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

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 0:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You can find out more about the Automation Series and IOTA in the show notes.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  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. Alright 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.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  So I actually was, I'm a mechanical engineer out of school. 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. Then I, you know, I've always been though interested in, I like to say if it's fuzzy, I'm on it. You know, any, any kind of forward looking stuff. And I just started kind of driving my teams to do more R and D. So that kind of led me into R and D roles, eventually into CTO roles. There was a stint where I was at in the startup world for a while and that kind of got me to the experience, wearing a lot of different hats.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  And then when I came back to Dell in 2006, just, just, just always in, you kind of was able to get into the, the forward looking innovation roles. Which ultimately, I decided, hey, I want to be more on the software side and kind of that business focus around it. And that kind of led me to, hey, what do we want to do with I O T? You know, in 2014, and kind of as the buzz really started picking up. And, and as I always tell my team, the best way to get a job is to already be doing it. So we, we just started, you know, going, building a, a strategy within a small core team. And that kind of led me to, you know, being, you know, my current role as CTO for I O T and Edge at Dell Technologies.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:12Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And it's a great outlook on life in general. Talk about the patents. You, you've got a ton of patents that you guys have, have written and, and are in your name. Maybe just talk a little bit about what some of those are and how they came about.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and they actually kind of track the, the progression, you know, a lot of the earlier ones that I've done with, you know, over the years. It had been kind of more of, of mechanical type things. And then they start looking more like, 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 I've got a, a number of patents around that. We were doing things around session continuity back, I guess it was maybe 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, that's a big kind of theme with, with different ecosystems today. You know, most recently we've been getting into a lot of stuff around, of course, I O T, more broadly speaking in Edge.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  But then also lots of work around how do you?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  In part like intrinsic trust across networks. Because if we can't get to this notion of trust at scale, it's going to be very difficult to realize the true potential over time. So it's a whole slew of stuff, but lots of fun, different areas that we've been working in.

• 4:33Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What's like the weirdest thing that you've worked on on the technology side?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  That's such a, what's the weirdest thing? There's so many different things.

• 4:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your favorite patent that you guys put together?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I mean, we did, we did one that was around, 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 then you go back to work and immediately starts, oh, hey, I meant to say whatever. So we did one patent where literally as people would walk by, people would kind of like dynamically walk by based on an algorithm on your screen. So it's kind of like walking by somebody in your hallway. And so it would be randomized and kind of automated.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  And then the patent also included some stuff around, based on the schedules that you mutually have, it would force a virtual interaction with someone depending on, 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 physical world while you're working remotely. So we had a bunch of things kind of like that.

• 6:03Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty cool. I like that one.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Another one was around 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 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 clicked one line within that whiteboard and it would play you the recording of the conversation when that line was drawn. Oh, that's awesome. So you can kind of get the immediate context. Yeah, a lot of kinds of stuff like that, you know, over the years.

• 6:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so today you are what the CTO of IOT and edge computing at Dell?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, at Delta Technologies, yeah. So for the portfolio, but yep, yep, looking at the, looking at IOT and I mean, edge computing is a broader term, big trend. You know, and then the way I like to do things with, with, with the teams is, you know, let's focus on outcomes and then let's back into technologies. So IOT 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, then you get into things like AI and ARVR and 5G and all these different technologies. It's best to start with the outcome and then, and then you're back into it.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  So, but yeah, you know, initially, of course, at the core, focus on IOT.

• 7:40Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. So IOT, I mean, it's, it's, it's not one single thing. 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 devices, not associated with a particular user, so autonomous in that sense, 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.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Computer vision is definitely a kind of a close parallel to I O T 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 A I on top of that and driving change, that's when it gets super valued and you start kind of automating things. Whether it's in cities or or building automation, obviously, we have a lot of smart home stuff. So the things with your lights and your Lexos and all that kind of stuff, that would be considered I O T in general. So just more devices online, driving more data that drive more analytics that that help make things better is is kind of I O T.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  But with more of these things coming online, we just have so much data coming from the edge edge, the device edge, laptops, tablets, you know, all kinds of different sensors, traversing networks, all that data. And there's a point where there's so much data that it just it creates bandwidth issues, it creates latency issues for response. If I if I, you know, needed 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

• 10:05Speaker 02

  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 closer to the edge. 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. Security, if I'm a nuclear plant, I'm not going to be hooking up to the cloud. You know, it just exposes too much risk. And then and then the but the kicker ultimately is is around around the cost of just moving a bunch of data around.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  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 at 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, you know, 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 a operations person, I need to run compute close to my factory floor or in my industrial, you know, plant, chemical plant, whatever.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  If I'm a chemical or nuclear plant, I won't, you know, connect to the cloud in many cases or I'll use a data diode so data can only go one way and 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. Really important to understand is that in the IT world, you know, there's a lot of standardization, you know, 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 incredible amount of stuff done in the cloud, but you're just going to see more and more done at the edge. And but IT stuff is fairly standardized, a lot of good stuff happening, you know, in

• 12:14Speaker 02

  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 inherent, inherently heterogeneous nature of the edge is challenging. In the IT world, if, 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, it tends to be, if there's a breach, it tends to be a super long tail,

• 12:56Speaker 02

  like a credit card breach, where for years you play out, you play out the losses from that. So I like to say, you know, IOT starts in OT and scales in IT. We don't know where compute's going to be running in the end from the edge to the clouds. 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 the right tech.

