The Pomp Podcast - Jason Shepherd, CTO of IoT and Edge Computing at Dell: The Future of Advanced Computing

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

This is episode #3 in the Automation Series. You can learn more about the Automation Series here. You can learn more about IOTA on their website. Jason Shepherd is the CTO of IoT and Edge Computing at Dell. As the leader of the Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Division, he and his team are responsible for technology strategy, standardization, business model innovation and strategic ecosystem development within the Dell Technologies IoT and Edge Computing Solutions Division.  Jason was recognized as one of the Top 100 Industrial IoT influencers of 2018, and he holds 14 granted and 13 pending US patents. In Jason’s episode with Anthony Pompliano, they go in depth on automation, edge computing, IoT and digital currencies.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. The following episode is part of the Off The Chain automation series sponsored by IOTA. The goal of this special series is to explore the intersection of distributed ledger technology and automation, specifically around digital currencies, digital wallets, and machine-to-machine transactions. My core belief is that every stock, bond, currency, and commodity will eventually be digitized and distributed ledger technology will empower the full potential of automation to be realized. IOTA is the sponsor of the automation series. Their mission is to support the research

and development of new distributed ledger technologies, including IOTA Tangle. The IOTA Foundation encourages the education and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols. You can find out more about the automation series and IOTA in the show notes. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression

of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Jason here with me. Super excited to have this conversation. So thanks for so much taking the time to do this, sir. Oh, yeah. My pleasure. Let's jump right into your background. Obviously, you spent a lot of time at Dell, but what did you do before getting to Dell? So I actually was, I'm a mechanical engineer out of school. I went to UT here in Austin. Got into, I actually started at Dell doing design of like the computer cases, plastic and sheet metal CAD design. And then, you know, I've always been interested in, I like to say, if it's fuzzy, I'm on it. you know, any kind of forward-looking stuff. And I just started kind of driving my teams to do more R&D. So that kind of led me into R&D roles, eventually into CTO roles.

There was a stint where I was in the startup world for a while, and that kind of got me to the experience wearing a lot of different hats. And then when I came back to Dell in 2006, just always in, you know, kind of was able to get into the forward-looking innovation roles, which ultimately I decided, hey, I want to be more on the software side and kind of the business focus around it. And that kind of led me to, hey, what do we want to do with IoT in 2014? And kind of as the buzz really started picking up.

And as I always tell my team, the best way to get a job is to already be doing it. So we just started going and building a strategy within a small core team. And that kind of led me to, you know, being in my current role as CTO for IoT and Edge at Dell Technologies. So it's been a it's been a good ride, but it's always about kind of finding finding gaps, you know, surrounding yourself with really good people and being inquisitive and just go make stuff happen. For sure. And it's a great outlook on life in general. Talk about the patents. You've got a ton of patents that you guys have have written and are in your name. Maybe just talk a little bit about what some of those are and how they came about.

well yeah and they actually kind of track the progression you know a lot of the earlier ones that i've done with um you know over the years have been kind of more of mechanical type things and then they start looking more like um the more and more software over time there was a stint where we were working with a team focused on how do we improve remote collaboration tools so we've got a number of patents around uh that we were doing things around session continuity back um i guess It was a little over 10 years ago around how you can drop off from one device and pick up on another. And, of course, that's a big theme with different ecosystems today. Most recently, we've been getting into a lot of stuff around, of course, IoT, more broadly speaking, and edge,

but then also lots of work around how do you impart intrinsic trust across networks? because if we can't get to this notion of uh trust at scale um it's going to be very difficult to realize the true potential every time so it's just it's a whole slew of stuff but um you know to you know lots of lots of fun different areas i've been working in for sure what what's like the weirdest thing that you've worked on on the technology side that's such a uh that's a man what's the weirdest thing there's so many different things um maybe what's your fate your favorite um kind of patent that uh that you guys um put together i mean we did we did one that was um around uh you know when you're walking down the hall and you see somebody and you're

