1994 – Overcoming the Connectivity Challenges in the IoT Landscape with Eseye’s Nick Earle

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1:05With us right now, it's Nick Earl. Nick, you are the CEO at SI and the host of the IoT Leaders Podcast. To our friend that's listening right now, you can search in your podcast player, your podcast app for the IoT Leaders Podcast. Nick, your website is SI.com. That's E-S-E-Y-E.com. Nick, it's great to have you. Josh, you got it all right first time, and it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So you are located on a university campus outside of London, and I would love to learn what SI is, who you serve, and what you do. Yeah, so yeah, we're a global company. We have offices around the world, but we're based here in the UK.

1:52Guildford, for people who know the UK, Guildford, Southwest London. What do we do? Well, in order to explain that real quick, what we've got to describe is what's the problem? So let's start off with the problem. So IoT, Internet of Things. I remember I used to do a global role for Cisco, by the way, prior to doing this. And we were always predicting, you know, by 2020, we confidently predicted by 2020, 50 billion things were going to connect. I never realized that one day I'd look backwards at 2020 and say, how did we get on? And the answer was we got to 11 billion. So the point is, IoT has not filled its promises.

2:29And there were basically two problems. and we at SI have solved those two problems. So real quick, problem number one is IoT is, think of your cell phone, your SIM card, it's proprietary. If you have a SIM card from a mobile network operator, you can only go to that mobile network operator and they will roam you on someone else. What we did is we solved the problem so we have essentially a SIM, a connectivity capability that will connect to any network in the world. So we got rid of the proprietary lock and we made it. I can talk about it however you want, but basically we can connect to every network in the world.

3:09So it's always connected. Your device is always connected. And then the second thing that we did, again, we can get into how we did it, is that we actually have solved the problem of how to make your device work on every network in the world. So it just automatically switches. So that's what we do. And that's why we've got about 800 clients all the way around the world using our system. Yeah. You know, I've done, you know, it was a couple of years ago, I really got into smart home technology. And that was one of the big challenges is just things, you know, there's just problems with things not talking well to each other.

3:51And, you know, just even at the, you know, very frontline consumer level, how frustrating that was. and just to look for then solutions. And I think there are some exciting things that are happening now, threads, and I forget the other standard, but yeah, it's really critical. Go ahead. Yeah, no, Josh, you absolutely nailed it. And that's on the consumer home side. And we do, and it's the same for B2B and the business side. The reason that's a problem, right? If you take a step back, why is it a problem? There's so much innovation and the innovation that people are developing their own products and actually interoperability is actually not the first priority.

4:32It's kind of like I'll interoperate with my competitors down the line, but first of all, I want to grab market share, right? So when you're building a company and you're running a company, one of the things that we did here is we said, no, no, no. The only way to solve this first problem that I mentioned is you've got to build interoperability in upfront. And actually, if you look at the business statistics, the inflection point of adoption for every technology is always when you enable interoperability with an open standards. That's actually when your market takes off, because then everybody says, oh, great, I can actually connect it to this other stuff that I've got in your home.

5:13And the moment you can connect your home system, all these pieces together, and there's, you know, there are some standards, the problem was that there's multiple standards. and said but if there was one or all the standards could talk to each other and that problem just disappeared you'd buy more stuff and absolutely and and and that's the aha and that's what we did essentially that was one of the again we're just talking kind of consumer home level you know because i you know i just again recently just went through a both a lot of education a lot of frustration and then ultimately a lot of satisfaction.

5:50So I think one thing sometimes that new smart home hobbyists do is they buy the cheap stuff that does not integrate with anything else unless you really wanted to get into some really nerdy behind this. It's just completely not accessible. But yeah, case in point, bought overhead lights or can lights for my whole house. went through the whole solution of installing them, then later learned that they don't interoperate well with everything else. So then had to rip everything out. And so, yeah, I hope, again, as both consumers and in the B2B world continue to learn, they're going to look for that.

6:36And it sounds like that you, Nick, and SI have been able to really, sometimes that's going to be easier said than done, right? When we want our IOT stuff. It's not easy. It is very easy to say. It's not easy to do. And I'll share a little secret with you. Well, it's not a secret we tell everyone, but I'll share with your listeners' viewers. We actually blatantly copied the method from the airline industry, would you believe? Because if you think about it, you go back 10, 15 years, maybe 20 years ago. And I've been based in the US. I've worked in five countries. And if you wanted to fly around the world, multiple countries, you had to choose your airline.

