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?
Resilience, Security, and the Future of Industrial IoT
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The evolution of industrial IoT is transforming how businesses approach connectivity, resilience, and edge intelligence. Digi International stands at the forefront of this revolution, having journeyed from a hardware-focused connected devices company to a comprehensive solutions provider over its 40-year history.
What makes this transformation remarkable is how Digi has woven together hardware excellence with sophisticated software, connectivity, and perhaps most importantly - exceptional service. As their leader explains, service isn't just about fixing broken devices; it's about understanding the context of each deployment and helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. In a world where customer service has become increasingly automated and impersonal, Digi's commitment to responsive, knowledgeable support serves as a key differentiator in complex industrial environments.
The conversation explores how artificial intelligence at the edge is revolutionizing industrial operations. Rather than sending data from remote equipment back to central systems for analysis and decision-making, edge AI allows for immediate action directly at the device level. This capability is already enabling automated service ticket management without human intervention and will increasingly allow for predictive maintenance that prevents failures before they occur - something anyone who's dealt with persistently broken elevators or ice machines can appreciate.
Security and resilience form the backbone of Digi's approach, with multi-layered strategies that begin at the hardware level and extend through software, monitoring, and third-party certifications. As wireless technologies evolve, Digi maintains a pragmatic perspective, favoring cellular for wide-area applications while acknowledging the complex trade-offs in local-area networks. The future holds tremendous promise as technologies like 5G mature and new standards emerge for specialized applications like renewable energy management, pointing toward an increasingly connected and intelligent industrial landscape.
Crossing Borders is a podcast by Neema, a cross border payments platform that...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really excited today to dive into how Digi is shaping the future of IoT, ai at the edge and so much more. Ron, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing. Great Thanks for having me, Evan. How about you?
Speaker 1:I'm great, Really excited for this chat. I mean, Digi International has been around for gosh four decades, Is that?
Speaker 2:right, yeah, our 40th birthday this fall yeah our 40th birthday this fall.
Speaker 1:That's phenomenal. I trust you were not there at the beginning, but maybe talk about your background and how you have evolved from a connected devices company into a full IoT stack solutions provider.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'll give you kind of a brief history of my journey, because every leader is horribly biasing their company's uh trajectory, and I'm no different. So I'll start off.
Speaker 2:I was born seven pounds, six ounces with very no, I'm joking, of course, but uh, so I actually out of out of college, I got into consulting and uh was a wonderful time. I got a chance to get exposed to different industries financial services, manufacturing, energy, uh, computers and really fell in love with wireless communications in particular. And you know you have these times in your life where you have these epiphanies and I had one of these that we're going to be sending data over wireless, we're not going to be using it for voice applications. And the pendulum swung for me extremely hard from consulting and advising companies to starting a company. And you may have heard this before, but there's some good research that says that one of the greatest times to start a company is between 25 and 35, because you're experienced enough to avoid, like obvious pitfalls, but you're actually stupid enough to think you can do it. And so I started a company in fleet management called PeopleNet and we provided onboard computers to North American truckers, eventually sold that business to Trimble and stayed on there for three years and helped build their trans-station logistics practice and was looking for my next opportunity and Digi came up.
Speaker 2:I'm a native from Minnesota, digi's a well-known local company and I've got three daughters. I really wanted to keep in the same school system. So I wasn't prioritizing being a public CEO, but saw an opportunity to really take a company with a rich history of providing incredibly reliable, secure, long-lasting, easy to manage and scale globally long-lasting, easy to manage and scale globally edge-based intelligence and transform Digi into more of a solution provider that still leverages that amazing four-decade history in providing reliable and secure hardware, but adding software services, connectivity to help our customers achieve their objectives more quickly, activity to help our customers achieve their objectives more quickly. And, no surprise, this journey has been heavily influenced by my fleet management experience. Right, and if you think about fleet management, it's the granddaddy of IoT applications. It's the largest, it's the most pervasive globally. We've got this incredibly important edge device that oftentimes interfaces with the driver, interfaces with the computer in the truck to get miles per gallon, to enable e-driver logs, provides a critical connection to both dispatch as well as their shippers and receivers, reliability, security. It's got to last a long time, it's got to suffer some pretty demanding environments and perform, and that's really an inspiration for what we're doing at Digi.
