The Data Stack Show - 62: The Internet of Everything with Rob Rastovich of ThingLogix

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:Rob’s career began as an early adopter in internet marketing and then he got the bug for machine-to-machine IoT (2:47)Making assumptions about mass scale (8:44)Pervasiveness of IoT in the market (11:47)Initial reactions to technological advances that we take for granted today (17:28)What makes IoT unique (23:56)Killing the SQL server (29:11)What really separates a smart device from a dumb device that can send data to the cloud (33:13)5G, LoRa, and drawbacks and advances in widespread IoT adoption (37:05)Security and privacy in IoT (41:23)Using IoT as a cattle rancher (45:20)The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show. Each week we explore the world of data by talking to the people shaping its future. You'll learn about new data technology and trends and how data teams and processes are run at top companies. The Data Stack Show is brought to you by Rudderstack, the CDP for developers. You can learn more at rudderstack.com. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. Today, we're going to talk with Rob Rastovich, and he is a fascinating guy.

He built an IoT company that he sold to Amazon, and actually we'll find out whether or not some of the stuff that he built is still running in Amazon, but he's also a cattle rancher. So just a really interesting, diverse guy. Costas, I think my burning question is, I think about IoT and I can't help but think about going to like a Best Buy or something and looking at a smart refrigerator or a smart washing machine. And I just wonder how widespread is the implementation of that? I know there's a lot of sort of IoT stuff, maybe in like warehouses, Amazon warehouses, where they're sort of doing inventory and there's lots of robots, but I wonder how widespread it is. So that's what I'm going to ask. How about you? I don't know. The first thing that comes to my mind

when I'm thinking about IoT is like when Roombas are going to revolt and, you know, they will just escape from every house. Then that'll just make the world a cleaner place. Yeah, I think probably that would be a good idea here in San Francisco, to be honest. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think it's probably the first time that we are going to have a discussion about IoT.

Yeah, I think so. So yeah, I'd love to get like to learn the space more, like see how the technology looks like. What are the use cases? What are the technologies out there? How mature are? Because there's also a lot of like fluff around that stuff, because there's also like a lot of like B2C products. So yeah, I think we're going to have a very interesting conversation. And hopefully we're also going to learn something about how

you can combine IoT with cattle. So let's see what he has to say about that. Let's do it. Rob, welcome to the Data Stack Show. We have so many things to dive into, but thank you for giving us a little bit of time. Thanks, Eric. I appreciate you having me. Okay. Well, give us your background.

You have a fascinating background, and I'm not going to spoil it for the listeners, but give us the brief background on how you got into data and then what led you to working with Thinglogic today? So I started out actually in marketing. My job was, I had an advertising agency in Southern California. That was my background. And when the internet first came around and we started working, we found out that, okay, well, this is another mechanism for us to sell ads back in the early nineties. And so I started playing around with the internet and then started putting up e-commerce okay, well, this is another mechanism for us to sell ads back in the early 90s. And so I started playing around with the internet and then started putting up e-commerce pages. And once I started that, I always say that was the point where I got hooked on technology.

That was the crack cocaine. When you first see, you put up a page and you click on something and, oh my gosh, something else happens. And you put something to a basket and you make a transaction and the sale number goes up. Back in those days, we had the counters on the pages when the biggest thing was how many pages people were going to your page. So that's when I really got the bug. I started doing that for a number of years and then did a conference in San Francisco and saw Mark Benioff and Parker Harris right click and deploy to a cloud. And I was hooked on the whole Salesforce ecosystem, being able to do, not having to worry about servers and JDKs and SDKs and application servers and all those things. And so I drank the Kool-Aid, drank the cloud Kool-Aid back then and started doing Salesforce consulting. Did that for probably eight or 10 years.

And then some of the guys that I was working with, we got the bug. We said, all right, well, this whole machine to machine thing, we think that's going to be the next big thing. And so we spun off and we started a company in Denver called Telemetry. And our objective was, the belief was that, okay, the next big dot-com boom, if you will, is going to be IoT. We didn't call it IoT back then. We called it machine-to-machine. But basically, the idea of a device talking to another device or talking to you and you talking to your device.

The use case back then was being able to turn your thermostat down from your phone and those kinds of things. So our goal was to build a message broker that could handle the amount of data that we believed was going to be coming through IoT. And that product that we ended up trying to build had to be something that didn't exist today or didn't exist back then. The idea was when we were doing servers and we were doing applications back then, it was all the size of the server, how many hits you could take, how big the database was. Well, this had to be a technology that could handle a million concurrent connections constantly and keep growing and growing in scale. So that was our objective. Well, and our goal was to, because we had come from the Salesforce ecosystem, was to sell it back to Salesforce. And I remember we were testing it out. We had a customer that said, okay, prove it. You think you can really do a million hits a day. It's a million connections every millisecond for a week. And that takes a big infrastructure to even to do that and to test that. Sure. We spun up a bunch of these EC2 instances on Amazon and we literally got a call from Amazon

going, what are you doing? Please stop that. And we explained what we're doing and the test was successful. And it was very quick after that. It was three or four months after that. And we sold the company to Amazon. And what is today the microservice AWS IoT was the technology we were building back then. And I also, I live on a cattle ranch, 200 acres and 400 head of cows. We can talk about that later too. But at the time- Oh, we definitely will.