7:19But then you had to buy a separate ticket with another airline because they wouldn't connect you. And you end up with all these tickets and you had to pay them all separately and your bags got lost. And we said, look, why can't I just buy a ticket that allows me to fly on any airline? And out of that, that's where things like Star Alliance came. And what happens is Star Alliance abstracted the problem up to a level and basically said, I'll sell you a ticket on all my members' airlines. You pay once, you have one e-ticket, and then you can use everyone's connections. That's exactly the telecom answer.

7:51We sell you a connection at the abstracted level on any network. You pay once, you have one pane of glass, as it's called, one set of APIs, one data rate, and we federate it across all of it. So essentially it's Star Alliance for IoT. Yeah, I love it. I love it. So, Nick, this is your world. This is what you do. And for those of us who are maybe focused on, you know, hundreds of other things, would you mind maybe giving a quick stay to the union for IoT right now? And also, what excites you most about what we may be seeing over the next 12, you know, one to two years? So I think that where we are right now is we're seeing some really, really interesting use cases everywhere from and I can quote use cases for our company better than other people.

8:49So I'll be selfish and use our use cases example. So, for instance, we're providing fresh water from automated pumps for a million people in Africa. I did a podcast on this recently. You know, people install pumps in villages in Africa, but they break and there's no maintenance model. There's no money to pay for them. So what you get is eight-year-old girls, typically eight or 10-year-old girls, walking two hours to get water and then back four or five times a day, which means they can't go to school after the age of eight. so iot because we are a design a device design company and an iot company we basically designed a pump that will sort of can be maintained remotely over the air with software right like your car can and what that means is the pump doesn't break and then what you find is you find suddenly there's there's a whole generation of children who are now going to school right and it's all done with mobile payments you know there's higher penetration on mobile phones in Africa than there is in North America or Europe.

9:51It's these old Nokia ones that we don't want anymore. They're all in Africa. Oh my gosh. Mobile money. Yeah. The higher penetration, right? So it's all paid for with a mobile phone. And you suddenly think, my God, we're actually a changing society. Other end of the coin, you've got companies like Amazon. As I said, one of the world's biggest companies, we do all of their IoT. That's another podcast I've done with them. But But Amazon Prime driver has about an 84 % success rate of first-time delivery to your house. So what they wanted to do is a way of automated gate entry to get into a condominium complex, which is secure and you can track so that you can give permission for them to come in without you being there.

10:30And they can get through the door without having to have a key. And they get it up to about 92 % first time. Now, those guys are doing tens of billions of packages a month. I mean, tens of billions. It's incredible. The bottom line benefit for Amazon on supply chain and distribution of being able to have that whole thing automated so that, you know, basically they're trying to automate every door in the world is how Amazon think, right? Now, in order to do that, you've got to have connectivity for every door in anywhere in the world. And so that's a business example of the same principle is that you've got to optimize the device and you've got to be able to take all this proprietary nonsense away, make it agnostic, abstracted agnostic, and it just works.

11:21One button press and it just works. So I would say what's happening now in IoT to your question, Josh, is we are seeing that inflection point I talked about. We are seeing just the beginnings of ubiquitous one-touch, one-button connectivity. And I think that's really encouraging because the number of use cases, healthcare, coffee machines, EV chargers, vending machines, lights, I mean, emerging markets. I mean, the number of use cases is almost infinite. And I think, never mind 50 billion things connected. If we can collectively as an industry solve this proprietary nonsense and generate interoperability, I think we're going to see 500 million or a billion things connected because that's where the next big productivity wave is going to be.

12:23your podcast i i really would love to hear uh about your podcast because again you know a friend that's listening to a podcast right now if they're interested in iot there's the iot leaders podcast you mind maybe sharing um some of the conversations you have or kind of what yeah no we've had some great guests um you know it came about i was it was just before christmas and i was thinking how you know we've got this really cool solution but people don't know about it and and traditional lead generation marketing. It was kind of like we're bouncing off and we get all these reject rates. And I was thinking, this is not scalable.

