Connected Spaces: Smart Buildings and the Massive IoT Revolution

Running hospitals, warehouses, and corporations today requires more than good management. A world of “massive IoT” necessitates nothing less than global, maximum connectivity. And Finland-based IoT company Haltian has plenty of use cases to prove it.

In the 46th episode of IoT Leaders, Haltian Head of Product Management Jarno Majava talks about what it takes to equip multiple verticals — ranging from automotive manufacturing to professional services multinationals — with globally connected IoT sensors that change business outcomes for good.

Listen to the podcast to find out:

1. How smart building companies are set to harness massive IoT in partnership with Eseye.
2. Why businesses need to consider all business costs.
3. How Haltian’s team equipped an entire hospital with its Wirepas tracking solution and got data flowing within seven hours.
4. The number one factor that’s increasing time to revenue (TTR), reducing connectivity, and wrecking productivity.

Tune in to learn how companies like Haltian can, as Eseye Chairman and CEO Nick Earle describes, “get information — from anything at all — through a gateway and consolidate it.”

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Transcript

You’re listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation’s swings and misses, lessons learned, and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT Leaders be your guide to IoT, digital transformation and innovation. Let’s get into the show.

Nick Earle:

Hi, this is Nick Earle, CEO of Eseye and welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. And today, we’re talking smart buildings, we’re talking sensors, massive IoT, the ability to get information from anything at all, anything and get it through a gateway and consolidate it and the case studies here from a partner of ours called Haltian in Finland are really impressive. I think we cover four or five case studies where they are implementing massive IoT already, including one case study where they smart enabled a hospital in seven hours so, quite amazing. It uses a very interesting technology mesh network called Wirepas and, as I say, uses gateway.

And what’s also interesting about this one, I really encourage you to stay listening to the end because, at the end, we talk about the vision of multi-RAT, so multiple radios and satellite, and the importance of the device and how you do long tail personalization of connectivity by letting the device choose the network and that’s something that Haltian and ourselves that Eseye really share a vision of is that, ultimately, the switch has to be resident within the device.

So, this is a company that’s really doing very well, he announces it on the podcast and I didn’t know that they just won Toyota, they also do the world’s largest warehouse company. So, they’re doing smart buildings right now and they’re scaling very fast globally so I think you’re going to really enjoy this. And so, here we go with my chat with Jarno Majava who runs product for Haltian, IoT company and a partner of ours in Finland. Here we go.

So, Jarno, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast.

Jarno Majava:

Thank you, Nick, happy to be here.

Nick Earle:

Yeah, and I’m really happy you are here as well because Haltian, and we’ll get into this, is a very interesting company using some pretty cutting edge technologies to solve big problems. And we’ll talk about them, the industry verticals like smart buildings, healthcare but you are pretty advanced at the cutting edge and I know that you’ve got a vision of where things are going to go, and particularly from a device perspective, which we want to get into as well. So, we’ve got quite a bit to talk about. But before we do that, for the listeners, can you just give me a little bit about your background and why and when you joined Haltian in Finland?

Jarno Majava:

Sure. Like many of us Finnish engineers, I started my career at Nokia, I spent 11 years in there and in various roles but also including IoT which is funny, at the time, it was called machine to machine communication and I was managing that portfolio of products at Nokia. And after that, I joined another Finnish stock listed company but I moved to the USA and designed and developed the first satellite terrestrial smartphone so, essentially, a Windows mobile smartphone with satellite connectivity.

Nick Earle:

Well, that’s interesting.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah.

Nick Earle:

That’s where we’re going to end up with this story. You actually are saying you started out with that, with satellites and mobile phones, yeah.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, exactly. I have a few years of satellite technology background as well and we also had several other customers for those products. And then I moved back to Finland and started selling tactical communications and high-securitya products to various governmental customers here in Europe. And I joined Haltian two years ago, actually, and I’m heading product management so I’m responsible of our product portfolio strategy and roadmaps.