We definitely will, we'll make time. At the time, I wasn't gonna, you had to move to Seattle because during that acquisition, you had to move to Seattle. Sure. And there was no place to put 400 cows in Seattle. And so myself and one of the

other partners and one of the other founders of Telemetry, we decided to spin up Thinglogix because Amazon was more interested in the tech than the customers that we had. So we really started developing professional services around IoT and trying to create a pattern by which to deliver an IoT solution. Because of our Salesforce kind of DNA that we had, Salesforce really did for CRM what we've done for IoT. And again, I imagine Benioff and Parker Harris sitting around one day go, I got an idea. Everybody out there is creating a database

and they're calling their table account and they're calling it contact and they're making a join and they're doing all the same. Why don't we just give them all of that and they can log in and they're all going to need the same things and then we'll give them the building blocks to expand on that. Well, we took the page right out of that and said, that's the same thing with IoT. You're going to need all these things. You're going to need context. You need security. You're going to need certificates.

You're going to need an API. You're going to need all this stuff to interact with your IoT devices. So why don't we just build that and give that to them? And that's what Thinglogix now became. We ended up building, we have a product called Foundry, which we have since open sourced, and it's free to everybody to install in their AWS instance and start configuring their way to an IoT solution. Wow. So question for you. It really struck me that you started out by assuming mass scale in terms of required volume for IoT.

And that's so interesting to me because a lot of times you'll sort of, when you're thinking about a new startup or a new technology, you think, okay, let's try to prove this out on a small scale. But it seems like you started with the assumption of mass scale. I'd love to just know more about the thinking behind that. And then also, did you estimate too low or too high. Well, so the first, the, the, the first problem you have to solve when you're talking about the data, the, the IOT world is custom. And I say there's a life cycle to an IOT project. Right. And the life cycle goes like this.

So customer shows up and they say, look, I have this thing. Can you connect it to the internet? So I want to, I want a connected thing. So we show, yeah, you put some little firmware on there and make a little MQTT client. And now you're publishing data and you show a little webpage and it says, look, here's your data. And they go, that is so cool. There's my data. I can see it going up there. Then the next thing they ask for is they say, okay, can you put it on a graph? Sure. So you make a little graph and you watch the other graph go dynamically up and go nine they go that's amazing that's awesome we want to you know well can you make it send me

a text message like when temperature gets greater than 100 i want to get an alert sure i can make it send sends you a text message then they say can you connect a hundred thousand of these right because because i don't have a business with one. And then they have what I call the oh shit moment. Hope I don't hope I can say that. Where they say, oh my God, how are we going to manage all these? How are we? I mean, and then turn off the text message because I'm tired of getting it. Don't send me a alert anymore and get rid of the graph. And now we need to manage this at scale. So we knew that that going in, that if you're going to have a business on this, and if you're going to have truly a connected product, whether it was a refrigerator or a dryer or a temperature sensor,

the business model had to be infinitely scalable. And so we set out to prove that, yes, you could connect, you can connect an infinite amount of devices and have that infrastructure automatically expand and contract for you. So we did start out with that idea. Did we succeed? Yes, we did. Now, since that time, Amazon has taken it obviously to a whole new level. So the stack that we sold actually still runs the core of it, but they've added their whole ecosystem around it as Thinglogix because we took and we started adding their whole ecosystem around the solution as well. Yeah. And so would you say, I'm also interested, and Costas, I'll hand the mic to you after this, because I know you have a ton of questions

as well, but when you think about IoT, when I think about IoT, it's a little bit novel, right? You think about, okay, smart home, you hear a lot of things about the smart home, and maybe people have a nest or a smart washer dryer or whatever, but how pervasive is it from your perspective? Is it one of those things where it's way more pervasive than we think it is? And sort of all these devices are sending data or is it, are we still on early innings as far as mass adoption? And maybe that varies between commercial and consumer. Well, it's not as pervasive as I want it to be. I'll tell you that.

Because I say, one of the things about doing a startup, and I say, we have created a solution to a problem that most people don't even know they have yet. So you can get out to the bleeding edge, but you kind of got to wait for the corporate America to get caught up. And I think we are still at the very beginning stages. And quite frankly, the pandemic has actually increased people's awareness of IoT. When the pandemic hit, we actually came out with and we built a, we called it WorkWatch, an application on top of our platform where it took health surveys. It had a kiosk.

