Tuesday, September 05, 2017

How IoT Capabilities Open New Doors for Miami Telecoms Platform Provider Identidad

Transcript of a discussion on how new breeds of Internet of Things capabilities help telecommunications services providers manage complex edge and data scenarios. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Our next Internet of Things (IoT) strategies insights interview focuses on how a Miami telecommunications products provider has developed new breeds of services to help manage complex edge and data scenarios. We will now learn how IoT platforms and services help to improve network services, operations, and business goals -- for carriers and end users alike.

Here to help us learn what is needed to build out an efficient IoT support business is Andres Sanchez, CEO of Identidad IoT in Miami. Welcome.

Sanchez
Andres Sanchez: Thank you, Dana. Thank you for inviting me.

Gardner: How has your business changed in the telecoms support industry and why is IoT such a big opportunity for you?

Sanchez: With the new OTT (Over the Top content) technology, and the way that it came into the picture and took part of the whole communications chain of business, the business is basically getting very tough in telecoms. When we begin evaluating what IoT can do and seeing the possibilities, this is a new wave. We understand that it's not about connectivity, it's not about the 10 percent of the value chain -- it's more about the solutions.

We saw a very good opportunity to start something new and to take the experience we have with the technology that we have in telecoms, and get new people, get new developers, and start building solutions, and that's what we are doing right now.

Gardner: So as the voice telecoms business trails off, there is a new opportunity at the edge for data and networks to extend for a variety of use cases. What are some the use cases that you are seeing now in IoT that is a growth opportunity for your business?

Get the data, then use the data

Sanchez: IoT is everywhere. The beauty of IoT is that you can find solutions everywhere you look. What we have found is that when people think about IoT, they think about connected home, they think about connected car, or the smart parking where it's just a green or red light when the parking is occupied or not. But IoT is more than that.

There are two ways to generate revenue in IoT. One is by having new products. The second is understanding what it is on the operational level that we can do better. And it’s in this way that we are putting in sensors, measuring things, and analyzing things. You can basically reduce your operational cost, or be more effective in the way that you are doing business. It's not only getting the information, it's using that information to automate processes that it will make your company better.

Gardner: As organizations recognize that there are new technologies coming in that are enabling this smart edge, smart network, what is it that’s preventing them from being able to take advantage of this?

Manage your solutions
with the HPE

Sanchez: Companies think that they just have to connect the sensors, that they only have to digitize their information. They haven’t realized that they really have to go through a digital transformation. It's not about connecting the sensors that are already there; it's building a solution using that information. They have to reorganize and to reinvent their organizations.

For example, it's not about taking a sensor, putting the sensor in the machine and just start taking information and watching it on a screen. It’s taking the information and being able to see and check special patterns, to predict when a machine is going to break, when a machine at certain temperatures starts to work better or worse. It's being able to be more productive without having to do more work. It’s just letting the machines do the work by themselves.

Gardner: A big part of that is bringing more of an IT mentality to the edge, creating a standard network and standard platforms that can take advantage of the underlying technologies that are now off-the-shelf.

Sanchez: Definitely. The approach that Identidad IoT takes is we are not building solutions based on what we think is good for the customer. What we are doing is building proof of concepts (PoCs) and tailored solutions for companies that need digital transformation.

I don’t think there are two companies doing the same thing that have the same problems. One manufacturer may have one problem, and another manufacturer using the same technology has another completely different problem. So the approach we are taking is that we generate a PoC, check exactly what the problems are, and then develop that application and solution.
This is not just a change of process. This is not purely putting in new software. This is trying to solve a problem when you may not even know the problem is there. It's really digital transformation.

But it's important to understand that IoT is not an IT thing. When we go to a customer, we don’t just go to an IT person, we go to the CEO, because this is a change of mentality. This is not just a change of process. This is not purely putting in new software. This is trying to solve a problem when you may not even know the problem is there. It's really digital transformation.

Gardner: Where is this being successful? Where are you finding that people really understand it and are willing to take the leap, change their culture, rethink things to gain advantages?

One solution at a time

Sanchez: Unfortunately, people are afraid of what is coming, because people don't understand what IoT is, and everybody thinks it's really complicated. It does need expertise. It does need to have security -- that is a very big topic right now. But it's not impossible.

When we approach a company and that CEO, CIO or CTO understands that the benefits of IoT will be shown once you have that solution built -- and that probably the initial solution is not going to be the final solution, but it's going to be based on iterations -- that’s when it starts working.

If people think it’s just an out-of-the-box solution, it's not going to work. That's the challenge we are having right now. The opportunity is when the head of the company understands that they need to go through a digital transformation.