Speaker 2:I wanted to avoid, you know, a second act in fleet management, so we're now into condition monitoring and some other applications that we think will be the next granddaddy of IoT in terms of size and scale. But that's really a summary of what's been going on here. That's really a summary of what's been going on here, and I joke that I'm addicted to these more solution-based businesses because they oftentimes have, you know, subscription contracts, which generates recurring revenue, and I joke that I'm addicted to recurring revenue. I'm not in treatment or am I taking any medication?
Speaker 1:I'm just owning this addiction. That's awesome. Usually, as a tech and wireless geek, I dive right into technology, which we'll do, but you actually talk about service services as a differentiator and say that it's undervalued in IoT. So maybe talk about that first. How do you blend technology with services to ensure that this stuff actually works in the field?
Speaker 2:You know, evan, I think you've probably experienced it throughout your lifetime Service is hard to buy. It's easier to experience it, and so sometimes selling service has to be more of a sleight of hand. Right, and so we embed 24-7 care into our offering. It's not called out as a separate line item. Believe, in this area of the world that we work in industrial sort of you know, heavy business and mission critical technology that service is a key differentiator.
Speaker 2:We, I think, struggle to get service nowadays as, like I have to gear up to call a company if I want to try to talk to their customer service group, because I know I'm going to take a long time to get through the ivr. They're going to really force me to some kind of chat based solution solution. And it's like, hey, if I knew that it could be solved via chat, I wouldn't have called in, right. But I'm actually hitting your relief valve here. I need to talk through a non-standard issue, and our business is full of non-standard issues and it's not good enough for us to just understand how our products and services and software work. It's how does it work for you? So tell me about the context, tell me about the application, tell me about the outcome that you're looking to achieve, and so I think it's less break-fix, it's more how do we get to that outcome together? And oftentimes our technology is interacting with a variety of other technology and it's critical that we help be the glue that gets all that system connected and working.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So, of course, ai is having its moment, and also at the edge, where edge intelligence, the far edge, is really having its moment as well. Talk about how you're leveraging AI to deliver unique insights and automation directly at the device level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we, like a lot of companies, are getting tremendous value in AI in terms of our administrative functions and processes, are getting tremendous value in AI in terms of our administrative functions and processes. But I think, to your point, one of the more exciting opportunities and it's probably got a longer fuse to it is the small language models. We are in a lot of remote equipment. The process today is we're generally connecting to the computer inside that elevator, generator, solar farm. We're then storing that data and then communicating it to our customers' back office systems. Those could be in the cloud, they can be on-prem variety of both and then they're doing some magic.
Speaker 2:To say, well, based on the information I've received from the field, I'm going to ask a person or a machine hey, what do you think we should do? And all of that, I think, will be placed on the edge and you'll be making real-time decisions as to whether to change the configuration, whether to update software or whether to initiate a truck roll from that edge-based intelligence. It won't be this sequential. I'm going to transmit the data back to some central headquarters that'll make that decision in either human or automated format and then tell that third party automated format and then tell that third party.
Speaker 2:Right now, for example, within our SmartSense group, we have enough information on refrigerated equipment that many of our customers are allowing us to open a service ticket when needed and to close it. So we don't rely on the service tech to say they solved the problem. We're asking that machine and making sure that machine is healthy. So it's that trust. But verify thing, so that can happen without any human intervention. Right Versus, you're telling a pharmacist or a retail employee that may be not engaged to make these steps that all could be automated without having to rely on that field resources, either because they're too busy or they're not aware, or they just don't prioritize Got it.
Speaker 1:So I think the word resilience is sort of the word of the decade, personally and professionally, but also in connectivity. It's not just connectivity is nice to have, it's become critical life or death in some cases. How do you think about resilience both, you know, to the device, to your, to your operations, your data centers and so forth?
