Interview Lou Lutostanski: Making Things Easier

The world of IoT is changing fast and the number of vendors and solutions are legion. Finding the right supplier can be tricky, says Lou Lutostanski, vice president for the Internet of Things at Avnet. He was named IoT Leader of the Year at Industrial IoT World in 2019.

Why should someone look to a distributor like Avnet for information about IoT?

Throughout our history, Avnet has been the provider of enabling technologies for OEMs of electronic devices. Supporting the Internet of Things is a natural progression of our business, and we are positioned to support this transformation of delivering insights through connected devices. We recognise that our OEM customers who build “The Things” in “IoT” (the Internet of Things) will face significant skill and resource challenges as market demands are requiring them to add cloud-based features and connected experiences to their traditional products. IoT implementations are complex and span many different disciplines that require a significant number of software skills that were not needed in the past. Recognising this gap, Avnet has invested significant resources in acquiring and developing IoT Software capabilities that can help our OEM customers create these connected experiences using the principles of IoT. We are prepared to support IoT, and over the past three years, we have built a solid practice and added over 700 IoT and Cloud software developers to an already significant number of hardware engineers. And we will continue to evolve so that we maintain our position as a significant technology enablement partner to our customers.

We're trying to build security options into IoTConnect, so implementing the desired level of security is as easy as checking a box to order fries with your burger.
_{Lou Lutostanski, Vice President for IoT at Avnet}

Seems to me that every time someone does a new IoT project they reinvent the wheel. Is that really necessary?

No, it is not. While there will always be some level of customisation in bespoke IoT applications, many companies continue to spend the majority of their time and money building and maintaining their own IoT platform using open source or Hyperscale Cloud IoT Services. This significantly extends their time to market and robs them of the resources that would be better spent on providing differentiated value in the way of their applications. It also creates significant overhead to maintain the IoT platform, which in the end, their customers will pay for. Other companies hire system integrators to build a custom IoT platform. Again, it delays time to market, incurs great expense, and locks them to one company (the SI) who they will be reliant on for the lifetime of the application as their IoT platform must be maintained into perpetuity. Spending time building or having someone else build an IoT platform for companies that create value through applications and IoT implementations, is a waste of time and money. And it adds zero value to their end customer. This is the number one reason why IoT is not scaling, and in turn, not reaching the forecast in connections predicted several years ago.

Build & Deploy: IoTConnect Platform is a smart IoT platform that helps boost efficiency, manage assets and adopt innovation. (source ©: Avnet)

Talking of ecosystems, you once criticised what you called ‘ecosystem mass confusion’. How should customers go about selecting an ecosystem?

Ask yourself, what would be the state of the mobile phone industry if there were hundreds of operating systems rather than the few available today. What would be the quality and usefulness of user applications if every manufacturer wrote their own operating system? Fortunately, this industry gravitated towards just two OS providers, which has enabled a massive ecosystem supporting developers and markets for applications. In comparison, ecosystems for IoT developers and users are not at this level of maturity, and there is a lot of confusion around identifying the ecosystem that is going to provide the solid foundation for this industry.

IoT ecosystems form around IoT platforms. These platforms provide the rules and structure for the various partners to integrate their products and services in a manner that is compatible with all other partners required for a successful IoT implementation. Partners who add value within any ecosystem are attracted by the popularity of a platform. The fewer platforms available, the higher the potential return on their investment. And in the case of IoT, the higher the potential ROI, the richer the applications, AI algorithms, and hardware purpose built for the solution.

The bottom line is, customers today should look for an ecosystem that can invest the most in research and development and yield the optimal features because they integrate into an IoT platform that is based on HyperScale Cloud IoT Services that can be used horizontally across many or all IoT solutions. In this way, the application that they buy will not require them to bear a part of the substantial additional cost of maintaining the platform. That cost will be born by the thousands and tens of thousands of customers that buy various applications built on that IoT platform. Additionally, it will prevent lock-in of one or several vendors and give them the maximum number of vendor choices for their IoT implementation.

Getting Started: Azure Sphere development kits provide everything you need to begin prototyping and developing Azure Sphere applications. (source ©: Avnet)

Tell me more about Avnet IoTConnect which seems to be an interesting approach.