like oh man i've been meaning to ask you for like three weeks like about this one thing you work at home like remotely and you don't talk to anybody you've got all these people sitting statically in your im window and you might just get consumed with your work and and then you go back to work and immediately starts oh hey i meant to say whatever so we we did one patent where literally as people would walk about people would kind of like dynamically walk by based on an algorithm your screen um so it's kind of like walking by somebody in your hallway um and so it would be randomized and kind of automated and then the patent also included some stuff around um you know based on the schedules that you mutually have um it would

force a virtual interaction with someone um depending on uh you know kind of the fact that you would have been walking by the actual physical hall because you were in those kinds of rooms there's kinds of different claims around that kind of stuff but this notion of combining physical and virtual and making you feel more like you're sort of in that in that um physical world while you're working remotely so get a bunch of things kind of like that that's pretty cool i like that one yeah another one was around white whiteboarding when you whiteboard on a screen and say you watch a video of some people that whiteboarded and it's like this squiggly mess of stuff in the end and um you know you go back as maybe you missed the meeting and you're like looking at this the

people's camera pictures of the smartphone pictures of the whiteboard and you're like i have no clue what that drawing is because it was all done you know in real time and people had different conversations and so the patent was around if you you clicked one line within that whiteboard and it would play you the recording of the conversation when that line was drawn so you can kind of get the immediate context yeah a lot of kinds of stuff like that got it and so today you are what the cto of iot and edge computing at dell yeah at dell technologies yeah so so for the portfolio but um yep yep looking at the looking at iot and I mean, edge computing is a broader term, big trend.

You know, and the way I like to do things with the teams is, you know, let's focus on outcomes and then let's back into the technologies. So IoT, you know, with more devices coming online, you know, at scale represents a big new workload, a big new opportunity. But ultimately, it's really about focus on the outcome, focus on the use case, and then back into it, all these technologies. And then you get into things like AI and AR, VR and 5G and all these different technologies. It's best to start with the outcome and then back into it.

So, yeah, you know, initially, of course, at the core, focus on IoT. Yeah, maybe just walk us through for those that don't know, you know, what IoT is and then what edge computing is. Right. You're I'll venture to say you're an expert in this. So kind of how do you describe both of those trends or themes to folks? yeah yeah definitely so so iot i mean it's it's it's not one single thing uh we joke all the time people they're like hey i'd like to buy some iot it's like oh really what color would you like you know i mean it's it's you know iot is a collection of of of things but really it's about this notion of more uh devices um not associated with a particular user so autonomous

in that sense um you know placed out in the physical world collecting data about the physical world and and you know feeding that into compute systems and in the purest sense you just give me visibility from the physical world you know sensors around temperature or pressure vibration cameras are one of the best sensors around so you know computer vision is definitely kind of a close parallel to iot with with image based data but you bring all this data into systems maybe giving you some visibility but then when you start applying analytics or you know ai on top of that and driving change that's when it gets super value and you start kind of automating things and whether it's in cities or or uh you know building automation um obviously we have a

lot of smart home stuff so the things with your lights and you know your alexas and all that kind of stuff that would be considered iot in general so just more devices online driving more data that drive more analytics that help make things better. It's kind of IoT. But with more of these things coming online, we just have so much data coming from the edge edge, the device edge, laptops, tablets, all kinds of different sensors, traversing networks, all that data. And there's a point where there's so much data that it creates bandwidth issues. It creates latency issues for response. If I need an immediate response and I cannot tolerate any kind of downtime, like if I'm a factory and I have a robot on the floor, I need immediate response