It automatically took your temperature and did all that real-time interaction kind of stuff. And we were able to spin that up and get going in like three or four weeks. But those types of applications now became like people's awareness. A big one for us during the pandemic became people counting. We had a very simple camera.

You put it at the beginning, at the entrance of a store, and you have a little sign on the You put it at the beginning at the entrance of the store and you have a little sign on the side and it counts the number of people going in and counts the number of people going out so that you have occupancy and capacity compliance. During the heart of it, we had a customer come to us. They were trying to get some people back to work. And their biggest problem was you had to make an appointment for the restroom, right? Because you couldn't have more make an appointment for the restroom, right? Because you couldn't have more than one person in the restroom at a time.

So they had to come up with a system whereby kind of like the light that you have in an airplane to tell you when someone's in and then to have when you can go and when not. And so all those types of little applications, I think, has greatly increased the awareness of people's need for these things are going to come around. So it is becoming more and more pervasive, but yeah, it truly is. I still think we're at the beginning of it. And one of the things that I'm very passionate about is how business could take advantage of these. It's a subscription-based economy that we're going to where you're now, and the example I always give is we had a pool supply company come to us and they said, well, we want you to update our website so that people can do online scheduling and they can order their products online and we can do a service call

line. It's the wrong business model. What you need is a connected pump. You put the connected pump in the pool, create a subscription model. The pump now tells you when the chemicals are low. So you don't have your customer. He doesn't have to go order. The chemicals just show up. You don't have to have that emergency call on Friday night that says, I got a pool party coming on Saturday. Can you come out and fix it? Because you can do predictive maintenance on the pools like that. So it's a different way of thinking about your business. And that shift in the business, I think is what takes time, but it's coming. Yeah. Would you also say, sorry, Costas, I lied. One more question. Would you say, we still have plenty of time. I'm so bad about this. Would you say also that, let's take the

pool pump example. And I was thinking about refrigerator. You mentioned a couple of other devices. Is there also a time lag with the replacement cycle of those, right? I mean, you don't buy a new refrigerator every year. And so even though there's a lot of availability of the technology on the market to actually replace physical devices, especially ones where I just think about, it's like, well, I couldn't even tell you how old my washing machine is. Would it be nice to have a smart washing machine so I can sort of manage that on my phone? That'd be great. But I also, I'm not going to replace it just to get that right now because it still works okay. Yeah. And you have that cycle along, like you

have the early adapters who are going to go buy anything that's tech. If you had told me 30 years ago, 40 years ago that, hey, one day you're going to buy a brand new phone every two years and it's going to cost you over a thousand dollars every time you want to buy a new, I go, you're crazy. It's, it's $3 and 99 cents. It's on the side of the, it's on the wall here. Why would I want to buy a new phone? It works fine. So that, that, that technology cycle, I think is getting shorter and shorter. And, and if you had, if you had told me 20 years ago that, Hey, I would turn off my cable and I'd only buy stuff off the Internet, I would not have believed that. But yeah, there is that lag. But I think it's getting shorter and shorter because the market that's growing up now is very used to technology in that cycle.

Us old guys, we weren't used to that cycle. So it wouldn't be out of the question, and they've got disposable income too. It wouldn't be out of the question for them to be walking through Home Depot or Lowe's. See, and I saw this the other day, and I have to have one too, by the way. A refrigerator that has a coffee maker built into it. That is the coolest thing ever. And then I go home and I think, I got to get a new refrigerator because I got to have a Keurig inside of my refrigerator. But yeah, there is that,

but it is getting shorter, I think. This is great. Rob, I have a question about something that you mentioned earlier. And mainly because we would take many things for granted. Like today, Salesforce, everyone knows about Salesforce. Everyone knows about the cloud. But what was the feeling that first time that you saw the founders of Salesforce demoing

in front of you a cloud solution? And not only yours, but also the people around you. Can you say a little bit more about this? Because I think this is going to be like super interesting. Well, yeah. And I am, I, technology is one of the things that excites me. Technologies and cows, right? Those are my two hot points, right?

And I, I had spent, I had spent most of my career at Harbor Freight provisioning servers, and it was always a fight. And then we had a DBA. Every time we needed a table, we had to do that. How you do indexing. And there was just so much that went into that infrastructure. And when I first put up my very first website, I had to provision the T1 line. I had to figure out what a DNS was.

