Introduction
This week I’m joined by Mark Thiele, the CEO and Founder of Edgevana. In our conversation, Mark shares his perspective on why edge is critical to the enterprise. We discuss how edge fits into the enterprise transformation journey and how its related to the Internet of Things or IoT. During our discussion, Mark outlines the opportunities and risks that edge presents to the enterprise.
Speaker Profiles
Mark Thiele Twitter: https://twitter.com/mthiele10
Mark Thiele LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markthiele/
Edgevana: https://www.edgevana.com
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Edge #IoT #DigitalTransformation #CxOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:00
Companies are looking for new ways to transform their business. Technology plays a critical role in this transformation. Speed and innovation in both technology and thinking are key to this shift. Hello, and welcome to the Cxo in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology through the lens of leading CxO executives. I’m your host Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Mark Thiele, the CEO and founder of Edgevana. In our conversation, Mark shares his perspective on why Edge is critical to the enterprise. We discuss how Edge fits into the enterprise transformation journey and how it’s related to the Internet of Things or IoT. During our discussion, Mark outlines the opportunities and risks that edge presents to the enterprise. Mark Thiele, welcome to the program.
Mark Thiele 0:58
Hey Tim, thank you. Happy to be here.
Tim Crawford 1:00
Cool. So I I want to get into this topic that I know you’re super passionate about, the edge. But first, let’s set the stage and help people understand who Mark Thiele is and what Mark Thiele’s up to these days.
Mark Thiele 1:15
Yeah. So I’ve been, you know, Mark Thiele. Gosh, what a loser! No, he’s been an IT guy for his his entire life. I mean, even when he wasn’t actually building infrastructure, Mark Tealy is a guy that loves the notion of building infrastructure, and and and now I’m asking myself why I’m talking in the third person. But I, you know, I’ve done pretty much everything you can think of relative to infrastructure, and from you know basic PC support and help desk stuff in the very beginning, hell, even before that, running mainframes, all the way through into building you know cloud infrastructure and whole data centers and global networks. And when I say me, I mean really the teams that I’ve had the privilege of leading over the years, and for about the last you know five or six years, I’ve really been focused on technologies that would enable an area of opportunity that I’ve been contemplating with a few people in the industry for seven or eight years, and that’s edge computing and the edge in general, and so yes, it is definitely an area of opportunity, and I’m excited about it, as you pointed out. And in fact, founded new company Edgevana on the theory of trying to help lower the barriers to entry for edge development.
Tim Crawford 2:38
Awesome. So you know, as we kind of think about edge and the enterprise and how executives should really be thinking about edge. When you think about the average enterprise, not the the folks at at the edge, so to speak, from an industry standpoint, but the average enterprise, why should the average enterprise have an edge presence?
Mark Thiele 2:59
With every company, there’s going to be a slightly different answer, but for at least a simple majority of customers that have anything to do with either a large number of B 2b customer partners or a large number of end user B 2c customers, you know, like a Walmart or somebody like that, but even a GE is a consumer company to some degree. Parts of it are, and they have 1000s of other companies that they do business with. So, Edge is not just for companies that happen to be distributed everywhere at the Edge, like a fast food place or a Walmart or something like that. Edge is your opportunity for a number of reasons, to get closer to the customer and to provide the customer with an experience that helps to differentiate you in the market, helps to create loyalty and bring awareness to you through any number of technologies and/or customer use characteristics to give you intelligence about how better to connect with your customers, how better to build your products, for that matter, and frankly, how better to enable your workforce, considering the changes that have come about since the onset of COVID 19.
Tim Crawford 4:16
You know, companies are are really trying to figure that out, and they’re trying to figure out ways to differentiate themselves, especially in light of the virus crisis and getting through the economic crisis and just the the social impact. You know, some have said the ultimate edge is our home network in some ways, but where does where do you feel that edge fits into that transformation journey? You know, enterprises are trying to transform their business. They’re trying to think differently about how they how they engage with customers, how they engage with partners in their ecosystem. Where does Edge fit into that transformation journey?