or there's a safety issue in many cases. I don't care how many nines your reliability has on the tail end for your network, a wide area network, like a cell network, you will not deploy your airbag from the from the cloud not going to happen and so so so there's there's a need for for edge computing so this this is about moving more compute uh closer to the edge um for reasons of latency i need immediate response bandwidth i've just got so much data that i'm getting from these devices that i can't send them over these networks because it just costs too much money uh security if i'm a nuclear plant i'm not going to be hooking up to the cloud you know that just exposes too much risk. And then the kicker ultimately is around the cost of just moving

a bunch of data around. The way I define edge computing is moving compute as close as both necessary and feasible to the subscribers that need it. So, you know, like in the sense of like a Netflix, they're moving more and more of the content close to the cloud edge, you know, where the telcos can then bridge that to your homes. I often explain why we need edge computing with cat videos. My wife and I have three cats, and cat videos is why we need the Internet, first off, of course. And then also we need more edge computing because if videos go viral, I have to cache it closer to the subscribers. If I'm an operations person, I need to run compute close to my factory floor or in my industrial plant, chemical plant, whatever.

Or if I'm a chemical or a nuclear plant, I won't connect to the cloud in many cases. Or I'll use a data diode so data can only go one way. I can't have any sort of attacks coming in. I mentioned the airbag example, but it's really about this continuum across the board. What's really important to understand is that in the IT world, there's a lot of standardization over the years. Of course, the cloud is not going away. There's a bunch of clickbait out there saying, oh, the cloud's going away. The edge is going to eat the cloud or whatever.

Not the case. You can still see an incredible amount of stuff done in the cloud, but you're just going to see more and more done at the edge. But IT stuff is fairly standardized, a lot of good stuff happening on that front. But in the OT world, the operations world, close to the physical world where processes happen, it is really fragmented. It's really messy. There's a lot of, you know, this is where people live, and people are complicated. And so dealing with that inherently heterogeneous nature of the edge is challenging. In the IT world, or I'll put it this way, in the OT world, if there is a security issue or a breach, there is immediate loss of production or a risk to life, if not loss of life in the OT world.

In the IT world, if there's a breach, it tends to be a super long tail, like a credit card breach, where for years you play out the losses from that. So I like to say IoT starts in OT and scales in IT. We don't know where compute is going to be running in the end from the edge of the cloud, so you really need to architect that. So we should kind of maybe talk through some of that. But it's a lot of interesting trends and challenges when you deal with IoT and edge and how it all comes together. But ultimately, it is about let's focus on outcomes and then back into it the right way. For sure. Yeah. And look, I think in crypto specifically, but obviously in things like IoT and edge as well, we see it all the time. Right. People get enamored with the technology.

they then go looking for a problem to solve with this new piece of technology rather than working kind of in reverse where let's start solving the problem and then figure out what technologies empower us to do that yep yep you know just because you can doesn't mean you should uh mantras focus on the outcome for sure um okay so let's get a little bit more into automation right and i look at automation as kind of one of these catch-all phrases because um there's no magic wand of automation right automation essentially comes down to things like computing power algorithm software um you know a lot of kind of logic and controllers etc but how do you kind of sitting in your seat at dell technologies think about automation uh is there anything

specifically that you guys are working on in that space um and then you know after we touch on that maybe we can get into some of the technologies you guys are using yeah i mean automation yeah it means it means a lot of different stuff to different people i mean of course you know Automation, in the purest sense, has been done in the OT world, the operations technology world, for a long time. When you think of process control, there's been programmable logic controllers, PLCs and factory floors for quite a while, SCADA systems, et cetera. They've been doing these types of things for a while.

Manufacturing, of course, you've got automation to a certain degree within lots of systems, even cars and all that. But the level of it is changing. And then there's also this notion of automation in the purest sense on a factory floor has been running for a long time, maybe building some widget, but you don't necessarily know what's happening in the moment. There's many cases in the history of manufacturing where you could be running your process for days, if not weeks, and not know that you're making bad parts. And so a lot of what's new is that when we're working, you know, Dell Technologies with a lot of companies, we provide infrastructure and we work with a bunch of different domain experts on top in the different fields, is how do I provide, quote unquote, real-time visibility to this process?