I had to figure out how to do routing tables. You had all of that, which kind of now is abstracted to anybody. And you just, I don't know, you just upload your website and there it is, take it for granted. So when I saw that, I thought, oh my God, this is where things are going because it made so much sense. And I had created those web type of applications in the enterprise. We were doing those, but not on the scale that Salesforce was doing. And so I remember going, I got to be, I want to be a part of this. So there was a company, Appirio. It was one of the very first little boutique consulting agencies that started up to do

exclusively Salesforce consulting. So I was like employee and I finally said, okay, I'm going. I actually went back and I said, I told a tool company that didn't want to put up a website because they never thought anybody was going to buy tools or put their credit card online. I said, hey, let's move all of our data to the cloud. And they looked at me like you, now you have completely off your nut. So I wanted to be a part of it. I ended up getting recruited by these guys at Appirio and went into that thing. And at that time we had to, I remember the sales cycle when you're going through and you're trying to sell a Salesforce implementation. The sales cycle wasn't about, is Salesforce a good platform or is it a good idea?

It was, well, what is the cloud? Where is it? Where is my data going to be? And why should I do that? And security and all those same questions that we answered 20 years earlier in the dot-com boom. We're now asking and answering for this. But it was a very exciting time because in a small startup like that, everybody else had drank the Kool-Aid too.

It's like, this is game changing. becoming a utility like your electricity or like your water or like the gas instead of the server closet. That to me was also game changing. When there was a book, I forget the name, but The Great Transformation, where they talk about how when electricity became utilitized, that really changed the way business could work where you could just plug in and you could use only the electricity that you needed to use. You didn't have to have a generator outside your factory to create it. That changed the way business. So when IT becomes a service and IT becomes more utility where you just pay for what you use, I thought that was a game changer. Appirio ended up doing very well. We left and started telemetry before they were sold, but Appirio grew to, I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000 people. It was acquired by Wipro. It's still going strong today, but it's part of the big S I know.

Nice. And how did you go from CRMs to IoT? Yeah. How did this happen? One day, so I had been doing it for almost 10 years, I think. And there's only so many times you can say, well, this is an account and accounts have contacts. And then there's a lead. When a lead comes in, it converts to an account and a contact and it creates an opportunity.

And then the opportunity, and then they go. And then every customer is like, well, but really different my world is different what i need is an opportunity that has a different value in the stage field okay so we did that and i ran a really big implementation for netapp i spent three years in implementing their crm and at the point i was like i want to do something new. And quite honestly, I don't think I've ever told the story. You guys pull out all these little stories from me that I didn't have told you. So I'm actually out in the field one day.

It's summer day. Yeah. Out in the field. Yeah. With the cows and I'm irrigating, I'm changing the irrigation. And I remember thinking to myself, like, well, so the dot com came around, I won and lost fortunes. And then the cloud kind of came around, we won and lost fortunes because I love the technology. I'm a much better technician

than I am a businessman, that's for sure. But I'm standing out in the field and I said, okay, you're so damn smart rob you think that you knew that the internet was going to be e-commerce was going to be and you think you knew the cloud so what's the next big thing and i remember thinking it's got to be iot is is that ability to connect things and have data move back and forth and have that messaging and things take care i go that's going to be it. Well, I think I was right, but I was way too early. We were way too early on there, but that's really what it was at some point. You're all, and people always ask me, well, how can you be a farmer and a, and a technician

at the same time? And I say, everybody should do it because it's those moments, right? It's, and you've all, we've all experienced those times. Like I can't solve this problem. How do I do this? You get away from it. You go to sleep. You get on a plane. And all of a sudden, the answer comes to you. Well, every day, I do that same process. I'm working on the computer.

I'm either solving a problem or trying to write a piece of code. I get stuck. I go out and I change the irrigation or move the cows here and there. And you get out and you kind of do something with your hands and it kind of frees your mind up like that those those things come to you and then i think when the opposite is true if i had to do that all day long i'd go crazy i love the idea that that grounding actually gives me um the freedom i think to explain explore and be more creative on the on the tech side that's great so i IoT, how is IoT different in terms of

technology and infrastructure? Why is it different than anything else that we have built in technology? What are the differences there? And that's a great question. And one of my other passions that I try desperately to explain to people. I think for the last 15, 20 years, we have lived in what I call a request response world, right? Maybe 30 years, a request response world, meaning, and think of a simple webpage. You click on a button on a website, you click on a link, it sends a request to a server, that server sends you a response, and now you see a new page. And you rinse and repeat that, and you go through all these different processes. Our businesses have actually mirrored that technology. And there's a great book called Man as a Measure that always talks about how we as humans actually

mirror our technology, that there's this underlying influence that technology provides and we model our world. And it goes back to the clock and how the mechanistic period when the clock started becoming very precise mechanisms. But in business, we do the same thing. We request from our customers. We send them emails. We send them advertisements. We try and we request that they ask us for information and whole industries are designed around this request, sending out information and asking for the request. And then we get a response from our customer. And then that customer goes into our systems and it goes through a journey. Marketing, these marketing automation systems call them journey and you take them through the journey and ultimately they buy your product and then you give them that kind of back and forth.