Mark Thiele 4:53
Yeah, I really see it, especially now. And I might not have said the same thing three months ago. In fact, I’m I’m positive. I wouldn’t have said the same thing three months ago. I would have focused on one aspect of the opportunity rather than two. And the two main aspects of of where Edge fits into the transformation journey is that I love metaphors and analogies, and I look at a corporation as a body with the things that it needs to communicate and touch and sense, etc. associated with that body. And today, most companies, you know, their outreach looks more like a the body of a Triceratops Rex with little tiny arms struggling to reach out and touch customers, and and and without and I’m not trying to pick on a corporation and saying they have a small brain, but in the sense of being able to address the opportunity associated with feedback from customers, most organizations are very slow at responding to that feedback. In fact, most corporations have a very difficult time taking feedback and immediately applying it to product development or marketing stories, et cetera, et cetera, and so constantly find themselves behind the curve or missing out on opportunities because of that failure to be able to respond quickly. And so the reason I use the body metaphor specifically is because I see edge computing for many organizations as an opportunity to add longer arms and bigger hands, and again, you know the the onset of the pandemic has changed perspectives a little bit. But historically, why do you reach out and shake someone’s hand? Because you convey something. Are you? What are you conveying? You’re conveying trust. You’re conveying friendship. You’re conveying warmth, et cetera, et cetera, strength, all of those things, and to me, the edge presents that opportunity in in myriad ways for the enterprise that would have been impossible even just two or three years ago for most organizations. And as much as I love like the idea of talking about 5g etc. there are a million, literally a million different ways for people to get better access to, for companies to get better access to the consumer and to the market around the consumer, in order to incorporate that information in their own journey for making better products, offering better services, and creating differentiation for their customers. So, you know, that’s what I really see as the as the main focus of adding edge to the story of of the transformation journey, and then relative to the pandemic, I think you you know you brought up a great question, and that’s is the home the new edge, right? And and I would argue the home has always been the edge for one reason or another, but from a work standpoint, one of the things that some of us have been banting about via Twitter is this notion of work from anywhere. And I was having a conversation with a bunch of people, and we were all talking about WFH, the new hashtag for work from home, as something that you know so many new people are doing more of. And the reason I suggested the idea of work from anywhere is that work from home, by virtue, is is a designation associated with being a 30 minute commute away from the office, and instead of going to the office, which is there sort of as a backdrop, as a safety net, as a as a disaster recovery for you, you’re no more than 30 to 60 minutes away from it. So you’re working from home, and if the worst thing happens, your internet’s down or or whatever. You just drive to the office, and everything’s fine.
Tim Crawford 8:34
Sure,
Mark Thiele 8:34
right. And so, what happens in the world when people stop going to offices altogether? And companies I’ve talked to several CEOs just in the last three weeks who are not going to renew leases on buildings, as examples.
Tim Crawford 8:48
Yeah.
Mark Thiele 8:48
Right. So what happens when when that edge isn’t a nice to have, like like a kid, you know, spending a little extra time watching a video, but instead is a minimum requirement for a kid being successful at school, or a minimum requirement from a sustainability of a business, a business continuity standpoint, is a minimum requirement for success for the employee and the company that they work for, and that that success needs to be guaranteed almost anywhere that employee happens to be, whether they’re you know on vacation, whether they’re living on a beach in Bali, or 30 minutes from where the office used to be in Santa Clara, California.
Tim Crawford 9:26
You know that could be wishable thinking working from a beach on in Bali, but I can dream. We can all dream. I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast would love to be on a beach working, or rather, just be on the beach and forget about the work. I want to kind of dive into that a little deeper. You know, you talk about how the the corporation or the enterprise doesn’t necessarily have those long arms. You know, the the thoughtfulness to to be able to step into this space. Why do you think that? That’s the case. I mean, companies have been around for a long time. They’ve is it muscle memory that that has limited their growth, their opportunities? What what’s holding them back?