Speaker 2:You know it's interesting and I couldn't agree with you more Resilience has become kind of the decade's word, if you will. But you know, I think about resilience that the context is that we are, I think, as a, as a society, experiencing a tremendous amount of change and that velocity is increasing and that change comes in all different formats. It could be technology-based change, it could be regulatory change, like we're seeing now with tariffs and other things, right. It can be business opportunities and challenges and the key is the ability to adapt to that change, which enables that word resiliency and the ability to not only make sure that your device can survive changing conditions, whether they be wireless, whether they be regulatory, whether they be opportunities and challenges in business processes, is very, very critical. Now there's some things in life, as you know, that are possible to change remotely, like going from, say, a 4G or 5G radio, but there are tons of things that can be adapted to via software changes, whether they be configurations or complete software updates.
Speaker 2:I've had my second Tesla. I know Tesla and Elon Musk have become a little bit of a bad word, but I had, like VIN number 10,000 of Tesla and Elon Musk have become a little bit of a bad word, but I had been number 10,000 of Tesla and the idea that a side of the radio would be in your car and that your interface would be able to change and that Tesla could avoid having you drive your vehicle into a dealership to deal with a recall, and that is, if that's not compelling, I don't know what is. I've got probably the fanciest ice machine I've ever bought in my life and it produces beautiful ice and about a month in it goes kaput, right. And so again, I'm gearing up to call the company to get me some help. And this is not a connected machine. And they come out, a tech, comes out to look at it. It's like, oh, you know, it looks like it's a motherboard that's gone bad. It actually ended up being three truck rolls, but I mean, there's no way they made money on that ice machine, right? Versus that ice machine being connected and be able to tell you hey, you know, here's what's going on, right. And to your point, the comms piece has to be treated differently, because if comms is relying on that motherboard and the motherboard is the problem, now you know there's that thing's no good, right. And so you have to have that resiliency built in the system.
Speaker 2:Our console server business, opengear, has what's called smart out-of-band networking and the number one rule in networking is don't rely on the network to troubleshoot the network Go out-of-band. So many of our customers use cellular, sometimes another wireline-based connection so they can access the console server to access then that footprint of IT technology, whether that be Edge at a store, at an office or in the cloud in a data center or an AI facility. But that's an example that resilience is thinking through these redundant ways and these less dependent ways to make sure that you have that remote presence even when some cases power goes out. Our SmartSense gateways have batteries that allow it to have a certain amount of last gas before they run out of juice and many of our customers rely on us to tell them that a store has lost power.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So you mentioned a lot of wireless technologies. We're all, as consumers and businesses, kind of spoiled for choice now, when it comes to the network. We've got LTE and 5G and hybrid satellite, of course, coming online. So many options. How do you maybe simplify all those choices?
Speaker 2:while leveraging all the networks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really good question. It's a really good question. I kind of break it down into wide area and local area. I know that's a little bit primitive, but you know we are big cellular people. We think cellular is like this mega trend. You know it's bigger, badder than anything else and I'm old enough that I've seen a lot of upstarts try to compete against cellular and really struggle.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you remember Ram Bell, mobile, mobitex, motorola had their own system and some other standards even within cellular, like CDPD. You know had very short lives. But we like cellular as a megatrend. Satellite is still, in my mind, a niche service. Now satellite's improving, it's becoming more integrated with ground-based technology, but I still think ground-based technology has the advantage for most applications. I still think ground-based technology has the advantage for most applications, certainly marine and you know remote, forest or other types of things. You know that those are going to be more difficult for cellular, but those are kind of niche applications. So we think cellular is really the dominant play and I like being elegant.
Speaker 2:I don't want to make it any harder than it needs to be. I tell you a quick story. I'm big into golf and I've got all girls and so I try to infect my girls with the game of golf and so I brought them out to see a ladies golf tournament. And um and and at the time Hannah, my five-year-old, is like dad, why is there sand on the golf course? And I was reaching my fatherly moment. I'm like that's a sand trap. Some people call it a bunker and you don't want to go in there because it's harder to get a good score. And she looks at me with such sincerity. She said, daddy, why would they make it harder? And I say that to my team all the time Don't make it harder if it doesn't have to be right. There's a lot of elegance and simplicity. So we are very cellular oriented for Y area.