And it starts with visibility, but then over time, you're going to start seeing more, taking automated action on, automatic action on the insights that you gain. But this is where, when you look at automation, where it's also very important to kind of going back to what I was saying about kind of the IT and OT worlds and the degree of risk when you do something in the OT world, immediate loss of production or life in the IT world. It's a, hey, sorry, you couldn't get your email. I shut down the network because I was concerned of a breach. You know, you can't just shut down a factory floor. I joke all the time, you can't just willy-nilly update things on a factory floor. Imagine a screen that said, hey, save your work. Your production line is rebooting in 15 minutes. We're doing an update.

You just can't do that. And so when you think about automation, you also have to think about the processes involved, the stakeholders involved, the risk of if you make a decision that creates an issue. Walking into the room, turning on the lights kind of innovation is not a big deal. You know, low risk, making that decision in an autonomous fashion, making a big decision around turning off your, you know, your production line because of some issue or making some change to the process is different. And so what you'll see in the industrial sense typically today is even if someone's collecting data, bringing it into some sort of analytics scenario, maybe applying some AI, machine learning, whatever, to do process improvement, it would be very untypical at this point for that decision. Hey, we could tweak this parameter and make the factory more efficient. Very untypical today would that decision be automated back into the factory floor because of the implications. What will happen is that decision will be fed to an expert on the floor or just in the production facility.

And then that person would decide, do I make that change? And so when you look at automation, I think it's just really important to think about the implications of doing so. And there's also this need for trust in how it's done across these networks. And so it's really interesting. This is why it's so interesting and so important to talk about this kind of notion of people and technology altogether. Last thing I'll say on that is real time is a very loaded word. There's a lot of loaded terms in technology. Real time to a building automation person in terms of making some sort of gathering data from the building around temperature and whatever.

um it's like 15 minutes i i would consider that real time as a building person if i'm a manufacturing person or if i'm an airbag you know it's an easy example i think real time is a fraction of a second that is deterministic the message must get there in time or there's a problem if i'm a financial institution i think real time is a fraction of a second but but no one's going to die if your starbucks doesn't get you know thing doesn't go through and you know transactions so it's we've got to really consider when we do automation all these different things so um i don't know i mean we can talk about some examples and uh but but it's just it's a really interesting thing and not too many people just say oh we're going to go automate everything

without thinking of the implications for sure and and it's so interesting to hear you say you know the need for with automation but but the kind of real-time nature being loaded words right um it's it really is so true. And obviously, kind of the elephant in the room, I guess, is as you talk about automation and this need for trust, how do you think about that being solved? You know, one of the technologies, obviously, that a lot of the listeners on this podcast pay attention to blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin, etc. And the blockchain technology solving for that trust by allowing people to verify information. Is that something that you guys are looking at as you try to solve the trust problem in automation are using other technologies kind of talk a little bit about that

yeah so so I think the system level trust is key you know how do you mitigate between across all of these different inherently uh inherently different uh stakeholders you know heterogeneous systems um so so ledger technologies blockchain um you know I think are a part of it uh you Obviously, I tease in some of my blogs about blockchain being kind of a Windex of technology. If you've ever seen the movie, My Big Pack Greek Wedding, the dad sprays Windex on everything. You know, like you've got a paper cut. Oh, but get some Windex. And so, you know, blockchain, AI, AR, VR, 5G, all these different things, I call them all Windexes of technology. People overuse the terms and you would have seen over the past number of years.

I mean, two years ago, you could have just said blockchain and someone would throw a million dollars at you, you know, VC money. And now it's kind of dried up because there's challenges with the compute power required. There's some inefficiencies. If you're in a cold supply chain scenario and someone gets sick and dies because you were the reason why, you know, their food went out of temperature and got contaminated and you were on a blockchain system, all of a sudden you hate blockchain. So fear of exposure creates a challenge. All these different things. But then there's some new technologies like IOTA, you know, we think is a super cool approach to ledger technologies, kind of a whole different way of doing it. We're working on some stuff even within Dell Technologies and VMware.