Nick Earle:

And a lot of people won’t be aware of Haltian, of course, we are, you’re customer of ours and we’re partners and we have been for quite a while. But maybe just a brief overview of what Haltian do.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, Haltian is a smart building company, we really focus on smart buildings and provide IoT sensors, gateways, services, tools, applications including digital twins so it’s an end-to-end solutions for smart buildings. And more specifically, we focus on corporate offices, hospitals and also warehouses and logistics.

Nick Earle:

And you’re not just … I know you’re speaking to me from the middle of Finland, actually, you’re more than a Finnish company, right?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, we have been expanding internationally. So, we have sales offices in several countries at the moment and we have customers in 28 countries so it’s not just a Finnish game.

Nick Earle:

There we go, all right. One area I wanted to move into is the, as I said in the intro, is the technology and you very effectively use a pretty simple technology called Wirepas. To people don’t know, it’s W-I-R-E, just, P-A-S which is also a Finnish company. But I was looking at their website and it really is a cool technology and let me … You know what? Let me describe what I think it does and then you can correct me and tell me what it really does. And I know you were at a conference, a Wirepas conference recently so you really will correct me. But in my understanding, Wirepas is a very small, light, relatively cheap sensor that can be attached to pretty much anything but it works on a mesh network. So, you start off with a connectivity hub, for example, and then you put … It’s really Metcalfe’s law applied, the power of a network is the number of nodes squared but it works in a mesh fashion so that you add another sensor and the sensor says, “Oh, I can see where the gateway is.”

But that new sensor, device number two or sensor number two, then starts broadcasting, it says, “I can see the gateway, I can see the gateway.” So, then, a third sensor, instead of having to connect to the gateway with a hub and spoke model, which gets very complicated, connects to the second sensor and goes through. But the fourth sensor may say, “No, I’m going to go direct to the gateway,” and so you rapidly build up a mesh and then, if there’s any issues whatsoever, they can actually change their routes by the way the packets work on the internet but the net effect is you can deploy and scale very rapidly and get very high density of sensors a very small area. All right, how did I do?

Jarno Majava:

That was a good summary, thank you, Nick. So, well done, let me just add a couple of things. So, it’s really a self-forming and self-healing network. So, if any of those nodes disappears, the network will pick it up and it’s really a robust way to build IoT solutions in smart buildings and, like you said, it is really scalable and ultra-high density as well. So, you can put 10,000 devices, small sensor tags on a pallet, for example, and you still get the messages through and-

Nick Earle:

Ten thousand on a pallet?

Jarno Majava:

Yes, yeah.

Nick Earle:

That is ..

Jarno Majava:

I think Wirepas has public demonstration of 6,000 sensors in one cubic meter and we have exceeded that so it’s really powerful.

Nick Earle:

So, that’s not only technically pretty cool but we’ve been talking … I very much recognize your point. When I first got involved in IoT when it was called M2M, in fact, you could arguably go back, it was actually floor automation and things like that even before that but let’s not go back too much. But we’ve been talking about IoT and 50 million things are going to be connected and then some people say, “No, it’s going to be 500 billion things, it’s going to be a trillion things,” and we suddenly realize, well, that’s broadly called massive IoT. And the ability to attach a sensor and have the data transmit reliably to almost anything, any physical thing at all and the sensor could have its own power source, you can print a battery, it can be tiny and whatever.

So, we’re talking here about the potential for massive IoT, aren’t we, very high volumes of devices, small amounts of data being transmitted. But I guess that’s why, when you say smart buildings, this is very relevant because you want to track everything in a smart building or in a hospital or that use case.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, exactly. And it’s not only tracking, it’s all kind of smart sensoring whether it’s measuring the temperature utilization of the building, people counting or utilization of the meeting rooms, it can be reading the electricity meter. So, it’s not only tracking, it’s all kind of IoT sensoring which can be made more scalable and robust through this mesh network.