Manage your solutions
with the HPE

Gardner: When you work with a partner like Hewlett PackardEnterprise (HPE), they have made big investments and developments in edge computing, such as Universal IoT Platform and Edgeline Systems. How does that help you as a solutions provider make that difficult transition for your customers easier, and encourage them to understand that it's not impossible, that there are a lot of solutions already designed for their needs?

Sanchez: Our relationship with HPE has been a huge success for Identidad IoT. When we started looking at platforms, when we started this company, we couldn't find the right platform to fulfill our needs. We were looking for a platform that we could build solutions on and then extrapolate that data with other data, and build other solutions over those solutions.

When we approached HPE, we saw that they do have a unique platform that allows us to generate whatever applications, for whatever verticals, for whatever organizations – whether a city or company. Even if you wanted to create a product just for end-users, they have the ability to do it.

Also, it's a platform that is so robust that you know it’s going to work, it’s reliable, and it’s very secure. You can build security from the device right on up to the platform and the applications. Other platforms, they don't have that.

We think that IoT is about relationships and partnerships -- it's about an ecosystem.
Our business model correlates a lot with the HPE business model. We think that IoT is about relationships and partnerships -- it’s about an ecosystem. The approach that HPE has to IoT and to ecosystem is exactly the same approach that we have. They are building this big ecosystem of partners. They are helping each other to build relationships and in that way, they build a better and more robust platform.

Gardner: For companies and network providers looking to take advantage of IoT, what would you suggest that they do in preparation? Is there a typical on-ramp to an IoT project? 

A leap of faith

Sanchez: There's no time to be prepared right now. I think they have to take a leap of faith and start building the IoT applications. The pace of the technology transformation is incredible.

When you see the technology right now, today -- probably in four months it's going to be obsolete. You are going to have even better technology, a better sensor. So if you wait --most likely the competition is not going to wait and they will have a very big advantage.

Our approach at Identidad IoT is about platform-as-a-service (PaaS). We are helping companies take that leap without having to create very big financial struggles. And the companies will know that by our using the HPE platform, they are using the state-of-the-art platform. They are not using just a mom-and pop-platform built in a garage. It's a robust PaaS -- so why not to take that leap of faith and start building it? Now is the time.

Gardner: Once you pick up that success, perhaps via a PoC, that gives you ammunition to show economic and productivity benefits that then would lead to even more investment. It seems like there is a virtuous adoption cycle potential here.

Sanchez: Definitely! Once we start a new solution, usually the people who are seeing that solution, they start seeing things that they are not used to seeing. They can pinpoint problems that they have been having for years – but they didn't understand why.

For example, there's one manufacturer of T-shirts in Colombia. They were having issues with one specific machine. That machine used to break after two or three weeks. There was just this small piece that was broken. When we installed the sensor and we started gathering their information, after two or three breaks, we understood that it was not the amount of work -- it was the temperature at which the machine was working.

So what they did is once the temperature reached a certain point, we automatically started some fans to normalize the temperature, and then they haven't had any broken pieces for months. It was a simple solution, but it took a lot of study and gathering of information to be able to understand that break point -- and that's the beauty of IoT.

Gardner: It's data-driven, it's empirical, it’s understood, but you can't know what you don't know until you start measuring things, right?

Listen to things

Sanchez: Exactly! I always say that the “things” are trying to say something, and we are not listening. IoT enables the people, the companies, and the organization to start listening to the things, and not only to start listening, but to make the things to work for us. We need the applications to be able to trigger something to fix the problem without any human intervention -- and that's also the beauty of IoT.

Gardner: And that IoT philosophy even extends to healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, any place where you have complexity, it is pertinent.

Manage your solutions
with the HPE

Sanchez: Yes, the solution for IoT is everywhere. You can think about healthcare or tracking people or tracking guns or building solutions for cities in which the city can understand what is triggering certain pollution levels that they can fix. Or it can be in manufacturing, or even a small thing like finding your cellphone.

It’s everything that you can measure. Everything that you can put a sensor on, you can measure -- that's IoT. The idea is that IoT will help people live better lives without having to take care of the “thing;” things will have to take care of themselves.

Gardner: You seem quite confident that this is a growth industry. You are betting a significant amount of your future growth on it. How do you see it increasing over the next couple of years? Is this a modest change or do you really see some potential for a much larger market?