Mark Thiele 10:12
I don’t think there’s any one reason. I think to some degree. I mean, you you use the term muscle memory. I might not have used that term, but I think it’s apropos in in certain instances, in the sense that this is how we’ve always done it. This is how we’ve always collected information, right? We we get feedback on on a web form, or we we have a once a quarter customer interview session with a key group of customers, or we pay an organization to go out and and survey our customers or whatever, and it’s not that any of those things are wrong, but they are literally 1950s technology.
Tim Crawford 10:48
So, is this culture and inertia that that is driving it or creating the limitations? I
Mark Thiele 10:55
think to some degree it is. I think there’s a there’s a in some organizations there’s a lack of vision for what the opportunity could be in really being able to differentiate how you build and maintain a relationship with a customer beyond just saying I have a good product or I delivered it on time. What’s your opportunity to add services that correspond to or or encircle, create an ecosystem around your product set? What’s your opportunity to incorporate information from customers in near real time, I don’t know the example. We don’t all know it, but many of us know the example of someone who tweeted at Elon Musk about something for Tesla cars, and two weeks later he’d incorporate software. Right? How many companies do we know off the top of our heads where that kind of interaction occurs, and a quote-unquote turn on a dime occurs relative to information. I mean, I I get I’m privileged to speak at a lot of events, and and one of the questions I ask at many of the events is I ask the audience how many people in the audience have been doing similar jobs to what I’ve done in the past, you know, building IT and jobs that you’ve done in the past, building IT and running IT organizations, and usually at the average event, somewhere around 30 or 40% of the people raise their hand. And I said, “How many of you have been asked by your leadership? And I don’t mean responding quickly to alerts that the data center is having a problem, but I mean you know responding immediately to data and information about trends or what customers are doing, et cetera. How many have you been told that you need to be able to provide real time data? And invariably, 70, 80% of those 30 to 40% raise their hands and say, “Yeah, I’ve been asked for real time. I said, “Now I want you all to keep your hands up if you believe your organization actually uses that real time data in real time. Invariably, one or two hands are left.
Tim Crawford 12:45
Wow!
Mark Thiele 12:46
And so it that’s that in my book is a major failure with or without edge. Yeah. Right. But edge is an opportunity to literally be, and I don’t mean this in the creepy way of you’re following your customer around and telling them what to do, you’re engaged with your customer. You’re allowing your customer to experience the enjoyment of an environment or the enjoyment of using your product most effectively, and doing your best to leverage that to give them an improved experience and to improve your product for their next experience, and to me, the companies that can’t do that three to five years from now are unlikely to be able to continue.
Tim Crawford 13:30
You know that’s a that’s a really important point, and especially as we start to go through not just the virus crisis but into that economic crisis. And some of the economists have said already, this is absolutely going to be the worst experience since the Great Depression, which is pretty meaningful, not in a good way, but it it causes us to rethink how we’re engaging with that aspect in our business that is most critical, which is ultimately our customer. We have to figure out how our organization, how our people can best serve that customer. And to your point, a lot of it in the past has been silos. Right? You come in, and the first what’s the first group that you hit in a company? It’s marketing, and then the next group you hit is sales, and then the next group you hit is service or support. But as you go through that journey, that one customer, each of those are silos with different sets of data, and they don’t necessarily connect one one another together. And so, it’s a little off the edge conversation. But I think to your point, these are the kinds of opportunities where we have to think about that that continuity, and it kind of leads me to a question that that I often see get brought up, which is, edge IoT, are they one and the same, or are they different?