Nick Earle:

So, that’s very exciting and we’ve been talking about it for a long time. We’re going to get, of course, into the, as we always do on these podcasts, into the practical details of implementing IoT. But for the moment, can you bring it to life with maybe a case study of an example where you have used it and put it inside, let’s say, a building, a smart building or something like that?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah. And do you mean Wirepas in general or?

Nick Earle:

I don’t mind. I know you’ve got a great … You’re telling me about a great story about New York so, I don’t mind, you choose the example just to bring it real. Because a lot of people have been talking about this and we’ve been to lots of conferences on smart buildings, smart communities, smart cities and we’re still not really there unless you have the ability to start from scratch and build a complete new location which most people don’t. But yeah, maybe just a building example?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, yeah, maybe if I give two. So, let’s start with the story of the biggest warehouse operator in the world, Prologis, they have 5,500 warehouses globally and, in those warehouses, they have customers like Amazon and other major corporations and they are using our sensors, for example, preventive maintenance. So, they are detecting the technical rooms of those warehouses if there are any latencies, if the machines are working properly and so on.

And maybe another example from the office, corporate office world is that, in many big cities, we have customers like Ernst & Young, Telefonica, New York Life and many others who are using our sensors to measure the utilization of the office and also making sure that the indoor air quality is up to the level that where people feel comfortable. And this is obviously important after the COVID where people started hybrid working and the company is often unsure how much space do they need for their employees.

And so, we really have a lots of different use cases from many different customers, so these are only two. And in the Wirepas open event that you referred to, we actually announced another major customer which is Toyota and Toyota is now piloting our solutions in their manufacturing facilities. So, it’s difficult for me to select only one case which is showing the importance of the Wirepas for Haltian sensors in general because there are quite many.

Nick Earle:

Yeah. Now, absolutely, this is the opportunity to talk about as many customers as possible. Congratulations on the Toyota win, I didn’t know that, obviously huge potential. The technology, from my understanding, one of the advantages of this solution is that it’s very robust and it works out of the box and you can implement it pretty quickly. I think you were telling me about a customer in New York, in Manhattan where you were asked to do something, something to do with the chairman’s phone or whatever which I thought was a good story, maybe you want to repeat that one.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, it was really a … Of course, it’s not funny when the chairman is calling that my phone is not working but it’s funny because we had our sensors and gateways in that building for, I don’t know, two years and, suddenly, there was a problem that the phones didn’t work in the chairman’s office. And at the moment, the assumption from the customer was that this may be due to the interference that is caused by the Haltian gateways which are-

Nick Earle:

They blamed you basically?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, exactly. And in those gateways, we obviously have the SIM cards from Eseye and this-

Nick Earle:

They blamed us.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah. And this-

Nick Earle:

There’s a phrase which something rolls downwards. I’ll use stuff rolls downwards but it’s another word, not stuff. But yes, we often recognize that situation, yeah. It was the SIM card, yeah.

Jarno Majava:

Yes. And it was really showing the power and the benefits of our partnership. So, together with Eseye, we were quickly able to show that, actually, this is not the problem, this is not causing the interference, these are the frequencies where we are operating and just to make sure we localize the SIM card to just select that one specific US carrier so that we could also … To make it bulletproof that there wouldn’t be interference. And actually, the culprit or the root cause of this interference was a new installation of the internal 5G base stations that the customer had put there to make sure that their phones work inside the building and that was causing the interference and that was the root cause of that problem.

But in any case, it was really great that we were able to very quickly show that, actually, there’s nothing wrong with the gateway. If you still want further proof, you just disconnect that, you can see that the it will continue after that. So, it was really a good way to showcase that our solution is working and it’s not causing issues.

Nick Earle:

Yeah, and I’ve got a support background in it. And you often actually find out a lot more about how people are using the technology when you do have support issues and very often where the finger is first pointed is not actually the problem but they’re very hard to diagnose.