There's a project called Project Concrete. Like, you know, you're seeing some different emerging things. But I always like to talk about technology in the sense of not a panacea. You need to look at it more holistically. So when you talk about trust across systems, you know, blockchain is certainly a core element or ledger, more broadly speaking, we'll say. electric technologies um but so is a number of other technologies and so one of the things that we've been working on at dell and i talk a lot about in different content that i have online and whatnot is this notion of um you know how do i uh get to the intrinsic trust required

to achieve um realize what i call the holy grail of digital and the holy grail of digital um i would say is this notion of selling stuff to strangers in simple terms. On one hand, yes, it's data. Data is kind of the obvious answer. And selling or sharing, and it's always on your terms. You always have to balance value with privacy and IP protection. But selling on your terms, data, resources, compute, storage, networking, energy, ride shares, anything consumable, or services your domain knowledge turned into an api uh your your your skills your behavior your ethics you know um you turn into an api on your terms because you want to be able to go sell your skills to complete strangers you know angie's list on steroids if you've heard of angie's list

or you know or whatever like automated reviews through interacting with technology and putting that into these kind of trusted fabrics so to get to the holy grail we need intrinsic trust across you know systems of systems that are inherently heterogeneous because you know the edge is very is very messy um and so so ledger technologies are part of that um you know so is down to the silicon level root of trust um if i have a trusted device and then i have strong authentication methods for said device or devices um i have open api uh ingestion methods so there's transparency and how i acquire that data this is why at dell tech we got edgex foundry a project within linux foundation going about two years ago in open source to do for iot what android did for

mobile you think of edgex is it's middleware but it's you know it's let me create interoperability between devices and applications regardless of hardware software um you know os you know in general a protocol we're never going to have one magical protocol standard for iot i can deal with inherent fragmentation and connect it to any back-end system around an open api that gives me transparency and how that interoperability happens so i can mine you know root of trust and authentication methods with open apis like edgex and there's other stuff we're doing within the lf edge project within the crano and all this different stuff these technologies with immutable storage i need to be able to put data into object-based storage and and if you tamper

with it the hash values don't match combine that with a a ledger technology and some other stuff around trusted execution like a whole meal of of trust technologies and transparency elements this is how i get to that necessary trust and transparent transparency it's not one thing it's how you build systems with the right technologies if you do this right you will be able to create data in the physical world send it off into the ether and collect checks from total strangers. This is scale. For sure. And so how do you think about the integration of automation, that ledger technology, and digital currencies? Because one of the things from an investment thesis that my partner and I had for a long time is

every stock bond currency and commodity eventually gets digitized. And once the assets themselves are digital, now you can unlock the full potential of automation. But before you have that, you still have kind of settlement time issues with the assets maybe talk a little bit about that well yeah i mean it's a great point i mean it it reminds me of a story um i was i was uh i meet with a lot of people and i talk about you know iot um you know a lot it's it's more about the maker movement than it is about anything it's it's this this ability to go innovate very quickly you know the kickstarters and indiegogos of the world you know your raspberry pies and arduino's kits and ecosystems and and then a lot of companies are getting into you know the old innovators

dilemma you know if i just do what i've always done faster um you know i'll succeed no you have to start to pivot and and i joke that i've got a gift card list of people to send the innovators dilemma book to um it's just a lot of people are kind of struggling with this and um it's understandable but you really have to kind of change the way you do things if you want to keep of them in this type of market so i was on this call i had this call around iot strategy with one of the big payment provider folks and and i prepared kind of this for the end and because i figured it would go this way and i knew that square you know the mobile payments um solution had really kind of impacted you know that industry that the traditional payments

