Ask the Expert: IoT Entrepreneur, Rick Bullotta

Rick: “You’d be shocked how many plant managers and operations executives say, ‘That can’t be true!’ when they gain real visibility into what’s going for the first time.

“The thing to remember is that visibility is useful, but visibility without insight and action means you’re missing out on a lot of the value. That’s where I think this wave of applying advanced analytics, the twin model and the concept of threads to make things actionable, those are the real value amplifiers. Those are the 10Xers for what you can do with this stuff.”

Rick: “We’ve had customers apply the platform and literally get insights within days. It’s not just a pipe dream anymore. It’s doable. And that’s the type of thing that, I think, is going to be hugely differentiating for our approach to the problem.

“We’re trying to focus on the things we do uniquely and more importantly the things that bring our customers big value, fast.”

Rick: “The misunderstanding has been that this is all new data we’re collecting. In many cases it’s supplementing data that has already been collected somewhere. Maybe not in the right context, maybe not in the right shape, maybe not able to join with all the other sources of data we have about an asset, process, facility or whatever. So there’s plenty of work still to be done but clearly there’s no shortage of raw data.”

“The other side of it is cloud capacity. By partnering with companies for cloud capacity, we don’t need to be in the business and our customers don’t need to be in the business of building all that infrastructure. So that has taken the bar down quite a bit.”