12:57There's got to be another way. So what I did is, well, why don't I just do this like we're doing right now? And I interview people, but I interview our customers. And I say, you've done something really cool. Why don't you tell me about it? And you know, Josh, at first I thought they wouldn't want to talk, but my God, they love it. They all want to talk about what they've done. They're proud. You know, we just say to them, what have you done? What have you learned? And we actually don't really talk about SI. I mean, obviously, it's our customer, but they talk about like Amazon talked about it.

13:32You know, it's the first podcast Amazon had ever done with an outside vendor, ever. So that shows how much Amazon really great relationship with them but we do we've had customers on who are small companies just trying to solve a little local problem we've had people who are trying to do like the you know I recently did the one on the water I had people phone me up and said they cried during that podcast what do you think about the 8 year old girl problem that it took and now at school you know they got photographs on their website They're called eWater, so little eWater. They got photographs on the website of girls who are in school uniform that could only go to school because of the solution.

14:20So we've done about, yeah, just under 50. And I did one this morning, funnily enough, with an analyst. And it's become a sort of go-to place for people to understand what is real and what's not real about IoT and listening to the pioneers and the people who are making it happen. It's a great way of getting close. I would advise for any of your listeners and the small businesses, CEOs, if you want to get close to your customers, then one of the great ways of doing it is do a podcast with them because you really get to know them. And afterwards, you just become best buddies after the podcast. It's just, it's inevitable.

14:57And the next time there's, if there's an issue, there's always issues. If there's an issue, you just phone each other up and you've already got a connection. yeah you're singing my song nick i know you know nick uh your website again si.com that's e-s-e-y-e.com when our friend that's listening right now goes to your website what would you recommend they do particularly if they're interested in perhaps having a conversation or maybe yeah so two things or something they're looking for thanks josh yeah i'd say two things first of all we're all about educating and explaining first and then the solution follows that's really important because most people if you go to their website it's immediately click here for a free sim click here for a quote we're like no no no i'm like an architect or we're like an architect i want you to tell me what your problem is then i'll propose a solution maybe i might not but but i'm not just going to say you know my my extension to your house costs x so the first thing is there's a resources section And in there, you can find case studies.

16:03And there's just there's dozens and dozens and dozens of case studies of IOT and what has happened. Like I say, we have 800 customers globally in about 190 countries. So so first of all, there's a bunch of good stuff. So educate yourself. Great reading, great examples. And then all over the website, thanks to my marketing guy, all over the website, there's these hooks that say, click. Do you want a meeting? Do you want to find out more? Click here. And you can't miss them. In fact, they're deliberately planted. So you fall over them. As you know, that's the way it works. and so people they come on they typically come on four or five times they browse they research and then they say you know what I think I'm ready to talk I'd never heard of this company but it sounds cool and so they wonder how to pronounce our name because it's not the most obvious thing and then then they click you know click here for schedule a meeting or click here to find out more Click here for a reach out, and then the whole process starts.

17:09Yeah, excellent. All right. Again, Nick, the website is si.com. That's E-S-E-Y-E.com. And you've been around for how long? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a very polite way of referring to my age, Josh. I appreciate it. It's very diplomatic. Not you personally. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, both are true, actually. Both are true. First of all, I've been in the industry over 40 years and have done big corporate roles in a lot of companies and four startups. But the company's been around 16 years. Quick factoid, one of the reasons we can do this is, listen, I'm the hired gun. I am not the brains of the outfit. the brains of the outfit are the two founders who are still in the business they're right outside the room i'm in they created zigbee so if you know yeah yes garage remote your tv control the mars moon lander the the helicopter that's buzzing around mars i've used plenty of zigbee products yeah so our our guys paul and ian are the zigbee guys they created zigbee uh they they They came up with the company name, which we have to explain every time.

18:26But their engineers have made sense to them. But then what they said was, well, if Zigbee can work with one button press anywhere around the world, it just works. Why doesn't cellular work like that? Why? Because it doesn't, right? It doesn't. So why don't we create an equivalent of Zigbee for cellular? And that's what they did. Excellent. So that's actually the genesis of the company. And that's how we can do what we do because they are a couple of really smart cookies, I tell you. Nick Earl, CEO at SI and host of the IoT Leaders Podcast. Nick, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure, Josh.

19:05Thanks for having me on.

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