What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
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?
XYTE's Vision for the Future of IoT and AV Industries
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wondered how the world of IoT device management is transforming industries? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Omer, the visionary co-founder of XYTE, as he unveils the groundbreaking solutions his company provides. Discover how XYTE's unique no-code platform is revolutionizing the way connected device manufacturers operate by merging the realms of traditional IoT and business software. Omer shares the inspiring story behind XYTEs inception and the company's mission to provide seamless cloud connectivity and efficient management of devices through their innovative six-hub structure. From live device monitoring to firmware updates, learn how XYTE is addressing urgent industry needs with its robust, tailored platform.
Gain insights into the strategic advancements within the AV industry as Omer discusses how Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are achieving unparalleled operational efficiency and cost savings. By embracing platforms like XYTE, MSPs can significantly reduce the need for physical interventions, allowing them to serve more clients with existing resources. We dive into the critical aspects of security and compliance, highlighting XYTE’s impressive certifications such as GDPR and SOC 2 Type 2, and recent security enhancements. Omer also sheds light on the collaborative nature of XYTE's platform, which fosters cooperation between device manufacturers, MSPs, and end-users, ensuring a smooth onboarding process that underscores ease and speed. Join us to explore the future of IoT management and how XYTE is paving the way for a more connected world.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, fascinating discussion today with an innovator in the world of IoT device management and more with Omer from XITE. Omer, how are you?
Speaker 2I'm doing great Aaron Pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker 1Well, thanks for being here Really interested in the work you're doing and maybe introduce yourself and the genesis of XITE and the kind of problems that you guys are solving these days.
Speaker 2Yeah, so my name is Omer Born and raised in Israel, live in Mountain View, California, nowadays. Worked for many years for relatively large device manufacturers in the professional audio video industry. I left the company about six years ago to found XITE, together with my co-founder. To date, we have raised nearly $40 million from Sequoia partners, Intel Capital, Samsung, BlackRock and some other leading investors, and really, when I left my previous employer, I realized, I guess, two main things. The first one is that devices need to have a much more robust cloud platform to be able to be managed in the cloud and for these device manufacturers to start and adopt more innovative business and go-to-market models, kind of like those we see with Apple, Tesla and others. And the other thing is to be able to do that, they need to have a very robust cloud platform that in most cases, it's simply not their core competency to develop once. So we followed. Excite raised some money from venture capital, as I mentioned before, to develop this cloud platform to serve device manufacturers, their value chain partners, system integrators, dealers and their and customers.
Speaker 1Oh, fantastic value proposition. And what makes your approach different or unique versus traditional solutions or standards that might be out there? What's your approach to connectivity exactly?
Speaker 2Yeah. So it's a great question that we constantly keep asking ourselves. And I think Excite is very, very unique in the marketing data aspect, because when you look at the solutions out there for device manufacturers, then you can kind of segment them into two groups and I say that there's almost like a Venn diagram, right? The first group is all the IoT platforms right, they have Azure IoT and AWS IoT and a bunch of other IoT solutions and their main focus is around IoT features such as alerts and telemetry and data and so on, and I don't think that Excite is an IoT platform. And the other group of solutions is, you know, generally speaking, business platform Think about Salesforce and ServiceNow, sap, oracle and others and those platforms are great for businesses, but they're not built for connected device manufacturers or IoT manufacturers.
Speaker 2And what Excite does? Really well, we merge those two circles in the Venn diagram, where we build a purposely designed platform with a business value proposition, but purposely designed for connected device manufacturers. So I strongly believe that the IoT and connectivity are solved problems, not interesting for startups to deal with, right, we can never compete with Azure and connecting millions of devices to the cloud and sending billions of telemetries. But I also don't think that there is much value lies there for the device manufacturers and their value chain. On the other hand, the real question is well, what do I do with this data? How can I leverage the cloud technology to offer my customers, my system integrators, my value-added resetters, new ways to innovate, new ways to run their business, new ways to support their customers? And that's where Excite fits.
Speaker 1Fantastic. So you're helping device manufacturers streamline operations. That's one key area. I mean, how does that work? Maybe describe a workflow or an example that would add some color to that.
Speaker 2So we offer our device manufacturers, customers and I'll maybe elaborate on that in a second. We have almost two products and two different types of customers, but we offer our device manufacturers, customers, a full suite of cloud-based tools. I always like to say that they can be in the cloud without needing to know how to spell AWS. It's a complete no-code platform and the platform is structured in six different modules, six different hubs. We have a specific module for the product people that enable them to very easily connect hundreds of thousands of millions of devices to the cloud.
Speaker 2Connect hundreds of thousands of millions of devices to the cloud and start then getting data from these devices and analyze the usage of these devices and start and trace anomalies in their device operation and so on. The other hub is the commerce hub that enables these device manufacturers to start and configure subscription and entitle licenses to their devices. So we're all very much familiar with premium features we can buy to Tesla cars today to enable full self-driving, right. There is a whole back office platform that Tesla has built in-house to support that, and Apple has a similar thing with their application store and their apps right. But when you think about those two companies, they're really software companies, and no other company in the world can can leverage this platform to start remotely managing, monitoring and then starting to offer premium features for their devices.