Jarno Majava:

Yes.

Nick Earle:

So, we’re going to get into hardware because a lot of this is to do with hardware expertise but, for the moment, let’s just park that. And you’ve mentioned Multi-IMSI switch networks which gives me the opportunity to say we are partners and we have a great partnership together. Why did you choose, there’s a lot of great telecom companies, there’s a lot of great MVNOs so why did you choose Eseye, what are the advantages from your perspective?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah. So, many of, if not most, of our customers are multinational and global companies and it was really important for us to have a global connectivity which comes from a single vendor and it’s then easy to partner and easy to scale and easy to add more sites, locations, countries as we grow together with our customers. That was really one of the key reasons why we selected Eseye and, like you said, it’s been a good partnership and we are happy to continue to grow that in the next years.

Nick Earle:

And we obviously know the answer but I think this is our 46th, 47th podcast and I asked the same question, I think I asked the same question on most of them. Not all have been Eseye customers but everybody basically says the same thing which is, paraphrasing it, if you need a single product SKU for your own product which you are selling to somebody else and you want to be able to deploy it anywhere in the world and get as near as possible 100% connectivity, and we average 99.5% globally, and we’ve got customers in, I think, it’s 190 countries. I think there’s only three that we don’t … There’s three countries that we aren’t allowed to go into but-

Jarno Majava:

There’s also room to grow also for Haltian because we are now-

Nick Earle:

We’re you’re followers, yeah. That’s a conversation for another time. But the point is that often people say, “Oh, the cost of the solution is X, I’m going to evaluate based on the cost of the solution and that’s the right thing.” But if you actually look at the backend business process costs or the cost of manufacturing, the cost … And if you have to insert different SIMs for different countries, the cost that you incur in supply chain installation, warranty, all your internal processes dwarfs by probably a hundred the cost of the solution. And so, you are another example of a company that says, “Look, I can deploy anywhere in the world and where there is a signal,” and we’ll get back on to multi-RAT,” But wherever the signal, I will deploy and it’s a managed service and it just works,” which is going to promise that you are making to your customers we can deploy and it works.

You told me when we did the prep, which was a while ago, we’ve had a little delay in recording this one, but you also told me, I think it was a, I may have got this wrong, it was a hospital use case and how quickly you can actually implement. And before you maybe recap that case study, one of the things about IoT, we’ve got about 800, 900 customers, but one of the things, clearly, about IoT is that projects can take a long time to deploy and for various reasons, there’s a lot of complexities. But one thing that stood out to me when I looked at my notes is this, I think it was a hospital case study and just how quickly you can put this Wirepas gateway network in, maybe you could just repeat that for the listeners.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, our product strategy is really built around easy delivery, easy installation, easy scalability and so on, a lot of ease. So, in this particular case, we had a customer in Purdah, in Norway, it’s a 10-story building and they wanted to have a solution for tracking hospital beds and also wheelchairs and some other items. And the team, two guys, they spent seven hours at the site and, in those seven hours, they equipped the whole hospital with our Wirepas asset tracking solution and the data was flowing after seven hours. So-

Nick Earle:

We’ve got to hit pause here because that’s the quickest, certainly, I’ve heard, I’ve heard about a lot of use cases, studies. And I think to understand it, I think it’s key to understand this Wirepas sensor, isn’t I, because it’s very small. And tracking things in a hospital, people lose wheelchairs, they lose keys to cupboards, beds, we need beds, where are they and it’s a very tedious process. So, things, tracking things, back to our earlier conversations. So, how does that work? Do you take a bunch of Wirepas sensors and do you just stick them on devices?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, most often-

Nick Earle:

And they’re active? Is that it?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, most often there is a two-sided tape but the key to this quick installation is that it’s truly wireless and cableless and it’s not only the sensor that is small and wireless and easy to attach but it’s also the network. The locators are, in our case, they are energy harvesting so we simply attach them next to the indoor lighting or close to the indoor lighting and we strip out the paste and tape and they start communicating. So, it’s a really fast and simple installation, not only the tags and the sensors, but also the infrastructure, so it’s also cableless. And the one thing where you need power is then actually the gateway where you have the Eseye SIM which is then aggregating all that data, sending that to the Cloud.

