hand. If you understand the air quality inside of your health care environment Nobody like can you believe that they?
Speaker 1:don't even know that. What the air?
Speaker 2:quality is inside of their building full of sick people. So again, easy, easy things. And then you start correlating, you start bringing all these data sets together and it really tells an amazing story. So I wish I could bring up some dashboards and show you some examples, but it's game changing some dashboards and show you some examples, but it's game changing.
Speaker 1:Wow, it sounds like it, and your enthusiasm is so infectious and you see a lot. So what you know when you go into a project new project, greenfield what have you? You know what are some of the challenges or roadblocks or pitfalls you typically see when you start using IoT solutions.
Speaker 2:You know we've been doing this for eight years now. We started the practice eight years ago and we've gotten really good at it. We've got the network. Everybody forgets about transport. That's another thing that you know I mentioned.
Speaker 2:You know we've got this very large footprint of private IoT networks around the country and in Canada and now Mexico, and you know that's not trivial. And to make sure that it's, you know that you're running a secure network, that you're not opening your clients up for risk, that you're actually taking ownership of that. You've got 24-7 monitoring on it, but it is not going down because some of the stuff we provide is critical to the ongoing, you know, either maintenance or running of somebody's business, and sometimes we have safety solutions in there as well. So it's highly critical and a lot of people just you know they'll build IoT point solutions that sit on top of Wi-Fi. We would never do that. That's horrible. Our enterprise customers already have a hard enough time with their Wi-Fi and people stacking, and then you've got this integration with the IT department. That generally adds a lot of time and a lot of complexity.
Speaker 2:So our ability to come in, drop a network that is reliable and monitored, that our clients don't even have to worry about, is a really big deal. You know, in terms of you know what sort of issues might come out of our discussions and ongoing work with our clients. We get our best ideas, our best solutions. I would say, out of the you know 50 plus patents that we now have, you know 30 of them came from ideas from our clients. Because you know we're going through this generally, once you start dropping this this was, you know, I'm actually eight years old. Eight years ago, we said here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make dumb things smart, we're gonna give our clients a taste of the data intelligence and then we're gonna we're hopefully they going to just do our work for us, and that's exactly what happens. I know that never happens in sort of a startup environment, which is what we were, but that's exactly what happens Once they got a taste of the data intelligence, like, oh, we need more, we need more, we need more. So where else, you know, can we drop these sensors? Hey, can you do? Can you do something that tells me how clean our water is? Can you tell me about water evaporation.
Speaker 2:In parts of the country right now, water is becoming a real issue, like a hair on fire type of issue. So how do I recapture water? What's my evaporation rate? How do I purify it so I can reuse it again? Is all that expense even worth it? How do I purify it so I can reuse it again? Is all that expense even worth it? Or should I be trucking it in? Or really obstacles? But we get challenged and those challenges turn into new solutions. And those new solutions get scaled across every vertical you can imagine, from mining to retail, to quick serve, to warehousing, to fulfillment, healthcare, hospitality, on and on and on.
Speaker 1:Wow, you just rattled off a giant chunk of our economy, so that's amazing to see the impact. I think you and the team were recently at Mobile World Congress, as was I, and it was amazing just trying to stay on top of some of the trends and opportunities and silicon and software and the standards are changing From your point of view. I mean, what are some of the bigger trends you're tracking over the next few years in IoT?
Speaker 2:I mean 5G, obviously, since you brought up Mobile Congress. It's important to us. We're watching it. Robotics is super important. Robots, at the end of the day, is just another sensor for us, just like a drone, so we want to see more of those. I think we're finally, finally, finally I don't think you were in our suite at CES. You need to please come by next year. We had several robots in there, point where I can really recommend that to a client with a straight face because they're getting less expensive than a full-time employee. So there's an all-terrain vehicle robot that I really like for surveillance on campuses, and the battery life is finally there. The reliability is finally there. You can't just walk up and push it over. So the function is really really good and B from a potential situation where they could be in harm's way, I think is a really strong use case. So we're getting there. So I'm really excited about robotics.
Speaker 2:I'm obviously really excited about AI, we've already incorporated, or have been incorporating AI for many, many years into our intelligence engine, signalgraph, which I wish we could do a whole thing on SignalGraph, because it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:Please let's come back and do that. I'd love that, as would the audience, I'm sure. And speaking of AI and robotics, I would agree. My son's college has the Starship robot scurrying all over campus, and when I go visit him I'm like I didn't even have internet or a mobile phone when I was in college. So what a difference a few decades make. But the other area you help clients with, of course, regulatory and compliance issues, a thing PwC knows a thing or two about. But what does that mean for IoT or other aspects of deployment?
Speaker 2:You know the regulatory side. We're generally getting more from the enterprise side. You know I mentioned, you know the huge regulatory burden for the healthcare space there's been.
