Lessons Learned on a Submarine, and the Heroic Internet, with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson

09/07/20 • 28 min

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rob Tiffany, VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson explores the development of 5G and LPWA technology for IoT solutions, what it looks like for Telco’s to be successful in the IoT space, and how the Internet is playing the hero during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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00:00 Pete Bernard: Great, so Rob, thanks for joining us today on the Unicorn, and really appreciate you taking the time. I was going to start by asking you a couple things about what your role is currently at Ericsson, kinda how you got there. I know that you and I did work together at Microsoft years ago back in the Windows Mobile days.

00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.

00:25 PB: Good times, good times.

00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]

00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...

00:38 RT: Yeah. And certainly by 2010 or around that timeframe I took an architect role in another group and probably started spending more time on Azure. I was at Microsoft for 12 years and so the first half was Mobile, Windows Mobile, CEE, Windows Phone. Second half was Azure, Azure IoT. And you know what? We had some good times in the Windows Mobile days when it was just us and BlackBerry slugging it out. We were making... When things like Exchange ActiveSync was a big deal to people.

01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.

01:24 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then no doubt, when we rebooted and did Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 and all that, I used to do so many EBCs for mobility and you noticed a difference and you had to get really thick skin. [chuckle]

01:42 PB: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Well, I peeled off after six... I think, so I went on to Zune incubation, I did Kin and I did all kinds of weird phone things and went off into the wilderness for a while on that while everyone else finished up with Windows Phone, but...

02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.

02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...

02:07 RT: You know what? I finished college on board a submarine, so when I was in the Navy driving subs I had what, maybe 30 or so hours to go to graduate, and so I've actually never set foot on the SUNY Albany campus...

02:26 PB: Oh, wild.

02:27 RT: But the military has programs with lots of different universities around the country and to show how old I really am, I was able to take college courses underway on the submarine using Pioneer LaserDiscs.

02:42 PB: Wow.

02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]

02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.

02:50 RT: That is fully old school.

02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.

02:58 RT: Oh, okay.

02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.

03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.

03:09 PB: Yeah.

03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.

03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.

03:14 RT: To say the least. But you know what? I think everything started back then with submarines and teaching myself how to code and do databases, and when you think about IoT, you're just remoting information that you had on these local sensors and we were surrounded by sensors on the submarine. There's the obvious things like sonar and things like that and this higher frequency one to see what your depth is below the keel, but inside you had CO2 radiation, all kinds of gas sensors and things like that to make sure we were still alive, which was kind of a thing. [chuckle]

04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.

04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?

04:13 RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the Microsoft thing. I was recruited out of the Azure back when we were doing incubating Azure IT. There was that time... And actually Microsoft IoT stuff started in the embedded team with Intelligence System Service, but then I went to Hitachi actually to build an industrial IoT platform called Lumada, which was really interesting. But yes, I joined Ericsson a couple years ago. Up until recently, I split my time between Seattle and Stockholm. Normally I'd be in Kista, the Ericsson headquarters with the rest of ...

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00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.

00:25 PB: Good times, good times.

00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]

00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...

01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.

02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.

02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...

02:26 PB: Oh, wild.

02:42 PB: Wow.

02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]

02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.

02:50 RT: That is fully old school.

02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.

02:58 RT: Oh, okay.

02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.

03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.

03:09 PB: Yeah.

03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.

03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.

04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.

04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?

Previous Episode

Powerful Lessons for Building a Scalable IoT Business with Lou Lutostanski from Avnet

On this episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, learn from Lou Lutostanski, VP of IoT at Avnet, as he discusses the evolution of IoT including the need to partner on solutions, especially at scale, lessons learned from years in IoT, and the ways IoT and AI can be leveraged specifically within the healthcare industry, including with remote telemedicine.

Download the Transcript Here

Pete Bernard:

Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So, let's get started.

Pete Bernard:

This week we are talking with Lou Lutostanski, who's the vice president of IoT at Avnet. Lou’s been in the business a while and he’s going to be talking about his journey there and also reflect a little bit on the lessons learned that he sees over and over again. And how can we work together to help mitigate some of those things. We’ll also talk a little bit about how things like national emergencies like the pandemic accelerate existing trends. This was recorded actually only about a few weeks into quarantine back in March so an interesting perspective there. So please enjoy my conversation with Lou.

Pete Bernard:

So Lou, thanks again for taking the time to join us here on the IoT Unicorn. I know that we've been working together for a few months now, I think we met last June at the NXP Connects event for the first time. And, maybe you can give us a little background as to what you're currently doing at Avnet and maybe we can chat a little bit about how you got there and what that journey looks like.

Lou Lutostanski:

Sure. Well Pete, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be on your podcast. It was last year at the NXP event that we met and we've been working together quite frequently here over the last few months. But I'm currently the VP of IoT at Avnet. We're traditionally come from a historical industrial distribution business and we realized that the next wave in technologies was all around IoT. So I'm doing that now. But to go way, way back, my formal education was in electrical engineering at Purdue University.

Pete Bernard:

I see that, yes. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile as we speak.

Lou Lutostanski:

Yeah. And I quickly discovered that my area of interest wasn't really in hardware and moles and electrons migrating across a PM junction, but more interest in software, all kinds of software. So there was a new technology in electronics when I went to school sweeping the land called microprocessors and I kind of fell in love with the 8080. So by the time I graduated college I had taken classes in computer system design, which is the equivalent of computer engineering before there was a name for it. I did a lot of embedded programming. I had written two pass assemblers for the PDP-11 processor in

C and wrote disk allocation systems for mainframe resource management. And I actually worked summers for my dad's company writing applications around accounts payable or accounts receivable, inventory management and work orders. So, I kind of loved all kinds of programming.