Nick Earle:

So, you only need power in the gateway. So, you’re taking the power from the light, what happens if it’s dark? Does that mean the sensor can’t communicate?

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, if it’s permanently dark. So, we only need four hours a day of the lights to be on and, if there are really dark areas, technical rooms or storage rooms, then we can use a USP to power those locator.

Nick Earle:

You use a USP, okay. But in general, four hours of light, and hospitals are lit all the time, buildings are often lit all the time but, in general, four hours of light means that you can … It’s a very small thin device, you don’t have to worry about the battery, you called it energy harvesting and, of course, the gateway is where we are and we need the battery and we handle all of the battery management and the aggregation of the data and the uploading it into the Cloud and giving 100% connectivity globally. So, that’s how the architecture works.

I want to do one more case study because I just think that Haltian as a company has got lots of case studies. And as I said right at the beginning, I remember, back in my Cisco days, which going back a while now, we were talking about smart cities and the potential and we’re still talking about it, right? You are doing a lot of it, building by building but also customer by customer and I think you’ve got a big example of the finished post office which is quite an innovative solution, maybe you want to describe that as well.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, yeah. Posti is one of our long-time customers, at least five years, I think, and it’s really one of the biggest ones in terms of a number of sensors. At the moment, we are somewhere at 140,000 active sensors and the number is growing every month and where Posti is using our sensors is that we all are happy to purchase things online and, when they are delivered, they usually end up in a smart box or a group of boxes in a grocery store or nearby location where you can pick them up and our sensors are actually controlling those boxes. In each and every box, there is a Haltian sensor which is integrated into the lock of that box, that’s the use case.

And at the moment, it’s really working, the number is growing but we are also looking at more rare but important use cases. What happens if there’s a child who ends up inside that post-delivery box and we have had a couple of those cases here in Finland.

Nick Earle:

Really? You hear these stories.

Jarno Majava:

Yes.

Nick Earle:

So, you’ve got a couple of cases with children end up inside Posti’s boxes, okay.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah. So, what we are discussing is that we would also make a detection if there’s a person or some animal or some form of a living thing that happens to go inside the box then we are able to detect that.

Nick Earle:

I’m sure kids-

Jarno Majava:

Luckily, that doesn’t happen too often –

Nick Earle:

No, but I’m sure kids would think it’s pretty funny to stick a cat in there or something.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah.

Nick Earle:

But the point again, back to the business process, is the ability to have secure opening and closing notifications to optimize the supply chain of a massively growing area. We had one of our guests on the podcast, about five podcasts ago, it was Amazon which is the first podcast that I’ve done with a vendor and we do all of the automatic door opening for Amazon Prime. As well as the lockers, by the way, we also do all of the Amazon lockers, very similar case study. They didn’t mention the children but I’m sure it’s happened to them. But the ability to optimize the delivery and the notification of the data, it’s really all about the data is to tell people, track your parcel, where it is, has it been collected, have you dropped it off, it’s all about process optimization for them. And getting 100% connectivity is a long tail personalization which we’re going to go on to talk about.

Because as we mentioned about IoT, IOT is, traditionally, it’s held great promise but it’s not delivered. Funny enough, today, I was just looking at an industry analyst report that came out today and it talked about the time to revenue for IoT companies has increased from 23 months to 41 months which is not good if you’re an IoT company but it reflects difficulties people have implementing IoT. Forty-one months to revenue puts huge strain on business models, MVNO business models, for obvious reasons, and you start drilling down why is the time taking to implement going longer and longer. And there are multiple reasons but the silo, proprietary silo nature of solutions is a huge factor.