Once people understand the capability of IoT, there's going to be an explosion of solutions.
Sanchez: That's a really good question. I do see that IoT is the next wave of technology. There are several studies that say that by 2020 there are going to be 50 billion devices connected. I am not that futuristic, but I do see that IoT will start working now and probably within the next two or three years we are going to start seeing an incremental growth of the solutions. Once people understand the capability of IoT, there's going to be an explosion of solutions. And I think the moment to start doing it is now. I think that next year it’s going to be too late.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been exploring how a Miami telecoms products provider has developed new breeds of IoT services to help manage complex edge and data scenarios. And we have learned how IoT platforms and services can help improve network efficiency across a variety of vertical industries and businesses.

So please join me now in thanking Andres Sanchez, CEO of Identidad IoT in Miami.

Sanchez: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Feel free to pass this on to your IT cohorts, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how new breeds of Internet of Things capabilities help telecommunications services providers manage complex edge and data scenarios. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.


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Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Inside Story on Developing the Ultimate SDN-Enabled Hybrid Cloud Object Storage Environment

Transcript of a discussion on how an integrator crafted an innovative storage services capability that provides extensibility into such realms as hybrid IT and multi-cloud support.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation success stories. Stay with us now to learn how agile businesses are fending off disruption -- in favor of innovation.

Our next inside story interview explores how a software-defined data center (SDDC)-focused systems integrator developed an ultimate open-source object storage environment. We’re going to learn how Key Information Systems crafted a storage capability that may have broad extensibility into such realms as hybrid cloud and multi-cloud support.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/claytonweise/

Weise

Here to help us better understand a new approach to open-source object storage is Clayton Weise, Director of Cloud Services at Key Information Systems in Agoura Hills, California. Welcome, Clayton.

Clayton Weise: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: What prompted you to improve on the way that object storage is being offered as a service? How might this become a new business opportunity for you?

Weise: About this time last year, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Discover, I was wandering the event floor. We had just gotten out of a meeting with SwitchNAP, which is a major data center in Las Vegas. We had been talking to them about some preferred concepts and deployments for storage for their clients.

That discussion evolved into realizing that there are number of clients inside of Switch and their ecosystem that could make use of storage that was more locally based, that needed to be closer at hand. There were cost savings that could be gained if you have a connection within the same data center, or within the same fiber network.

Pulling data in and out of a cloud

Under this model, there would be significantly less expensive ways of pulling data in and out of a cloud, since you wouldn’t have transfer fees as you normally would. There would also be an advantage to privacy, and to cutting latency, and other beneficial things because of a private network all run by Switch and through their fiber network. So we looked at this and thought this might be interesting.

In discussions with the number of groups within HPE while wandering the floor at Discover, we found that there were some pretty interesting ways that we could play games with the network to allow clients to not have to uproot the way they do things, or force them to do things, for lack of a better term, “Our way.”  

If you go to Amazon Web Services or you go to Microsoft Azure, you do it the Microsoft way, or you do it the Amazon way. You don’t really have a choice, since you have to follow their guidelines.
They generally use object storage as an inexpensive way to store archival or less-frequently accessed data. Cloud storage became an alternative to tape and long-term storage. 

Where we saw value is, there are times in the midmarket space for clients -- ranging from a couple of hundred million dollars up to maybe a couple of billion dollars in annual revenue -- where they generally use object storage as kind of a inexpensive way to store archival, or less-frequently accessed data. So [the cloud storage] became an alternative to tape and long-term storage.

We've had this massive explosion of unstructured data, files, and all sorts of things. We have a number of clients in medical and finance, and they have just seen this huge spike in data.

The challenge is: To deploy your own object storage is a fairly complex operation, and it requires a minimum number of petabytes to get started. In that midmarket, they are not typically measuring their storage in that petabytes level.

These customers are more typically in the tens to hundreds of terabytes range, and so they need an inexpensive way to offload that data and put it somewhere where it makes sense. In the medical industry particularly, there's a lot of concern about putting any kind of patient data up in a public cloud environment -- even with encryption.

We thought that if we are in the same data center, and it is a completely private operation that exists within these facilities, that will fulfill the total need -- and we can encrypt the data.

But we needed a way to support such private-cloud object storage that would be multitenant. Also, we just have had better luck working with open standards. The challenge with dealing with proprietary systems is you end up locked into a standard, and if you pick wrong, you find yourself having to reinvent everything later on.

I come from a networking background; I was an Internet plumber for many years. We saw the transition then on our side when routing protocols first got introduced. There were proprietary routing protocols, and there were open standards, and that’s what we still use today.

Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking

So we took a similar approach in object storage as a private-cloud service. We went down the open source path in terms of how we handled the provisioning. We needed something that integrated well with that. We needed a system that had the multitenancy, that understood the tenancy, and that is provided by OpenStack. We found a solution from HPE called Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) that allows us to carve up the network in all sorts of interesting ways, and that way we don't have to dictate to the client how to run it.

Many clients are still running traditional networks. The adoption of Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and other types of SDDC within the network is still pretty low, especially in the mid-market space. So to go to a client and dictate that they have to change how they run the network it is not going to work.

And we wanted it to be as simple as possible. We wanted to treat this as much as we could as a flat network. By using a combination of DCN, Altoline switches from HPE, and some of other software, we were able to give clients a complete network carrying regular Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) across it. We then could tie this together in a hybrid fashion, whereby the customers can actually treat our cloud environment as a natural extension of their existing networks, of their existing data centers.

Gardner: You are calling this hybrid storage as a service. It’s focused on object storage at this point, and you can take this into different data center environments. What are some of the sweet spots in the market?
The object service becomes a very inexpensive way to store large amounts of data, and unlike tape -- with object as a service, everything is accessible easily. 

Weise: The areas where we are seeing the most interest have been backup and archive. It’s an alternative to tape. The object service becomes a very inexpensive way to store large amounts of data, and unlike tape -- where it's inconvenient to access the data -- with object as a service everything is accessible very, very easily.

For customers that cannot directly integrate into that object service as supported by their backup software, we can make use of object gateways to provide a method that's more like traditional access. It looks like a file, or file share, and you edit the file share to be written to the object storage, and so it acts as a go-between. For backup and archive, it makes a really, really great solution.

The other two areas where we seen the most interest have been in the medical space, specifically for large medical image files and archival. We’re working now specifically to build that type of solution, with HIPAA Compliance. We have gone through the audits and compliance verification.

The second use-case has been in the media and entertainment industry. In fact, they are the very first to consume this new system and put in hundreds of terabytes worth of storage -- they are an entertainment industry client in Burbank, California. A lot of these guys are just shuffling along on external drives.

For them it’s often external arrays, and it's a lot more Mac OS users. They needed something that was better, and so hybrid object storage as a service has created a great opportunity for them and allows them to collaborate.

They have a location in Burbank, and then they brought up another office in the UK. There is yet another office for them coming up in Europe. The object storage approach allows a kind of central repository, an inexpensive place to place the data -- but it also allows them to be more collaborative as well.

Gardner: We have had a weak link in cloud computing storage, which has been the network -- and you solved some of those issues. You found a prime use-case with backup and archival, but it seems to me that given the storage capabilities that we've seen that this has extensibility. So where it might go next in terms of a storage-as-a service (SaaS) that hybrid cloud providers would use? Where can this go?

Carving up the network 

Weise: It’s an interesting question because one of the challenges we have all faced in the world of cloud is we have virtualized servers and virtualized storage, meaning there is disaggregation; there is a separation between the workload that’s running and the actual hardware it’s running on.

In many cases, and for almost all clients in the mid-market, that level of virtualization has not occurred at the network level. We are still nailed to things. We are all tied down to the cable, to the switch port, and to the human that can figure those things out. It’s not as flexible or as extensible as some of the other solutions that are out there.

In our case, when we build this out, the real magic is with the network. That improved connection might be a cost savings for a client -- especially from a bandwidth standpoint. But as you get a private cross-connect into that environment to make use of, in this case, SaaS, we can now carve that up in a number of different ways and allow the client to use it for other things.

For example, if they want to have burst capability within the environments, they can have it -- and it’s on the same network as their existing system. So that’s where it gets really interesting: Instead of having to have complex virtual guest package (VGP) configurations, and tiny networks, and dealing with some the routing of other pieces, you can literally treat our cloud environment as if it's a network cable thrown over the wall -- and it becomes just an extension of the existing network.

We can secure that traffic and ensure that there is high-performance, low-latency and complete separation of tenancy. If you have Coke and Pepsi as clients, they will never see each other.
That opens up some additional possibilities. Some things to work on eventually would be block storage, file storage, right there existing on the same network. We can secure that traffic and ensure that there is high-performance, low-latency and complete separation of tenancy. So if you have Coke and Pepsi as clients, they will never see each other.

Gardner: Very cool. You can take this object storage benefit -- and by the way, the cost of that can be significantly lower because you don’t have egress charges and some of the other unfriendly aspects of economics of public cloud providers. But you also have an avenue into a true hybrid cloud environment, where you can move data but also burst workloads and manage that accordingly. Now, what about making this work toward a multi-cloud capability?

Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking

Weise: Right. So this is where HPE’s DCN software-defined networking (SDN) really starts to shine and separates itself from the pack. We can tie environments together regardless of where they are. If there is a virtual endpoint or physical appliance; if it's at a remote location that can be deployed, which can act as a gateway -- that links everything together.

We can take a client network that's going from their environment into our environment, we can deploy a small virtual machine inside of a public cloud, and it will tie the networks together and allow them to treat it all as the same. The same policy enforcement engine and things that they use to segregate traffic in microsegmentation and service chaining can be done just as easily in the public cloud environment.

One of the reasons we went to Switch was because they have multiple locations. So in the case of our object storage, we deployed the objects across all three of their data center sites. So a single repository that’s written the data is distributed among three different regions. This protects against a possible regional outage that could mean data is inaccessible, and this is the kind of recent thing that we in the US have seen, where clients were down anywhere from 6 to 16 hours.

One big network, wherever you are

This eliminates that. But the nice thing is because of the network technology that they were using from HPE, it allowed us to treat that all as one big network -- and we can carve that up and virtualize it. So clients inside of the data center -- maybe they need resources for disaster recovery or for additional backups or those things -- it's all part of that. We can tie-in from a network standpoint and regardless of where you want to exist -- if you are in Vegas, you may want to recover in Reno, or you may want to recover in Grand Rapids. We can make that network look exactly the same in your location.

You want to recover in AWS? You want to recover in Azure? We can tie it in that way, too. So it opens up these great possibilities that allows this true hybrid cloud -- and not as a completely separate entity.

Gardner: Very cool. Now there’s nothing wrong, of course, with Switch, but there are other fiber and data center folks out there. Some names that begin with “E” come to mind that you might want to drop in this and that should even increase the opportunity for distribution.

Weise: That’s right. So this initial deployment is focused on Switch, but we do a grand scheme to work this into other data centers. There are a handful of major data center operators out there, including the one that starts with an “E” along with another that starts with a “D.” We do have plans to expand this, or use this as a success use-case.

As this continues to grow, and we get some additional momentum and some good feedback, and really refine the offering to make sure we know exactly what everything needs to be, then we can work with those other data center providers.

Whenever clients deploy their workloads in those public clouds, that means there is equipment that has not been collocated inside one of your facilities.
From the data center operators’ perspective, if you're one of those facilities, you are at war with AWS or with Azure. Because whenever clients deploy their workloads in those public clouds, that means there is equipment that has not been collocated inside one of your facilities.

So they have a vested interest in doing this, and there is a benefit to the clients inside of those facilities too because they get to live inside of the ecosystem that exists within those data centers, and the private networks that they carry in there deliver the same benefits to all in that ecosystem.

We do plan to use this hybrid cloud object storage as a service capability as a model to deploy in several other data center environments. There is not only a private cloud, but also a multitenant private cloud that could be operative for clients that have a large enough need. You can talk about this in a multi-petabyte scale, or you talk about thousands of virtual machines. Then it's a question of should you do a private cloud deployment just for you? The same technology, fulfilling the same requirements, and the same solutions could still be used. 

Partners in time

Gardner: It sounds like it makes sense, on the back of a napkin basis, for you and HPE to get together and brand something along these lines and go to market together with it.

Weise: It certainly does. We've had some great discussions with them. Actually there is a group that was popular in Europe that is now starting to take its growth here in US called Cloud28+.

We had some great discussions with them. We are going to be joining that, and it’s a great thing as well.

The goal is building out this sort of partner network, and working with HPE to do that has been extremely supportive. In addition to these crazy ideas, I also have a really crazy timeline for deployment. When we initially met with HPE and talked about what we wanted to do, they estimated that I should reserve about 6 to 8 weeks for planning and then another 1.5 months for deployment.

Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking

I said, “Great we have 3 weeks to do the whole thing,” and everyone thought we were crazy. But we actually had it completed in a little over 2.5 weeks. So we have a huge amount of thanks to HPE, and to their technical services group who were able to assist us in getting this going extremely quickly.

Gardner: It's an interesting and impressive use-case and go-to-market opportunity. I really appreciate you telling us about your object storage-as-a-service hybrid cloud environment.

Good luck with that! I would like extend our thanks to our guest, Clayton Weise, Director of Cloud Services at Key Information Systems in Agoura Hills, California.

Weise: Thank you.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation success story. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your cohorts in the IT community, and feel free to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how an integrator crafted an innovative storage services capability that provides extensibility into such realms as hybrid IT and multi-cloud support. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.


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