payment processing industry and and we get in there and and we're having this call and they say, oh, we don't know what to do. We don't want another square to happen. And I'm like, oh, I can understand that. That really probably was a big impact to your business. And it was just kind of spinning. And you could tell that they're just stuck in innovators. So I'm like, what do we do next? What's the big thing? And I'd saved this for the very end. I'm like, hey, guys, I need to go. But have you thought about when machines start making payments? And that kind of blew their minds. And I'm like, I didn't say anything about it because it would be respectful. It's like the fact that this this blew your minds is why another square is going to happen to you because you're

not changing how you do things and and or changing how you think about things and and so when it comes back to what the question this notion of automation this notion of if you can kind of create this digital currency and you build the trust in the systems as you know we're working on with a bunch of folks i know the iota folks are working on we're actually collaborating with them closely here uh we're doing some stuff and when it's foundation edge project and ajax and there's some new stuff coming that i can't quite talk about yet but if i do it right real automation and real business starts to get um to really scale when you're able to kind of trust machines you know in the sense to you know if i'm a machine and i'm doing what there's predictive

maintenance being done and i'm about to be broken why don't i order the part for myself and put in a work order and then have that come have me um get fixed but better than that better than that how about all the machines in a region all look at themselves and collaborate and say hey look we're all having issues and so why don't we send out a tech to replace the you know upgrade all of these things at once because we're going to make that tech more efficient oh no actually i'm like about to be broken so i'm going to order a new machine because if you fix me you're just going to spend more money over three years than if you just replace me you know all of this kind of smarts and this automation and these layers of decision making and this efficiency driven at a

both at a local regional and global scale this is the real potential oh and by the way let me now let me talk about different stakeholders crossing you in cities and public and private boundaries and all that um you know uh imagine a world where your your your refrigerator could order food from the local grocer and make a payment that grocer then gives it to a delivery person who's a different party that delivery person comes to your house and then says hey can i get into the into the house and then in the house that the security system owned by somebody else opens the door so it's not like one company in the middle of it whether it's an amazon or google like i'm doing great things don't get me wrong but to be able to do these types of

of automation things these these systems of systems we cannot have any single entity on the trust we need to collaborate on decentralized trust it's like you know imagine if one company owned the internet it just wouldn't work and so to get to all of these great players out there working on this notion of hey let's get out of the lock-in mentality let's collaborate on enough of kind of open plumbing both in terms of interoperability with things like edgex but then also you know this distributed trust the stuff we're doing with iota and a bunch of other players and whatnot, you know, and some new stuff coming, as I mentioned, I need to get to where I have intrinsic trust across all domains, you know, web and mobile and brick and mortar and industrial

and home and auto. Then we start seeing that automation stuff really scale and really cool stuff happen over time. For sure. And I guess, kind of walk us through, you know, one of the examples that you're most excited about. So you take this distributed ledger technology, you implement it along with these hardware devices that are collecting data in the real world and you start getting you know closer and closer to kind of the promise of automation um what does that look like or what's one of the examples that you're super excited about yeah yeah so so yeah so many cool things you know i know i'm talking a lot of bigger stuff and and um you know i always like to say it's good to start uh start small um i always say think big act small um and another

thing that we're finding with Dell Technologies, we're working in so many different industries, manufacturing, transportation systems, retail, healthcare, you name it, is that the use case that you start out with, maybe you're just trying to solve a simple business problem, is not the use case that you end up with finding the most value in. So an example that pops into my head is this notion of, there's a provider that we're working with that's working with a steel manufacturer uh this steel manufacturer uses more power uh to produce uh steel than the city next to them and so the initial you know question was hey how do i save some some money on my electric bill it's crazy um and so they come in and then they take this holistic approach looking