And the fact that an operator typically can give you 80% connectivity maybe, but not a hundred and none of your use cases work on 80% connectivity. MVNOs Multi-IMSI MVNOs can give you maybe 93, 95, and this is industry data percent, connectivity and your use case is a 7% loss in connectivity massively affects the promise you give to your customers. And then the architecture, I won’t go into it now, but the architecture to deliver 100% connectivity is a pretty different innovative architecture, as innovative as your Wirepas is, because you’ve got to be able to reroute the connection seamlessly and it has to be done automated and that’s how we achieve 99.5 globally.

But what that says is that, actually, right at the beginning of this part, we talked about it’s not just cellular and you mentioned satellite and not everywhere has a satellite signal. And if there is one, we connect, we don’t care whose satellite … Sorry, if there is a cellular signal, we connect, we don’t care whose cellular it is. I like to say we don’t have a dog in the fight, we’re agnostic. But I know that you are wanting to go further and into satellite and what’s called the R17 standard, the GSM AR17 and you also, you believe that the device has to play, hardware has to play a really big role in this. And maybe you talk about your views of how multiple radio access technologies will play a role in the future and the role of the device and how the device has to become much more intelligent.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah. So, this is really a good topic and, as we all know, today, we have already multi radios in our hands, we have smartphones that are using multiple technologies but those are really use case dependent. So, they use NFC when they are doing the payments or they use Bluetooth then connect it to your headset and it’s usually the user that is telling the device that, okay, here’s the thing I want you to do and then the device then selects the communication method. But in IoT, there’s no normally no user to interact with and the device itself has to be more clever and make those decisions based on what is best available or the best technology at the time.

In my Nokia days, that was called least cost routing, so optimizing the connectivity matter based on the cost but I think today it’s more about ensuring that there is connectivity whether you are inside the building, out on the streets, out on the sea and so forth. And there are, from the device perspective, it’s about building multi radios and supporting multiple connectivity technologies in the KPay, for example, including Release 17 satellite connectivity when we eventually get there, at the moment, we are still in 4G in our devices but it’s also about the kind of standardization. And we talked about Wirepas, for example, and they have seen this as well. It’s an extension to the Bluetooth standard if you look at it from the technology perspective but, at the same time, they have been now standardizing that so it’s also actually the first 5G non-cellular standard approved by ETSI.

So, standardization is important so we get better support from the chipset vendors and we have more options when we build the products but then, for the device manufacturer, how then supporting multiple technologies in a clever intelligent unit is really a way to ensure that connectivity is working everywhere. And then, last but not least, obviously, the connectivity provider and how we work with Eseye’s base then finalizing the package.

Nick Earle:

That’s a very good explanation, it gives me option to link to the number one piece of collateral that’s downloaded from our website every year is our predictions report. And we’ve been talking about multi-RAT and the device’s role in selecting the connectivity and this year’s predictions report is all about, I think it’s themed, it’s all about the device. And the point about it is that, you mentioned lease cost routing, us Americans call it lease cost routing, and of course, one of the reasons that people do that is that they’ve done a contract for a fixed price and then they try and optimize their profit by then switching it to networks. But your solution really has to be based on maximum provision of service and quality resilience and lowest latency which is a completely different model so you have to … And you still have to provide it for a fixed price.

And in order to do that … And then you say cellular is only 13% of all connections, you mentioned Bluetooth, BLE, mesh networks, Wi-Fi cellular is only 13% and the percentage is getting smaller and, when satellite gets introduced, even smaller again. So, our view is that, not only does the device need to be intelligent, but actually the switch needs to be resident in the device. Today, the switch is in the Cloud, we deliver you 100% connectivity globally because we’re using software, machine learning, we’re using a series of things to say which network should this device connect to. Now it’s long tail personalization and you don’t see the switches that we’re making, you just get connectivity with switching in the background because we have so many, we basically connect to any network.