Where I think IoT is changing that fundamentally is changing this idea that now instead of that request response, it is the new UIs, the Alexis, the Google Homes, SMS messaging, the new UIs of tomorrow are, we're going to require an immediate action on an event. It's going to be, and it is today, Alexa, send me, send me some more dog food. Well, that's not a, it's not a request response kind of thing. It is an event I spoke and something needs to happen in a whole bunch of things need to happen down the road. And the data from my speech has to be translated into an order and my address and all of those events. I mean, go down there. And we talk about the pool, a pool company that comes to us and they say, okay, well, we want to build a new website. And this new website, we want it to have a calendar on it.

So you can request a maintenance and we want people to be able to order their products. And we want to schedule our service and our cleaning, those kinds of things. It's a very traditional business model. And we'll drive people to the website and they'll buy our product. Well, to switch that model around, I said, okay, let's not do that. Let's take a connected pool pump that sends us the pH, the alkaline, the chlorine, sends us data about how the pool, the pump is working and do that as a subscription model. Now I have a customer that is very sticky. Like I'm not going to lose them. I got them. I

got their, their chemicals are arriving automatically. Their pump is being on a maintenance schedule that is predictive. In other words, it's not like, okay, if we have a pool party on Saturday and it goes down on Friday, I don't have to go out and do emergency because I can see the predictive maintenance schedule that needs to go on there. So it changes that model in there about how we do businesses and how businesses interact. We did one called cleaning as a service. Hoover, actually, Hoover vacuum cleaners installed our technology and they connected the vacuum cleaner. Now, we all have heard about the Rumba, iRobots cleaning thing, but Hoover went to one step further and said, what if we did cleaning as a service? What if we said, okay, we know that 99% of the reason that people return our vacuum cleaners is because their filter is dirty and they don't know how to clean it.

Yeah. Right. What if we just sent them a new filter when it got dirty? And what if we, those parts and pieces came to you instead of, would you use that vacuum cleaner more? Yeah. And you would probably do a tech refresh more often than you would if you just have it. And you would be more loyal to the brand. Because if you think your vacuum cleaner is not working because it doesn't work, when really it's

just you didn't change a filter, you're going to throw it away. Instead of getting a Hoover, you're going to go get a Decker or whatever they call them. But if you know that, oh, well, I get my parts and my pieces and it gets fixed. And when the new one comes out, I get a new one. I think it changes how you do business and how the stickiness is of a customer to a company. Yeah, yeah. That's super interesting. And, okay, from what I understand, like the way that you describe it, when we are talking about IoT, we are talking about like this kind of connectivity of the physical world with, let's say, the digital world. Yeah.

And there's a lot of telemetry happening, right? Like you have all these sensors, like all these devices, the remote devices that they live like on whatever like equipment we have out there, like the pump, for example. So there's a lot of data there, right? What are the, in terms of scalability and in terms of like the technical requirements, what do we need in order to realize like this vision that you are describing right now? That's a great question too. And the first thing you have to do is kill the SQL server, right?

Because tables and rows don't work anymore, right? You can't do, and we have been so, and I've seen so many IoTot so many iot implementations they've tried to do it like okay we're gonna we're gonna spin up well okay we can't use sql server we can't use my sql we're gonna have to spin up a redshift or something that's really grows but iot data is is changing version one of the firmware probably sends you temperature and maybe battery life. And version two has latitude and longitude. Version three has humidity and temperature and battery life and latitude and longitude. And so you can't be living in a structured data world

in an, trying to put an unstructured data world into a structured data world. So that was the first thing. And unstructured data is very uncomfortable for IT people. It's like, okay, they understand indexes, they understand tables and rows. And I even remember as a traditional Java programmer and traditional database developer, I remember going, no SQL, that makes no sense. How can you have unstructured data that didn't make any sense? I go, oh, you mean it's a Word document? No, it's not a Word document. Oh, you mean it's a PDF? No, it's actual data, but you don't know what the columns and rows are. And that's number one. So now that you have that, now you need a place to say, okay, how do I put logic? Where do I put

my code? I've got code that I want to write. I want to create a solution. And where do I drop that code so that when the temperature value comes up and the temperature is 100 and the temperature sensor is in Arizona, the logic does something different than if the temperature value is 100 and the temperature sensor is in Alaska. Where do you put that logic? And how do I put context around that? So where are my devices? Who owns it?

Who do I bill? And is there a rogue device? And how do I protect it? And all those kinds of things. So we put in everything's event-driven. Everything turns off of events. So a message comes and something happens. And there is a series of things. So we put in, everything's event-driven, everything turns off of events. So a message comes and something happens and there is a series of events. Now you have to have an infrastructure that is pretty robust to handle this. This is not something that's going to go in the server closet. So it has to be cloud computing. It has to be AWS. It

has to be Azure. It has to be Google. It can't be anything other than that. And that to me is also, and I think one of the exciting things where technology has come, and I remember without the advent of the internet, and this sounds almost naive, right? In the advent of e-commerce, there would be no Amazon, right? Without this cloud computing, without the evolution of cloud computing going to, and I mean, not just Salesforce cloud computing where we had CRM in there, but I'm talking enterprise data, 100% in the cloud with that kind of compute power. Without that kind of compute power, we couldn't have these types of business models. We couldn't have these types of devices and data coming up.