Avnet’s IoTConnect is an IoT platform built on Microsoft Azure microservices. Our microservices architecture enables us to adapt to the evolving needs of our users and developers, and we view Microsoft as one of two hyperscale cloud providers who can support Avnet for the long term. We believe alternative platform architectures built on open-source technologies are too complex to maintain and become stagnant shortly after their release. But building from the established Microsoft Azure ecosystem has provided a solid foundation.Based on our deep and long-term relationships with our semiconductor suppliers and OEM customers and our growing capabilities in cloud, IoT, AI, security, and application software, we believe our IoTConnect Platform can serve as an enabler to allow for simple, fast, and secure IoT implementations. And if we are successful in getting IoTConnect adoption as one of the two or three standard Horizontal IoT Platforms, then the scale that the industry has been expecting and is now demanding can become a reality.It would have been much easier for Avnet to help our customers with their IoT implementations, if there were already one or two established platforms out there. But there were not. And as such, the complexity and risk associated with IoT discouraged our customers from pursuing strategies that could create substantial growth in device counts that would have in turn fueled growth for our business. The lack of an established IoT platform also forced us to help customers create hardware solutions with limited use as they were bespoke to only the IoT platform they were designed for.

It’s Official! The W3C has declared the WoT Architecture and the WoT Thing Description to be official recommendations for the standardisation of IoT applications. (source ©: W3C)

Sounds like IoTConnect is offering a type of Plug and Play for IoT.

Plug and Play is a term that I first heard about in the PC industry. It applied to PC peripherals that could plug directly into a PC without the requirement of the user being forced to run software programmes to install drivers.

Plug and Play in the IoT world is exponentially more complex. The number of things, software elements, and connectivity methods used to create IoT solutions are infinite. So creating rules for how these things interact with each other in the way of the platform, and having the software and hardware skills to assist those connections, is what makes Avnet the ideal entity to bring the physical and virtual worlds, the OT and IT worlds, together.

Expert Opinion: Lou Lutostanski, Vice President of IoT at Avnet, was named IIoT Leader of the Year at Industrial IoT World 2019. (source ©: Informa PLC, Jeremy Coward)

We believe that Avnet will succeed while other companies, some much bigger than Avnet, have failed because they did not have a deep understanding of all the parts of IoT. People with device or connectivity solutions did not understand the cloud and above. And the cloud people lacked the deep embedded device experience to create a scalable means for rapidly onboarding an infinite number of “Things”.

You advise bringing order to IoT. What do you mean by that?

It means developing software rules that allow companies with many different types of hardware and software products and services to participate in successful IoT implementations, without having to understand the complexities of all the technologies required to produce them. IoTConnect defines those software rules and provides a mechanism to manage those devices, integrate third party software, and integrate applications and AI in a manner that delivers simple, fast, and secure IoT implementations. It allows OEMs to deliver rich features and user experiences around their products and the opportunity to create new services to deliver revenue beyond just the physical hardware.

Are IoT solution providers really addressing the security problem in an adequate fashion?

The majority are not. Security is extremely complex. And with many companies building their own IoT platforms or paying someone to build it for them, budgets are usually blown before the complexities of security can be addressed.I would make two comments about IoT security.

• People who are serious about IoT will never deploy at scale without some level of security. The financial liabilities and the potential damage to their brand are just too significant.
• For those that deploy without security by design that get hacked, the only fix is to start over. (Rip & Replace).

Avnet has built varying levels of securities into IoTConnect. And we are working with third party security and identity providers to integrate their IP into IoTConnect to facilitate the deployment of security after the fact. So one can preclude security through small or test deployments and implement security at a later date. Avnet’s goal through IoTConnect is making adding security to your IoT implantation as easy as adding fries to your burger order.

How do you scale IoT?

The industry needs to limit the number of IoT platforms to less than a handful. This will attract partners and create a vast and vibrant ecosystem. Companies need stop building, or paying someone to build their own IoT platforms and build their applications and product experiences around one or two that have wide adoption in the industry such as the WoT Standard released by the W3C. Customers will never accept that they will have to maintain an equal number of IoT platforms to the number of applications that they deploy.

How does the COVID pandemic accelerate IoT?

I think there are two answers to that question. One is that most people are working from home now and we’re finding they appear to be much more efficient. As such, they have much more time to think long term regarding applying IoT technology in their products or services. The other thing is that there’s a whole new generation of applications that have been spawned for contact tracing, prescreening, medical monitoring, which have an urgency about them coupled with an extreme requirement for action. This has created a whole new application category, if you will, built to deal with the challenges presented by the Covid pandemic. So, I think these two factors have accelerated the deployment of IoT implementations.

Learn more about IoT Connect here

READ MORE ARTICLES