Speaker 1Fantastic. So it sounds like remote monitoring and maintenance of devices in the field are key use cases. Are those the primary ones, or what else do you see in terms of the value you're delivering?
Speaker 2management and monitoring in most cases is the initial value, the immediate value that these device manufacturers are looking to get with XITE. Because when this device manufacturer, when they're being a contract right, in many cases their end customer number one request is being able to make sure that all the devices are live and maybe distribute new firmware version to all of the devices and so on. So they have to have some kind of a cloud platform and that's what Excite allows them to do. But what was also very clear to us in the beginning is that if you're selling in an integrated industry, like the professional audio video and the unified collaboration is, which is one of our first target markets, then there's very little value for your customers in monitoring a single brand devices, Because in most cases you'll have a display from one brand and an audio system from another brand, maybe a microphone and a UC system from Zoom or Teams. And what the enterprise customers and the managed service providers, the system integrator, what they really need is a single pane of glass where they can see all of their devices and services in a single pane of glass.
Speaker 2So about three months ago we've launched a new product for managed service provider, for system integrators, dealers, in some cases large universities and customers, enabling them to take all the device manufacturers working with Excite, as well as some others, into a unified interface. And that adds great value to these MSP customers, compared to have 10, 15, 20 browser windows, sometimes open with 20 different monitoring tools. So we bring everything into one window. We allow them to integrate with their native ticketing system notification apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and others, so they can always be proactive, and once we build that, we add great value to the remote management and monitoring aspect to the customer, which ensure much higher adoption rate and retention rates for the device manufacturers as well. And then in many cases, the second act, in a way, is starting to offer, start offering subscription or premium feature enablement based on the XI platform.
Speaker 1Oh, fantastic. So it's funny, you chose collaboration as the market to focus on, given that you're basically trying to improve collaboration between the manufacturers and the MSPs and the integrators. So what is your go-to market? Who is your customer? The MSPs and the integrators. So what is your go-to-market? Who is your customer? Is it the MSP, or is it the device manufacturer or the systems integrator, or all the above?
Speaker 2So both? That's a great question. Both we essentially work with the MSPs to have them manage all the devices for their customers. Whenever they have another brand they're usually working with, if that brand does not already have a cloud that we can integrate with, then we have all the cloud tools for these brands to onboard each devices to the cloud, or, as we call it, to cloudify their devices. And then, in that case, we work with device manufacturers. Once again, in the audio video, we work with some of the leading device manufacturers, including Legrand, planar, bose and others, and we're now expanding to those MSPs and the very large enterprise customers sometimes managing tens of thousands of meeting spaces worldwide, and they absolutely must have some sort of a platform to make sure everything is working as it should.
Driving Innovation in AV Industry
Speaker 1Fantastic. So is your elevator pitch about cost savings. Is it operational efficiency, less manpower from your platforms, or how do you pitch this to customers? So for MSPs?
Speaker 2I think it's exactly that and it's about rolling less trucks, being able to be proactive, signing better managed services agreement or SLAs with your customers and ensuring uptime based on the platform, being able to fix things remotely. Many of those systems integrated today there's 10, 20, 50, sometimes more employees focusing on service their customers. Instead of taking those 50 employees and have them across maybe two large customers, now you can take them across 50 different customers right and grow your services dramatically. I also think that if you look at the analogy of the software world and that's the one I often use with system integrators, I strongly believe that system integrators must change their business. And if you look at what happened in the software world, it's hard to believe. But 10, 15 years ago we all used to go to the store down the street and buy Adobe or Microsoft Office on a CD, take it back home and install it right and those stores.
Speaker 1I used to buy it on floppy disks. So On floppy disks, yeah, yes yeah, the large ones right.
Speaker 2Yeah, five and a quarter yeah, and if you go back there, this store is no longer there, right? And one of two things happened Either the store went out of business because no one is resetting disks or CDs any longer, right? Or they changed their business to become G Suite or Microsoft Office 365 implementation partners. And while with devices it's different, because there's always a physical device to be installed and you can't simply download a 65-inch display from the cloud, I think there's still a very strong force pushing everybody, but especially those MSPs, to opt in more and more into services, because otherwise the devices are being commoditized. Anyone can buy a display. It's best buy today and install it on the wall. And if you really want to offer a better service to your customers, you have to adopt new technology, and that's what Excite and, end of the Day, system integrators do.
Speaker 1Oh, fantastic. So your clients probably have lots of questions about security and encryption and compliance with your solutions. How do you put them at ease when it comes to deploying this, particularly across all those networks and devices?
Speaker 2Well, first of all, when I left my previous employer, I've built that platform for my large enterprise customers at the time that were asking for something that we simply couldn't supply them at the time. So when we built the platform, we built that with compliance and security in place. And today, well, first of all, the platform is completely GDPR and CCPA compliant, certified and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. And by doing and going through regular penetration tests weekly, and by doing so, we actually take a lot of hassle from our device manufacturers, customers and the MSPs, because when they're selling that to some of the largest enterprises today using Excite, they don't have to go and do all those processes which, by the way, are very, very pricey on themselves, but actually say, hey, you know, we're using Excite. They don't have to go and do all those processes which, by the way, are very, very pricey on themselves, but actually say, hey, we're using Excite.