What I understand is that the way that I visualize it is we have all these sensors. The sensors are sending data on the clouds. On the clouds, we run some logic and we do something. Like, for example, we make a request on our CRM that this customer, his vacuum cleaner needs a new filter and someone is going to fulfill this order and all that stuff. Do you see this being also bi-directional in terms of the cloud and the device on the other side start interacting and not just being passive, this kind of like the pump, for example, like opening and closing the pump or this kind of thing. Do you see this happening? Absolutely. Yeah. And we always talk about the

life cycle of an IoT project, right? Somebody says, all right, can you connect this up to the cloud? I've got a water sensor. So yeah, we connect it up. You see the data coming in. Oh, isn't that cool? Isn't that interesting? Can you put it on a graph? Yeah, you can put it on a graph. Can you make it send a text message?

Yeah, I can make it send a text message to you. But really, that's not a smart device. That's just a dumb device sending data up to the cloud, right? What a smart device does is say, oh, if there is water, tell the pump to turn off. Not just send you a text message so that you can go turn the pump off. Go and turn the pump, actually go turn the pump off.

And when the pump turns off, it should notify maybe the utility company that it's got a leak or something. There's opened up a service ticket in your utility company. So yes, these devices can't be just dumb data collectors where they're sending data up. They got to be both ways. And really the interesting part of it becomes is I think businesses have to be that way too. So one of our clients is the United Way.

And the United Way, you think, okay, well, what devices does the United Way use? None. They don't use any device. But we use the same paradigm to do, we did agencies as a device, if you will. So Cisco actually sponsored an initiative to, they wanted to do a thousand people out of poverty was the name of their program. And they contacted us and said, hey, what we want to do is be able to coordinate care across multiple agencies in the San Fernando Valley. Not sorry, Silicon Valley in San Francisco. And they want to be able to coordinate their care. But they're all disconnected systems.

And we have a person that isn't really going to fill out a form or is not going to, the whole data input is a problem. Someone's going to do it on their behalf. So we enabled each of their devices to basically create database as a device. so we put a small piece of code very a very inobtrusive piece of code on these databases that would chirp and say okay well this record just got updated so it sends a message the message comes into into foundry I think logic's foundry and we can coordinate that against its other care get referrals to other networks and so their entire networking system became an event- thing. So once a person says, all right, I'm leaving, they're leaving the homeless shelter to go to the job

training shelter, you know that immediately. And you can track them, you can do the end. And I think in California, it worked out really nice because the state also provided cell phones. And so as state provided cell phones you could you could track and coordinate their care and whatnot so it is a situation where and it's got to go both ways it's got to this is not it's not messaging of of just saying listening to it but it's got to be interactive that's why i think it's the internet of everything and not necessarily just the internet of things yeah there's a lot of discussion also about like, like the impact that 5G is going to have and that like stuff like edge

computing. So the compute actually is going to move away a little bit from the cloud and go closer to these devices. Because I mean, if we end up like connecting everything, that's a lot of bandwidth, right? Back and forth so what do you see in terms of like the maturity of the technology right now where do we stand i mean the vision is amazing it's great like we have all these connected devices we can become as lazy as we want everything will happen automatically so we are cool uh but where where are we today well it's interesting you

mentioned 5g and a lot of people think that i that okay 5g is going to take us to the next level of that but ironically enough one of the the biggest use cases for iot is agriculture right and i know that because i live on a ranch and plus most of our stuff are we have a lot of agricultural clients and in agriculture and in iot it's not bandwidth it's not a vertical bandwidth not how much you can because the messages are very small but it's distance it's like can i get a temperature sensor out 200 acres and there's not wi-fi around my 200 acres but can i get a temperature sensor on the backfield to send me moisture data back and so technologies like la, where it's very small payloads, but very long distances,

that to me, I see as defining technologies in terms of the IoT world, because it's not the amount of bandwidth we need, we need the reach of it, and we need to be able to go everywhere. But where are we in terms of, is this all kind of pie in the sky or is this actually happening? And there's a couple of things. So it actually happens, but there's two things that slow it down. Number one, we talked about, I think it's enterprises learning to do this business model. Corporate America doesn't change quickly. Number two, it's fear, right? It is. And we see this almost daily. And when we were developing this technology, we had some people who were very interested in our technology that made us a little nervous that they wanted to invest in this. And we just were very unnervous because reality is we are building