When it gets to multi-RAT, then, actually, it’s a little bit more than just the switch because you, not only need to have a path to, this case, the satellites, but you’ve basically got to treat the satellite as if it was just another IMSI. But then you’ve got to have the intelligence in the device to update the firmware settings so that the modem or different modem even can connect to the satellite rather than connect to cellular and there’s a lot of different firmware settings to make that all to be seamless. So, we’ve talked a lot about smart connect, which is our offering, which is essentially a device centric switch, very small footprint which is programmable by the customer like yourself. So, you can use lightweight M2M in the Cloud to set the rules but then it is deployed and runs on an individual device basis and essentially you’ve turned the model upside down.

Now you’ve got the device making the intelligence switching decision so the device doesn’t have to communicate to the Cloud to actually switch. Now, when the device doesn’t have to communicate with the Cloud, you are then even further optimizing for service provision. But what you’re also doing is this building is you’re going from connectivity to resiliency because now you’re saying, you talked about self-healing, this is exactly … It says, “Look, it’s healed itself and you weren’t even aware of it. It’s chosen a different network because of the circumstances it finds itself in and what’s happening and then it will also self-heal and change again dynamically.” In order to do that self-healing, we believe firmly the switch has to be driven from the device out, not from the Cloud in or definitely not from the operator in but it has to be able to access those other two layers, it has to be able to access the Cloud and it has to access all the satellite networks and all of the other radio access types.

So, we’re basically pursuing the same vision of device centric switching which is, frankly, edge computing. But it’s not a model that’s common in IoT, it’s been very much from the operator out which is why, back to that survey, still now, in 2024, we’re seeing lengthening implementation times and which is why I wanted to highlight when you said we put a hospital in in seven hours or whatever, it was one use case with putting sensors in and gateways. But even so, we have to, as an industry, solve that problem in order to deliver on the business promise of IoT and that’s exactly the direction you’re going in, isn’t it? We share that vision of the smart device because you are device people.

Jarno Majava:

Yeah, we do very much and I think we are actually pretty much tied together as these multi radios context aware devices where AI can do the decision should I use this or that connectivity method and then also the slowness at the moment, slowness of implementations in IoT. So, I think, when we are solving these technical topics together, we are also helping our customers because they really don’t want any silos, they don’t want a IoT solution that is solving only one specific problem of their business. Obviously, it’s good that it does that but, if they have a thousand problems and you need to build a different IoT solution to solve each of them, you have, suddenly, 1,000 different IoT solutions in your IT and that’s not really sustainable.

So, I think, we, together, Haltian and Eseye, we can also help the customer growth by solving these technical hurdles and building more resilient and flexible products because then we are also able to have support for multiple use cases from the customer perspective. So, I put these two together, so solving technical problems and then solving customer problems, they have the common goal and that is to have easier, faster, better IoT solutions.

Nick Earle:

And we couldn’t leave it on a better note than that summary. So, very exciting going forward, thanks for the partnership. Congratulations on your Toyota announcement, that’s a big one and very exciting. And in percentage terms, it’s got to be at 99 point many nines percentages of buildings that still aren’t smart.

Jarno Majava:

Yes.

Nick Earle:

Opportunity here is so enormous and it’s not just buildings, we’re talking things and trillions of things and massive IoT. It is very, very exciting but also challenging and we have got to solve these problems. So, Jarno, I’m going to leave it there, thanks so much for your time and being on the IoT Leaders podcast and, no doubt, we’ll talk again soon. But thanks for joining us today and great podcast.

Jarno Majava:

Thank you, Nick, thank you.

Outro:

You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders featuring digitization leadership on the front lines of IoT. Our vision for this podcast is to be your guide to IoT and digital disruption, helping you to plot the right route to success. We hope today’s lessons, stories, strategies and insights have changed your vision of IoT. Let us know how we’re doing by subscribing, rating, reviewing and recommending us. Thanks for listening, until next time.

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