![]() ![]() Our job in the IoT ecosystem is to find them, encourage them and make these champions of change successful. This person has the vision, understands problems an IoT solution will tackle in their context, and can put a strong business case together to get an internal Go! from leadership. ![]() A champion of change, an innovation instigator, or just a product manager looking to differentiate their offers that has the grit to go upstream and uphill, is a must. The first one is absolutely necessary to get anything started within even a small to mid-size organization. A solution with the right components and partners.An internal champion with a strong business case.The fundamentals of what is required for a successful IoT project are three things: It starts with the vision of the IoT champions and the right solution elements to help them succeed. Since that time I have been working with Ray, and now at Blues Wireless, in his quest that extends back to Fukushima disaster a decade back ( Ray: Soul of a New Machine) on removing friction for building real world IoT solutions. I was challenged with "What are you going to do about it?" by Ray and AT&T leadership. We had to get ready to help developers onboard billions of devices over the next decade. As the leading IoT network operator in the world with commitments to deploying what is now termed as 5G low power wide area networks, this was a must-do part of the strategy for AT&T. Ray shared his thoughts on how necessary it was for the IoT industry, the developer ecosystem and AT&T to reduce the cost and complexity of building connected products. We had an informal coffee at a sidewalk café, and again later in the week we met more formally in an in-venue meeting about future investments required to connect billions of devices to the Internet. I met Ray in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress 2018. Instead, it was because, just two weeks prior, I had met Ray Ozzie for the first time, and by the time I returned to the office, my perspective on what's possible in IoT and how we get there had changed. ![]() ![]() That day doesn't stick in my mind because of anything happening on the Foundry floor. But many more have unfortunately failed, besides bests of intention and effort. It was an exciting time and place and many of those projects are now real connected products that are commercially deployed in hundreds of thousands of units, and several in the millions. Some were colleagues, some partners in resident, others were customers and consultants visiting, all busy across the floor at different stations and work rooms, championing many IoT solution projects. I walked past all this on this normal day of work into my glass office space at the end, turned around and looked at the hustle and bustle of many IoT Champions. Behind these assets, along the wall, was specialized equipment and stations for trained engineers who printed circuit boards, made enclosures on 3D printers, tested antennas in specialized instrumented faraday cages and wrote custom firmware and applications. Size of a notecard driver#At least a dozen other similar assets were arranged down the entrance in different stages of being connected: wheelchairs, luggage, gas meters, feed containers, a specialized camera, a driver monitoring device for insurance, a health bracelet and on and on. There were two customer assets that were being unpacked on the journey to make them into smart connected products – one was a scooter for monitoring and payment processing, the other was part of an oil rig for instrumenting sensors for specific gas monitoring. The Foundry was bustling with action that day. The Bluebonnets were blooming, and so were the IoT projects at the Foundry. It was a cool day in spring and the weather was perfect. A little over three years ago when I was an employee at AT&T, I walked into the IoT Foundry, an AT&T IoT innovation center in Plano, TX. ![]()
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