Speaker 2Excite has the SOC2 type report, the GDPR, whatever you need. Excite has that in place and we're building on top of that. In addition, we've spent a lot of resources, honestly, in the last six months or so to drastically improve our security capabilities and features and adding new features such as two-factor authentication and some other auditing tools and so on to the platform to make it really a good fit for large enterprise customers. And without naming names, I can tell you that some of the largest Fortune 500 companies today are using Excite to manage and monitor their devices.
Speaker 1Oh, well done. Speaking of customers, you have lots of brands and logos on your website. Care to share any anecdotes or stories or outcomes on customers you're working with and how it's going.
Speaker 2I don't want to get myself into trouble with some NDAs, but I would tell that some of the customers there that you see have been with us for five years now, renewing from the very beginning where, quite honestly, what I sold them wasn't fully working.
Speaker 2It's a whole different platform today. Some of those customers, especially device manufacturers, did the math and they found out that building the same platform on their own will cost them anywhere between $5 to $8 million or euros, depends on their geographic not a big difference today anyway. And with Excite they were able to get to the cloud with a fraction of the cost within three or four months. So it's a drastic improvement for them. So it's a drastic improvement for them, and I really do think that the most exciting thing about Excite is not one customer or another customer, but it's the collaboration, as you mentioned before, because, unlike any other platform, excite enables the device manufacturer not just to push products and solutions for their system integrals and customers, but actually collaborate with them on the platform, and it enabled the MSPs and the customers to collaborate with multiple manufacturers on the platform. So it's essentially a collaborative platform, which I think makes it very, very unique.
Speaker 1Yeah, it sounds like it. So how does a customer, a partner, an MSP get started? I mean, what's the process, how long does it take and when can they expect to get up and running? Is this days, weeks, months?
Speaker 2So they reach out to us through the website, we take them for introduction and call, we show them the platform, and that usually takes 45 minutes to an hour, based on their use case. For system integrators and MSPs, it's relatively very, very easy. They can open an account the same day and start buying, essentially, licenses for that single pane of glass monitoring tool those some of them do choose to take to leverage our APIs and connect some custom devices, and that can take slightly longer, but once again, not longer than a few weeks depends on how complex they want to go. And then device manufacturers it's usually a more strategic decision. So the process is usually longer, not because of no, we don't because of excitement, because we're missing anything, because it usually takes them some more time to evaluate the platform.
Speaker 2Once again, I think we I believe we had Bose and LeGrand sorry, bose and Atlas, I guess two good examples that announced their cloud platform around Infocom in June and two three months later they launched a platform for the public. So I really don't think you can compete with that if you're looking to do anything in the cloud. Doing something in the cloud in under three or four months is quite incredible yeah, well, well done.
Speaker 1Uh, so what are you looking forward to as we head into 2025? Lots of great events. You mentioned infocomm. I mean I'll be at ces and enterprise connect mobile world congress. Um, where are you headed and um, what are you looking forward to?
Speaker 2yeah, so our biggest focus, as I mentioned before, is the professional audio-video and the unified collaboration industries. We see great momentum and great motion there among system integrators and customers and device manufacturers. Our two main events for 2025 are ISC Integrated System Europe in Barcelona and Infocom in June in Orlando. In addition to that, we just had our AV Cloud Summit about a month ago. It was an online event and we're planning on another online event sometime in May for the industry. And in addition to that, we are going to many other smaller events to visit or support our device manufacturers' customers demonstrating their cloud solution based on Excite.
Speaker 2Our expectation to Excite for 2025, I'm sorry is to keep the same momentum as we are now growing, growing the team, growing our set of customers, adding more capabilities and features to the platform. There's just so much to do, right, and I'm a very as the team knows very well, I'm a very impatient person, so I kind of want it all now and but we're working very, very hard to complete our um, our goals and, I think, more important than anything else, to really satisfy our customers and partners. We see that as a very long-term relationship with them. We build a very strong partnership with many of them. We take very seriously their feedback and requests and continuously push to improve the platform and how we can support them, to essentially support their customers. So I think it's a very ambitious goal to work with all these device manufacturers to do that.
Speaker 1Well, well done. Well. It's an exciting opportunity, great value proposition, and the AV industry has been in a bit of the dark ages for a long time. That's my words, not yours. So getting them into a modern cloud architecture is great stuff.
Speaker 2Congratulations on all the success, thank you so much and also, on a personal note, that I've been in this industry for, I want to say, 28 years now, so I tend to agree with what you just said, but I think it's personally very exciting for me to transform, to help take a small part in transforming this industry and get into a much more modern cloud infrastructure. I think data should deserve it, our customers deserve it and if we can help make that change, I think it'll be a Our customers deserve it and if we can make help make that change, I think it'll be a great achievement.
Speaker 1I agree. Well, congratulations, thanks for joining. Thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing as always, and take care. Thank you so much, evan. Bye-bye.