Big Brother, right? There is no question about that and all things connected. And that is a scary thing. And when everything's connected all the time, and one of the other discussions that I also love to have is ethics and morals that I think we as technicians have a responsibility to when we have this technology to make sure that it is properly used. So it will always be used for ill and good. I don't doubt that, but I do think that that is coming. So that fear, and it's the same fear we saw when people putting their credit card on the internet, like they would never do it. Why would we put our credit card in the internet? Well, eventually you will. Eventually you get

comfortable with it. Now, hopefully, and we see this all the time now, and it's getting scarier. You do a search on Google and all the ads pop up on Facebook for what you did a search on Google for. And all of this stuff, it's too scary. We can do really connected kind of things. But because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing. And I think, I think we're kind of at that spot where, and I saw, I think Facebook announced today, they were going to change their ad algorithm or there was something about that, that they said, okay, okay, enough. We'll stop. We'll, we'll stop doing this, this crazy kind of

stuff. But it also is, there is is, there is a value to that too. And I go back to my beef customers, right? Like if I just texted everybody in Bend, Oregon and said, hey, buy ground beef from Rob Rastavish. Well, most of them are going to get all kinds of expletives back about why you're texting me, how did you get this number and whatnot. But the ones that I do engage with, that ones that choose to have all kinds of expletives back about why you're texting me. How did you get this number and whatnot? But the ones that I do engage with, that ones that choose to have that kind of relationship,

it creates a new kind of relationship between me and my customer that is much stickier, much more personal. And even you look like telemedicine and the things that we can start doing telemedicine and all those things. There's a lot of value in this, but I think we're just starting. Last question is what about three words? One is security, the other is safety, and the third is privacy. You touched privacy a little bit, but I think what is interesting with connecting the physical world is that we can have scenarios that are from funny to tragic,

right? Like I can imagine someone hacking my Roomba and my Roomba, for example, attacking me, right? So I wouldn't like this to happen. So what have we done towards that? Like, where do we stand about that? And what is needed so we can feel as safe as possible around IoT? Yeah, so, I mean, and that is always our number one,

our number one concerning question we get from our customers. Like, how can we make sure that this doesn't fall into the right hands? And I think we're doing a lot of those things. So the monitoring systems we're doing, the certificate systems, the being able to make sure that what is sending the data truly is it. We have, and we've all seen certificates on

websites that when you put your credit card in, you want to make sure that it's a secured site and whatnot. Well, each one of these devices actually has a certificate on it and it has connected. Because early on, we had all of that on there as well. We had many stories and you can hear these stories over and over again about how IoT devices got hacked. And one of my favorite stories was there was a rental car company that said, hey, we'll make a mobile a key, unlock the car, you get in, you can drive off. Well, they did that. And this, this, this couple, this elderly couple drove out into the desert of, of, of Nevada someplace and got out to look around and there was no cell phone signal and they couldn't unlock the car. They couldn't get back in the car because there was no, there was no connectivity on there. And then there's stories about people turning lights and on and off about through other

devices. So it is a main concern. And so the audits that we go through, one of the things that we did, one of our customers is Emirates MDB. We actually have an office in Dubai and we do a lot of IoT in the Middle East there. They're very much willing to, they seem to be more open to these IoT solutions than we are in the States, but security is a huge concern. So going through the security audits and doing all those best practices. And today, even today, I think most people think, and I think there's a common misconception that the biggest danger is some hacker is going to

figure out your password and get into your system. That is a danger, but we have such great protections against that the real problem in all this is the social engineering part of it and there's a great youtube video and i don't know if you've seen it but this and it and the guy is is a news reporter and he's has a a hacker is telling him it's a lady and she says uh you give me your phone number i'll close your bank account have your social security number and turn your phone off. And he goes, there's no way you can do that. She goes, yeah, I can do that. And I can do it. All I need is your phone number and who your carrier is. He told her her phone number and who the carrier was. She finds an audio recording on the web of a crying baby.

She gets on the phone with this dear, sweet, wonderful, well-intentioned customer service rep for the carrier. And the crying baby's going off. And she explains to this person how her husband's going to get mad, and she's got a baby, and she's got to get this, and she doesn't have his social security number. And she goes through this whole thing. And at the end of the day she has all those he's turned off his cell phone has his bank account closed and knows his social security number okay not through a pro not through a a process of of hacking into bits and bits and bytes but through a process of social engineering and that's really where the danger lies and i think the

misconception is that it's all, oh, we got hackers. Yes, that is a threat, but it is nowhere near the threat of phishing links. But here, click on this link and all of a sudden you're giving your password away to somebody. Fascinating. Tons to think about. We're close to time, but the question that I had to ask was, you started to talk about some use of IoT in the context of your ranch. Can you just tell us how you use IoT technology,