Speaker 2:You know every industry has their own regulator that you know they need to be able to work with and you know the risk and regulatory side of what we do is actually really important Because you know I mentioned a lot of times our clients will come to us with a problem and I would say more than half the time it's a regulatory issue. So it's a hair on fire kind of thing. I need to get this solved. It's costing me money, I'm getting fined, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So especially like in quick serve, cold chain. Those types of environments super important. But again, I think the good news there is the cost of these sensors. One of the things at CES and Mobile World Congress that I love, love to see is all the consumer sensors that are now coming into the market.
Speaker 1:Like.
Speaker 2:I'm buying sensors for my house now. You know a lot of this stuff that we were deploying in the enterprise three and four years ago. We're not even get it for pennies on the dollar and you're deploying it in your home. That's great. That is such good news because it's driving the cost down. Once the components, you know, get to a certain point, you know, it just drives everything down. Seeing the same thing with battery. The new battery chemistry is amazing. So everybody wants a sensor that's tiny and they want the battery life to last forever. So you know, that's always a hurdle for us is like well, you know batteries don't last forever, so let's think about the operational aspect of this, you know again how we are different from you know, your typical IoT provider who's providing, you know, essentially a point solution.
Speaker 2:We think through things like battery chemistry. We think through the operational aspects of okay, well, when you want this, it has to be in this form factor let's talk about. You know the hours it's going to take to charge the system, the processes that you're going to need to put in place to make sure that this thing is running the way it was specced to run, and we're going to hit our SLAs. So we kind of do that a lot. But you know the new, the new batteries that are coming out. I'm just super excited. Six months, you know, I think we're going to be moving from a situation where we're seeing, you know, two years of battery life. You know we used to get excited about six months, now two years. Soon it's going to be five years, five years of life, of asset and we're pretty much done.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, so you're in the DC area. I imagine you have a tremendous amount of interest from government, state, local, federal, government, dod Are you seeing them adopt?
Speaker 2:IoT and transforming in the way you think they could, in terms of integrating it into government or in terms of embracing it for the industries they regulate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think internally. I mean, we're all talking about smarter, more efficient digital government at state, local, federal level. Have you seen much adoption on the federal side of all of these technologies yet, or is it still the private sector that's kind of driving this?
Speaker 2:It's very much the private sector that's driving this. For sure, we've seen a lot of interest, mostly from safety and security, from the public systems, and you can just imagine what that is. So you know there are solutions there. Remember, when we first opened up the practice, we were pulled into a bunch of things. We used to be a lot more active on the public sector side.
Speaker 2:And we actually sold off that practice. So, in full disclosure, it's not hasn't been a huge focus for us because we literally weren't allowed to do it. We are starting to kind of think more about it these days, but now we used to think more about smart border walls. We used to think about fire prevention, and how do we understand fire movement in a different way?
Speaker 2:Actually, we're involved in some piloting around using VR headsets for firefighters to be able to more safely navigate and understand and predict how fires would be interacting and again bringing in lots of data. You know weather and wind and historic data. So what did it do when these parameters were in place, you know, at the last big fire, kind of thing. So these are big, meaty problems. These are we love to think about and, you know, build and experiment and, you know, eventually deploy solutions that solve these important problems.
Speaker 1:Well done. So what are you excited about over the upcoming weeks, couple months? Are there any events out there? I imagine lots of customer interaction. What's on your personal radar?
Speaker 2:So we do have a lot of deployments coming up Again. Healthcare has just been very much a big one. We've got a big pipeline customer. That's really interesting in terms of what we're able to do for them. We've got a new release coming out of our SignalGraph platform. We're sort of branding this concept of operational AI. So we're taking that sort of people, places and things inside your enterprise and giving it insights into your business sort of people, places and things inside your enterprise and giving it, you know, insights into your business. So you know that is going to be really anytime, you know, a new Rav of SignalGraph comes out. I just I get a little geeky about it.
Speaker 1:Speaking of geeky, you know you're obviously an expert in this space. Have your friends and family neighbors sucked you in as tech support for their smart home problems, or have you managed to avoid that requirement?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you reminded me. I do not disturb because I'm sure I've gotten, you know, two messages from my mother.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the nature of the beast.
Speaker 2:I've been in the tech business for 30 plus years, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm the tech guy. You're tech support. Well, thank you, Rob. Thanks so much for joining and just giving us a peek into the amazing work you're doing at PwC. And thanks everyone you know reach out doing at PWC. And thanks everyone Reach out to PWC. They put out great content on their social handles, where I discovered their work here in the connected realm, and we'll see you out and about in the industry, Rob, Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Alan.
Speaker 1:Take care, thanks. Take care everyone, bye-bye.