Speaker 2:Now, local area is a much more complex thing because you've got Wi-Fi, zigbee, bluetooth, lora. There's a lot of different options for local based network and it's a combination of range, how much data you want to send, and then how many wireless sensors or nodes do you have out there. So it is a more complex decision. You know, lora has very good range and noise overcomes a great amount of noise. But it's we call it data dribbler, right, it can only send small amounts of data. So meter-based applications condition monitoring can be really good for LoRa, but if you're going to send larger amounts of information, laura's just not going to work for you. But we try to work with our customers to make sure that we're both context appropriate but also we don't make it any harder than it needs to be Because we got to keep this stuff up and running In every radio. You've got to think through that resiliency.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, let's talk security, which has been the bane of IoT really from the beginning. Fantastic, let's talk security, which has been the bane of IoT really from the beginning. Lots of terrible stories, mainly in the home environment around loose, lax security. By design, I think you're coming a long way, but what's your philosophy around staying secure, compliant, especially in regulated environments in which you're working a lot?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got. First of all, security, as you mentioned, has been increasingly challenging to keep pace with. Unfortunately, there's enough bad actors out there that can monetize these things and boy, I think we're all desensitized to the latest company who's been hacked and all our customer information's out there, right. And with IoT it's much more subtle, because you're not going to get customer information out of IoT device, You're going to need access. So we're really a vulnerability point if we're not properly managing it to get access to a much bigger and broader system.
Speaker 2:So we treat security with the utmost care. We are designing it in at the hardware level in addition to software level. We are constantly managing and looking for CVs. We are scanning the globe through subscription services and our own efforts. We've got dedicated security officers both at the corporate level and as well as in the businesses, to make sure that any critical vulnerabilities are addressed, and we have a weekly security and quality meeting where we're going through these, any potential issues that are open and or been resolved, anything that's been reported. So we then complement that with a broader security setting where we're ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant, which gives a lot of customers and prospects comfort that not only we secure, but a third party can you know, accredit our security status, Because?
Speaker 2:I think it's important for a customer to make sure that their critical vendor doesn't just say they're secure, but has the accreditation to prove it.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, so you're much more than connectivity. Leveraging all that juicy juicy data at the edge is really powerful now, especially with these embedded AI models you're deploying. Maybe talk about what's possible now with that data and what are your customers doing with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really I would call it a slow motion success story, because there are all these small pockets of very, very valuable and private information. Our customers don't want this information out in the wild. They don't want a competitor to see it and maybe even a prospect, or maybe even their service partners. So you've got to really work with companies that were kind of in this early stage of both getting the data to the point where it can be leveraged by AI and then thinking about these use cases that can deliver that value right. So let's take an example of an elevator. Right, we've got many customers. We're the communication device inside that elevator, both providing emergency voice services but also connecting to the elevator's computer to make sure that we're examining fault codes, being able to change configurations and even update the software of the computer on that elevator. And we're working with them to say, hey, listen, let's incorporate some of that knowledge, let's get it standardized so that AI let's write AI tool to use. Let's practice it in the cloud first, before we try to domesticate it to the point where it can be put into an edge device, before we try to domesticate it to the point where it can be put into an edge device and then we've got to put containers in there in that edge device to make sure that the customer's application, they feel that secure and it's also an area where Digi is not causing any problems with collisions and inference. So it's a slow motion success story. It really is. And if you think about our customers, which are global, you've got every degree of maturation in their AI process right In terms of their understanding.