Pete Bernard:

Sure, sure. Cool. And yeah, it's interesting. I've had some guests on here, it's okay to refer to IoT as embedded systems because that's what we used to call it. But now it sounds a lot cooler. But it sounds like you had a lot of hands on experience with that through your career. So you ended up at Avnet, it says 2013, was that when you started at Avnet?

Lou Lutostanski:

Actually, I ended up at Avnet in earlier than that. 1987.

Pete Bernard:

Holy mackerel.

Lou Lutostanski:

Yeah. I came off a brief stint at IBM out of college went to work for my dad's company. He had a company that did industrial equipment and so I sold for him for a while before I moved back to Austin, Texas, where I had started with IBM. Love took me there, I married a girl from there, and got involved in the wonderful world of distribution. So, my first job was with Hallmark Electronics and I was a sales manager, or actually a system sales manager selling storage terminals, PCs, monitors, motors, and printers. And I did that job for about a year before I figured out all the action in industrial distribution was in the semiconductor world. So, I converted over to become one of the first field applications engineers in distribution for the Motorola line. And later on, I moved up to sales management in Dallas and moved back to Austin as branch manager. Around that time Avnet bought us. So that's where I became a member of the Avnet family, even though I started in '87, 1993 was when the acquisition happened.

Pete Bernard:

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Next Episode

How Your Office Will Change Post-COVID-19 w/Cory Clarke at RXR Realty

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Cory Clarke, VP of Product Management and Strategic Partnerships at RXR Realty, discusses some of the IoT solutions his company is using to facilitate a safer return to the workplace during COVID-19.

Download Transcript Here

00:00 Pete Bernard: Cory, thanks for joining us, appreciate you taking the time. And I've done a little bit of looking at your LinkedIn profile and kind of understanding where RXR is at, but maybe you can kinda give us a little introduction about who you are and what your story is, and then we can talk a little bit about what you're doing.

00:19 Cory Clarke: Sure. I'm Cory Clarke. I lead product at RXR's digital labs. RXR is a New York real estate company, we own around 26 million square feet, 20 or 30 buildings, many really iconic ones like the stair at Lee High or the Helmsley Building. And yeah. Before RXR, I worked at WeWork for a couple of years, leading their Powered by We Group and Powered by We Technology. That was the technology they were building for enterprise clients to improve the experience of the workplace. And always kind of been interested in the overall workplace experience, actually I trained as an architect.

01:03 S1: Yeah, I see that.

01:05 CC: Seven years of architecture school, and then got entranced by technology and started working in software development and never really looked back. I did a lot of work for companies doing intranets and a lot of employee enablement, and really got interested in how technology can transform the employee experience, and that's what led me to WeWork and ultimately to RXR.

01:29 S1: Yeah. Well, it's interesting, you mentioned that... I talk to a lot of folks, and it seems every company is turning into some kind of technology company, or every company needs to have an element of software technology as part of its strategy. There's no such thing as a kind of a pure play, non-tech company anymore.

01:47 CC: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Every financial company is a technology company, I think every real estate company is eventually gonna be a technology company.

01:55 S1: Yeah. I was actually... A kind of a side bar, but I was futzing around with these bluetooth connected water systems over my long weekend made by Orbit. And Orbit makes all these little sprinkler googahs. And... So now they have these Bluetooth connected googahs, and they have an app that you download, and it's pretty cool, but you can tell at Orbit at some point the switch went off to say, "We're not just a sprinkler company, now we need to be a tech company with sprinklers and we need to write apps and we need to do stuff." So I suspect realtors like RXR and other folks are like, "Yeah, we're doing this thing, but now we really need the tech to take it to the next level." And...

02:37 CC: Yeah. I think the real estate world's kind of where I feel like where retail was maybe in the late 90s, early aughts, where like the... Brick-and-mortar was making this huge transition to online and real estate really in the last five, 10 years has gotten a ton of investment in PropTech and trying to make that same transition into a more... Like... Technology enabled services.

03:02 S1: Yeah. No, I can imagine. I asked you this before we started recording, but... You're kind of... You said you were a East Coast, you're an East Coast transplant.

03:14 CC: Yes.

03:15 S1: Or you're a... You've acclimated to become an East Coaster. I'm from New Jersey myself, that's why when I saw the background in New York, I thought maybe you were East Coast-y. You consider yourself now the East Coast person.

03:28 CC: Yeah, I am naturalized... Naturalized.

03:31 S1: Naturalized, yes excellent.

03:32 CC: Yeah. I've been in New York City... There's definitely people that were born and bred here, but there's a lot of people that come here and never leave. And yeah...

03:43 S1: Awesome. Yeah, it's an incredible area. I was actually in Long Island this summer for a little bit and got the New York vibe there, so that was good.

03:52 CC: Yeah, it's definitely been interesting during this time. [chuckle]

03:56 S1: Yeah. Yeah, clearly. And speaking of crazy times... You guys are kind of right in the middle of a lot of big transformations going on, not only technologically from your business transforming, but obviously the world is transforming in the way we are being much more remote in what we're doing. And maybe you can share with us where does RXR see offices and office work sort of transforming and moving post-COVID?

04:29 CC: Yeah, and I think the... The phrase is, the reports of the office demise are greatly exaggerated. I don't see the office going away, but I do think it is gonna fundam...