at all the different systems you know and of course the core process but also logistics and all this different stuff and they ended up not only saving power but they also saved so much power and got so many different efficiencies that we're able to sell energy credits back to the power company and so actually turned it from a cost center into a profit center uh in a sense so it's it's really cool when you start seeing these types of things where when you talk about automation you talk about the article possible um if you set things up right and you kind of architect you know properly so that you can kind of grow as you get efficiencies you start focusing on this trust across networks, you know, the sky's the limit. I like to say that if you're

focusing on, you know, most of this stuff starts with driving efficiency and the like, but there's only so much you can cut costs. If you're focusing on new money, new revenue pools, new opportunity, the sky's the limit. So you want to kind of have that balance and be really thinking about the big picture. For sure. And so as we kind of look to that future world of automation, which I think you and I both believe will happen. What are the technical challenges that kind of stand between us, right? So from where we are today to where we're going, what are some of the technical challenges that you think need to be kind of solved? Yeah. So first off, I'll say that one of the biggest challenges is in biggest variables and

also greatest assets is people within organizations. And so there's that people problem that we've talked about. Technically, when you talk about the scale factor, first and foremost it's about driving interoperability you know open always wins in the end the past four years in kind of iot has been about everybody trying to create these platforms and thinking if i can just lock you in i can sell your data if you let me and the reality is is what you need to do is open it up at the edge where data is created and this is why we've been investing in things like edgex foundry and a bunch of other projects and collaborating with with with players around ledger technologies and the trust stuff that we've talked about. You need to collaborate on

the technical plumbing that will enable, you know, open interoperability between, you know, devices and applications, that trust factor that we've talked about. Security is a challenge for sure, you know, maintaining privacy and governance, but it's also related back to how you architect. To get to the real potential over time, we need to extend cloud native principles, This notion of platform independent, loosely coupled architectures, microservices, this notion of continuous delivery, those types of principles that have been taking a good hold in the cloud extend those principles to as close to the edge as possible. So I have that flexibility to rapidly assemble components from heterogeneous suppliers around kind of common baseline frameworks. And so EdgeX was set up to extend cloud-native principles to the IoT Edge as close as you can, where all of a sudden the devices become so constrained they can't support containers and things like that and virtualization.

But I want to be able to run compute across that continuum and literally move workloads anywhere along that line and kind of automate that analytics. And I want to be able to do that with providers, domain experts from many different domains around that open API, around that interoperable base. And so the technical challenges really kind of come into architecturally how you do things, making sure you abstract the data and application from the underlying infrastructure, focus on these different uh tools that that ensure security and trust you know at scale um and and just kind of build out things in a collaborative fashion uh that that plumbing you know we need we need more consistent plumbing again imagine if the internet was owned by one person it wouldn't work out so well you know you need that open plumbing to get there so the technical challenge um a lot of people talk about security uh security is certainly a big one it's

all about defense in depth many of the breaches that we've seen in iot has been where there's basically no security applied so we do need to separate out um you know can it be done versus was it done and did someone kind of uh you make a mistake in terms of um not not allowing people to change their password i mean the briefs that took down the net in the northeast of the u.s a few years ago was literally the millions of cameras got a took part of a ddos attack because I think it was like under 20 sets of usernames and passwords that went to all those cameras. So, you know, A, change your password,

but B, it's really about kind of how you apply it. And ultimately for security as a technical, when it comes back to technical challenges, is more about how do you apply security technologies in a usable way? If you make things so difficult to use, then no one's going to want to use them or they'll just bypass it and then bad things happen.

So lots of different things around architectural considerations and how you apply the different tools in the right way. And then, of course, it's like you're saying, how do you collaborate on the necessarily open parts to get to the true potential? For sure. Well, listen, Jason, I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation.

It's fascinating for me personally to kind of hear how you're thinking about it, you know, sitting there at the PTO role with Dell Technologies and kind of your background, not only on the kind of mechanics part, but then also the software, computing, et cetera. So just thanks again from all of us for taking time, frankly, to just educate us. and see you next time on Off The Chain.