Speaker 2:But the key for us, evan, is always like what's the outcome you're going to look to achieve? Are you going to have fewer truck rolls? Are you going to have higher uptime? What is the outcome? And then let's make sure we measure it. What's our baseline right now so we can understand, by implementing this model, what we can get to and is the implementation effort and cost a 10th or less of the value that you expect to receive right? So we want to make sure we've got that strong business case that it's very motivating. There's a pot of gold at the end of that technology rainbow and then we can go after the technology assessment.
Speaker 2:We see a lot of times, evan, people kind of jump to the technology assessment. You got to make sure there's this real exciting opportunity that, if you're successful can be very, very rewarding, and that's a key part of, I think, our role is making sure that we're not just stuck in the lane of the technology, a little bit helping people through those business models. But it's an exciting future. I think there's so much more to come here. With leveraging AI, leveraging new technologies. Everything's getting better, cheaper, faster and I think that unlocks a lot more business opportunities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, particularly when it comes to areas like predictive maintenance. I love your ice machine example. Why couldn't you predict a failure of a part or a battery? For operational efficiency reasons. Digital twins are becoming a big deal week and it seems like half the escalators weren't working at any given time and I'm thinking you know why is that? That just seems such a no-brainer for IoT and operations. But how are you seeing these opportunities evolve in your customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think an underrated part of, I think, keeping things up and running is that there are humans that are needed to go out to either service or repair, and those jobs are getting tougher and tougher and tougher to fill. I think it's not as desirable, especially right now. Immigration is very contained and a lot of times immigration takes up some of these roles right. So keeping these systems up and running is so critical, and I think one of the unappreciated things of having a connected device is feeding the performance information of that existing technology into the next generation right. That allows you then to have more reliability, resiliency, uptime. You know our building in the office here, embarrassingly to your point, we have four elevators. It is rare that more than one or two are working.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's rare and it's a bit of a running joke. It just seems like there's so many already here. Now that seems like a design or maintenance issue, but we can't tolerate that level of performance and be expecting to succeed as a company or a society. So I think having that edge intelligence is going to unlock so much value, and one of the biggest could be, you know, feeding the performance information into that next generation design.
Speaker 1:Fantastic opportunity. So much to be excited about. What excites you over the next year or two, with all this emerging technology that you're leveraging and the investments you're making?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think with the amount of technology coming to market, a lot of these things again in the industrial world, because the IOT is so fragmented, even things like 5G we've scratched the surface on 5G. 5g radios are still really expensive from an IOT perspective. So to give you a feel, you could buy a 4G cellular radio for $20. A 5G radio today still is like $100. Oh, wow, and that's just the radio, right, and the red cap will come out. That'll bring it down to at least 80.
Speaker 2:But we have a lot of ways to go with. Just getting 5G domesticated to the point where it can be leveraged. And this is going to become a big issue over the next five years because you're going to see the carrier start to farm that 4G spectrum and move it over to 5G, and 4G applications won't necessarily be shut down in five years, but you're going to see the carrier stop approving new devices. Then they're going to stop, you know, activating devices and so getting that 5G train, you know, is really important for customers.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of exciting things going on in local wireless too, where we play a big role. You've heard of standards like YSUN. Ysun is an emerging standard. It's particularly useful for solar farms and renewable tech projects where you're supporting a large amount of nodes over a pretty great distance and you want a real reliable standard that can keep those panels tracking the sun throughout the day and making sure that you're getting optimal energy output. So there's a lot of, I think, a lot of exciting opportunity out there and I think we're limited mainly by really good business cases, not necessarily the technology, and I think we're limited mainly by really good business cases, not necessarily the technology.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an exciting thought and congratulations on all the success so far, onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely Absolutely, and when we're successful we're 100% solutions company. We got about 35% of our revenue that we attribute to solutions up from zero when I joined 10 years ago. So we've we've ourselves have been a evolving story, but I think when we get to a hundred percent, you know solution revenue we've made it.
Speaker 1:It'd be amazing to watch. Thanks, ron, thanks for joining, thanks for having me, evan, and thanks everyone for listening, sharing this episode, watching and check out our new TV show now on Fox Business and Bloomberg techimpacttv. Thanks, ron, thanks everyone, cheers.