if and how you use IoT technology as a cattle rancher? Yeah, you wouldn't think it would be top of the list. Well, and I'm probably the exception in the cattle ranching industry in terms of IoT, right? So what I've started to do is, so I built, so we have, what my model is where I take in cows and we feed them beer mash. So we pick up the spent grains from the local breweries and Bend, the Shoes Breweryies probably our most well-known one and we feed that to the cows so when you and then we sell the meat back back to the pub so when you when you come to come to town you have a burger and a beer you're eating a burger raised on the beer you're drinking and so and so everybody do that everybody needs to show up at bend but but the, the process of handling cattle is, is a, when you, and when you, when you handle cattle, a, you want to keep as you want to keep a cow as least stressed as you possibly can. I mean, in, if you've ever been in a 24 by 24 pen with a 1600 pound animal, that is very stressed. You don't want to do that, right? That is a bad place to be.

So each cow has an RFID tag in their ears. So we know, you know, which one they are. So what we're just, what we're starting to do and what we're trying to develop, it's not completed yet, but we're working on it, is a series of, and we built a new corrals and we have RFID readers so that as a cow passes through on this way to feed or to get a drink of water or something like that. We'll read and see what the number was. We could then punch in the, we have an inventory of cows and we can see, okay, which one has been here the longest, which one weighs the most, which one is ready to go to market. Because today the one that goes to market is the slowest one, the one that you can catch and put in there. That may not be the real one that should be going to market, right? So as the cow passes through these

readers, we can open and close a series of gates that just very casually moves the cow into an isolation pen and then they close back in and the rest of the cows go to where they normally go. So by having that type of system in there, you're able to keep very less stress on the cow because they just move in and get their feed. The safety of the handler is he doesn't have to get in there with a 1600 pound animal. And so that's one of the use cases where you can now use IoT to move and change. You can change gates and move them and move cattle around. The other one we use, we grew industrial hemp a couple of years ago after it became legal in Oregon. And as a result, we could start using a fertigation, we after it became legal in Oregon. And as a result,

we could start using a fertigation, we call them fertigation systems. So in other words, you put a sensor out and because in hemp or row crops, what they call them, a row crop is like anything that you plant in a row, that's why I call them row crops, like celery or carrots or potatoes or cabbage or those kinds of things. And typically they're individual plants. They're usually covered and they have a drip irrigation system underneath. And we put a sensor in there for not only moisture, but for nutrients. And then the sensor will send data back to the pump and it will increase or decrease. The water is going to go through no matter what, but say it needs more nitrogen or

it needs more phosphorus or whatever it needs, it'll increase or decrease those nutrients to the plant too. So the plant gets exactly what it needs when it needs. Very efficient. And water use, which is another passion of mine. I think that's a whole podcast in itself. We could talk about water. But one of the other things, we're working with the USGS, the United States Geological Service, and they're using our technology to measure the volume of water in rivers so that you can do flow analysis. And that flow analysis, and while it's

the, I guess the logical thing is, is there going to be a drought or is there not a drought? But more importantly, if whatever's in the Columbia River or in the Colorado River, probably right now today, is really important to the guy in Arizona because that's going to tell him what kind of crops he can plant two or three months from now and what that's going to look like. So being able to create that water, I think is pretty important. Fascinating. Rob, this is amazing. I can't tell you what a treat it's been to just hear you talk about all the amazing IoT technology and then how you're actually using it on your own ranch.

I mean, that is just incredible. Thanks for sharing your story. We're out of time, but we'd love to have you back on the show sometime and hear about how implementing some of those IoT projects on the ranch goes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it.

It was really fun. What a fascinating guy. I mean, I just love talking to someone who is trying to just deal with the normal things you deal with as a cattle rancher and growing crops, but who also sold an IOT company to Amazon and works with so many interesting businesses. I think one of the things that really stuck out to me was his point about social engineering being more dangerous than hacking in the sort of movie sense where we think there's someone in a dark room

hacking into a system with code. And that was just, that was very thought provoking. And I really appreciated that perspective. Yeah, absolutely. I think the way that he put it, like it seems that humans are the weakest link in this situation. And probably he's right.

You cannot manipulate like a machine. I mean, machine is zero and one, unless like there is some kind of issue that we can exploit for that. If we follow all the best practices and the attackers do not know something that looks like a zero-day bug or something like that, then, okay, it's not that easy. Yeah, humans can be manipulated.

That's true. So social engineering is quite a thing. Indeed. All right. Well, we will catch you next time on The Data Stack Show. Thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Data Stack Show. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified about new episodes every week.

We'd also love your feedback. You can email me, ericdodds, at eric at datastackshow.com. That's E-R-I-C at datastackshow.com. The show is brought to you by Rudderstack, the CDP for developers. Learn how to build a CDP on your data warehouse at rudderstack.com.