Mark Thiele 14:52
Yeah, well, it’s it’s interesting. IoT by virtue doesn’t have to be edge. IOT could be on-premise solution for a hotel, or a central office for a campus, or for a chemical refinery, or something like that. Right? I mean that it is edge because it’s more easily delivered closer to where the demand is, rather than being delivered from some central location hundreds or 1000s of miles away. That’s what defines it as edge in the parlance of you know Amazon selling Outpost or Microsoft selling Azure or VMware selling some form of hyperconverged infrastructure into your data center. That kind of thing. So while it’s edge, it’s really more effective utilization of appropriate fit technologies to maximize your ability to deliver on things like safety and efficiency and rapid iteration on product improvement. Simple things like being able to know where people are on a factory floor and what routes they take in real time, so that you can one protect them from themselves from running into a machine they shouldn’t be running into, or getting run over by a cart that’s on automation, or responding quickly to sensing that allows for a production to begin providing warning before there’s actually something broken about issues with the with some part of manufacturing or some part of the robotics assemblies, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of this data has value in the moment. Most of the data has value in the moment, and the shorter that moment is between data actualization and data response or information response, the better your productivity, the better your your efficiency, and the better your overall safety. You know, it may not be all of those things for every issue, but those are all real opportunities. And and that you know you can extrapolate from that and say edge for the customer from a from an end user customer. Obviously, it depends on what type of customer we’re talking about. But let’s let’s pick let’s pick a journey, right? Let’s pick IoT at the edge for a city like Santa Barbara or Santa Monica or Newport Beach, right? What are some of the things that a city that’s a vacation and residential town, for the most part, would want-they would want to know information about weather. They’d want to know information about available parking, about traffic, about holes in the road, about events that are occurring, about whether the waves are safer today or bigger today than they were yesterday, which way the wind’s blowing, et cetera, et cetera. All of those things are opportunities for collection of data, and they’re important to that city. But they might also be important to people that sell surfboards or Walmart, and what kind of clothes they’re stocking that day in their in their store nearest that location, or what the what someone who sells gasoline, or someone who sells car washing, or a food truck, or UPS drivers might be interested in, in order to more to navigate the city or town more effectively based on the information they’re getting. All of that is IoT, but it’s an edge opportunity for any one or all of those potential customers of that data, in order to provide effectively real-time information. If you’re a UPS truck and you’re driving through town, in fact, I’m going to back up just a second. If you haven’t watched it, if you’re not into war movies, I understand, but it’s one of the better war movies made in a long time, and it was Black Hawk Down about the Somalia issue. And one of the nightmares of that whole thing, one of the things that caused us the most problem as American soldiers was not us, me, but as as soldiers in general, was that they were trying to drive through town to safety in their trucks, trying to get out of Somalia, trying to get to crash sites, etc.
Mark Thiele 19:04
and the the route of communication between them and an overhead helicopter and headquarters and the mapping, et cetera, et cetera, meant that they were always passing the turn they needed before they got back to information, and so that’s a great analogy to. why edge computing and instant information can be so important in so many different ways when you’re talking about an active living environment of a city that includes the peoples, the machinery, the the busses, the transportation, the road workers, the the weather, the the museums, the parking garages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Tim Crawford 19:46
And I think that your example of the beach, as well as your example of the story behind Black Hawk Down, I think that that’s really apropos to the sense that it’s not just about the technology, and it’s not just about the. Data element that you get from the edge, but it’s what you do with it in the moment.
Mark Thiele 20:06
Right.
Tim Crawford 20:06
I think that’s what you’re what you’re getting trying to get across here is that it’s not as simple as just saying, okay, great, we’ve got weather information, we want to get that to people on the beach. Well, you want to get that information to them at the right time and think about the larger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish, which is the experience. In a lot of ways, isn’t it?
Mark Thiele 20:28
Right. It’s the experience. It’s it’s access to. And when you say experience, it’s all of those things, right? I mean, I was going to expand on on experience, but experience is the big picture. Experience of the ice cream trucks in the right place at the right time. That the surfboard shop opens up at the right hour. That they close off part of the beach at the right moment because of a shark threat. That that they they put an extra lifeguard in a place because there happen to be undercurrents in one part of the beach that are unusually strong, they route traffic appropriately. A particularly popular parking garage is unavailable reason, and all of those things may not those things may not require instantaneous response. Maybe it could wait five minutes or an hour or something. It’s possible, but as a whole, they provide a picture that could over and be leveraged not just by the city, but by any one of the organizations that all creating data and are to maxim their ability to make value from being in that city, supplying customers or hoarding the environment.
Tim Crawford 21:40
You know, we’ve we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the opportunities, and I think it would be remiss to not talk about the risks. And you know, cybersecurity is is definitely one of those risks. But I think there there are many aspects to risk when you think about the edge. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those risks are, or some of the things that that enterprises should be thinking about when they’re thinking about edge and risk.
Mark Thiele 22:08
Yeah, I mean the the you know one of the first things I like to point out when I talk about edge and specifically IoT is that IoT devices, the way most of us think about them create an image of an environment, right? So, if as an example, if you have a building or you have a park or you have a a roadway or something, it’s not like you only have a sensor for the temperature of the roadway or you only have a sensor for the number of cars. You have sensors for those things and and you have for the intersections and you have all that stuff happening at the same time, and that creates an environmental view, right? The any one of those things having the wrong data at a moment’s notice might be a problem, but it’s a nightmare if someone can actually make all of those sensors appear to be supplying information that’s wrong at the same time, right? So when I think about risk relative to how people are deploying IoT, there are the obvious ones that everyone should recommend, like who is your supplier and what have they considered relative to security associated with your IoT devices? How do you validate data? All those kinds of things, things that that gentlemen by the like Rich Miller would go into serious detail on. All of those things are really important, but it’s also being able to validate in near real time, and this is where maybe AI comes in. Certainly, data validation comes in, but in be able to validate in real time whether or not the image you’re getting from the environment is something approaching the truth, and what’s the best way to do that? Because you could have an environment where you’re not supposed to let more than a certain number of cars on the road at a particular time, and instead, because of the sensors being faked out, you’re letting four times as many cars on as you should. Or you could have sensors that talk about the temperature in a building, or you know the the air quality in the building. Continue to say that the air quality is good, or or whatever, and instead suffocate a bunch of people from carbon monoxide. So those are the kinds of things that really make me nervous longer term. And then there’s the potential, you know, bad actor approach associated with IoT in the sense that the more sensors we have around us, the more capability someone who has access to those sensors has of drawing an image of our life. Right? There could be street sensors that don’t even have to be on your house, but are collecting vibrations from your windows, collecting information from when lights go on in your house, when the gas is used, when the TV is normally on or off, etc. and all of those things combined could easily create an image of. Who Tim Crawford is at a moment’s notice, and yeah, it is. You know, there there there are a number of issues relative to how to deploy and how to manage against risk in general. But then there’s also some larger societal questions about how we manage to information protection and intrusion into people’s lives just because we can, or just because it’s convenient.
Tim Crawford 25:28
So I would think that you know, some an executive listening to this right now would kind of think about these risks and go, you know what, that’s just that’s just too much for us. We’re we’re going to avoid edge because the risks are the risks are not going to outweigh the opportunities in their mind. What would you say to someone that is starting to think along those lines or starting to question how far to the edge or how far they leverage edge in their transformation in their environment in their organization,
Mark Thiele 26:02
right? Well, I would say that you know it’s it’s easy for Mark Tealy to talk about the problems of edge in a in a a wide spectrum response, right? But that wide spectrum response covers any one of 100 different ways a company or an individual might approach benefiting from something that would be considered edge. So, as an example, are there security risks associated with putting a significant edge sensors and video as IoT and analytics inside of an oil refinery? Yeah, there’s potentially risk, but there’s also the possibility to maximize safety in a number of other ways, and to some degree, potentially wall off that edge environment from the rest of the world to provide better security. Right, so you can minimize the risk, and the value is really high. Another opportunity when you think about edge is that while IoT is a major impact on on the potential volume and benefit of the edge environment that we all live in or work in. There there are significant number of you know toys and tools that all of us carry around on a regular basis that are individualized or meant for our car, or meant for an airplane, et cetera, et cetera, where companies can still leverage those technologies to get closer access to, you know, how how customers live with their products or how they can offer a differentiated service without having a store in every town with over 1000 people in it. Those are the areas where I think it’s vitally important for companies to realize that, and for and for community to realize not just the companies trying to benefit from edge and delivering an edge solution to their consumers, but from a delivery standpoint for edge, keep in mind that for every Walmart, for every Chick Fil A companies that are demonstrating a desire to build edge in their environments, if not already having done so, the example of those companies is that well, Walmart has 11,000 stores. They’re almost by accident in edge everywhere.
Tim Crawford 28:18
Sure,
Mark Thiele 28:18
right. Whether they want to extend that edge beyond the boundaries of their partner is a different issue. But the edge, while their customers are and their employees are experiencing working in or buying in one of their stores, is a clear opportunity for them because they have customers everywhere. As in, they have stores everywhere. But for every Walmart or Chick Fil A, there are another three or four companies that have a same desire to reach customers, to have experiences with customers, to gain intel from customers, and to provide new experiences to customers. Don’t have the luxury of having you know that Starbucks or Chick Fil A or whatever it is on every corner.
Tim Crawford 28:57
Yeah, and this is really where the differentiation is going to come in, especially as we get through the economic journey and kind of look to to make it past it.
Mark Thiele 29:07
That’s right. That’s right.
Tim Crawford 29:08
So as we kind of wrap on the episode, Mark, where can folks find you online?
Mark Thiele 29:14
I’m pretty active on both Twitter and LinkedIn. So on Twitter, it’s m t h i e l e1 zero, and on LinkedIn, it’s just you know go to my profile and you can find conversations that and articles that I’ve written on my feed, and I’m fairly active there. And I love engaging. I love testing my assumptions, and that’s usually how most of the conversations start for me on LinkedIn and in many cases on Twitter, and Tim, if you don’t mind me taking 10 seconds to to talk about one thing that I would have liked to have added earlier, is that you know considering the business, the the the way businesses are impacted because pandemic, and considering the the notions associated with edge, if somebody were to come to me. I’ve done this before, so that’s why I would say somebody might come to me. If somebody were to come to me and say, “Mark, I need a business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan, the very first thing I would work on before I did anything else was a communication plan, right? Before I even worked with all the line of business managers about what’s critical and what needs to five, what needs to be three nines, and and all that stuff is. I need a communication plan. I need to know who needs to be contacted. I need I need to know how we’re going to contact them. I need to know the process for fail if if Mark’s not available. How do they get a hold of Tim, the second in line? All I need that communication plan. Edge, especially during the situation when your employees, let alone your customers might feel disenfranchised based on their ability to to see you, work with you, be in your office, be in your store, whatever the case may be. Edge offers a pretty unique opportunity to help maintain that kind of communication in new and unique ways, and so I would urge people to to find ways to exploit Edge for that benefit to maintain that connection because, frankly, you communicate employees during a failure, then you’re not going to recover nearly as quickly as you could have. And if you’re find a black hole when they hear there’s a California and the response from the company, your customers are going to assume your company is broken, and they’re going to go somewhere else, or lose faith in your ability to respond, so that that communication is just the most aspect of our opportunity.
Tim Crawford 31:30
Got it. We’re gonna have to leave it right there, Mark. Thanks so much. For more information on the Cxo in the Know podcast, visit us online@cxointheknow.com You can also find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please subscribe and thank you for listening.
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