• 13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Just because you can doesn't mean you should, mantras. Focus on the outcome, bud.

• 13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. 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 there's no magic wand of automation, right? Automation essentially comes down to things like computing power, algorithms, software, you know, a lot of kind of logic and controllers, et cetera. But how do you, kind of sitting in your seat at Dell Technologies, think about automation? Is there anything specifically that you guys are working on in that space? And then, you know, after we touch on that, maybe we can get into some of the technologies you guys are using.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, automation, yeah, it means a lot of different stuff to different people. And of course, you know, automation in the purest sense has been done in like the OT world, the operations technology world for a long time. When you think of like 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 within, to a certain degree, within lots of systems, even cars and all that. But it's 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.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  You may be 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 the, what's new is that, and we're working, you know, Delta Technologies with a lot of companies, and 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.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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 know, you just can't do that.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  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's, that creates an issue. Walking into the room, turning on the lights, kind of automation, 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,

• 17:13Speaker 02

  bringing it into some sort of analytics scenario, maybe applying some AI, machine learning, whatever, to do, you know, process improvement, very, it would be very untypical at this point for that, 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 a, an expert on the floor or in the production facility. And then that person would decide, do I make that change? And so it's, when you look at automation, I think this is really important to think about the implications of doing so.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And, and there's also this need for trust in how it's done across these networks. And so it's, 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, you know, gathering data and from, from the building around temperature and, and whatever is 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, is an easy example.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  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 too many people just say, oh, we're going to go automate everything without thinking of the implications.

• 19:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and it's so interesting to hear you say, you know, the need for with automation, but, but the kind of the real time nature being loaded words, right? Um, it's, uh, it, it really is so true. Um, and, 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? Um, you know, one of the technologies, obviously that a lot of the listeners on this podcast pay attention to blockchain, crypto, uh, Bitcoin, et cetera, and, 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 or using other technologies? Kind of talk a little bit about that.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so getting to system level trust is, is key. You know, how do you? Mitigate between across all of these different inherently inherently different stakeholders, you know, heterogeneous systems.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  So so ledger technologies, blockchain, you know, I think are are part of it. You know, obviously, I tease in some of my blogs about blockchain being kind of a a Windex of technology. If you've ever seen the the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the dad sprays Windex on everything, you know, like you've got a paper cut, oh, but you've got some Windex. And and and so, you know, blockchain, AI, ARVR, 5G, all these different things, I call them all Windexes of technology. People overuse the terms and and 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 with the compute power required. There's some inefficiencies.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  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 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 a sense of not a panacea, you you need to look at it more holistically. So so when you talk about trust across systems, you know, blockchain is is is certainly a

• 21:31Speaker 02

  a core element or ledger, more broadly speaking, we'll say, ledger technologies. 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 in different content that I have online and whatnot, is this notion of, you know, how do I get to the intrinsic trust required to achieve, realize what I call the holy grail of digital? And the holy grail of digital, I would say, is is this notion of selling stuff to strangers in simple terms. On one hand, yes, it's it's data, data is is kind of the obvious answer. And selling or sharing, and it's always on your terms, you always have to value, balance value with privacy and IP protection.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  But selling on your terms data, resources, compute, storage, networking, energy, ride shares, you know, anything consumable, or services, your domain knowledge turned into an API, your skills, your behavior, your ethics, you know, turn into an API on your terms because you want to be able to go sell your skills to complete strangers. Angie's List on steroids, if you've heard of Angie's List, or Yelp or whatever, like automated reviews through interacting with technology and then 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 messy.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  And so ledger technologies are part of that. You know, so is down to the silicon level root of trust. If I have a trusted device and then I have strong authentication methods for said device or devices, I have open API ingestion methods so there's transparency in how I acquire that data. This is why at Dell Tech we got EdgeX Foundry, a project within Limits Foundation going about two years ago in open source to do for IoT what Android did for mobile. Think of EdgeX as it's middleware, but it's, you know, it's let me create interoperability between devices and applications regardless of hardware, software, you know, OS, you know, in general, a protocol, we're never going to have one magical protocol standard

• 23:47Speaker 02

  for IoT. I can deal with inherent fragmentation and connect it to any backend system around an open API that gives me transparency in how that interoperability happens. So I combine, 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, like in 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 if you tamper with it, the hash values don't match. Combine that with a ledger technology and some other stuff around trusted execution, like a whole meal of trust technologies and transparency elements.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  This is how I get to that necessary trust and 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.

• 24:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so how do you think about the integration of automation, that ledger technology, and like digital currencies, right? Because one of the things that, from an investment thesis that my partner has 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, right? But before you have that, you'll have kind of settlement time issues with the assets. Maybe talk a little bit about that.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's a great point. I mean, it reminds me of a story. I was, I was, I meet with a lot of people and I talk about, you know, IOT, you know, a lot. It's more about the maker movement than it is about anything. It's this ability to go innovate very quickly. You know, the Kickstarter's and Indiegogo's of the world, you know, your Raspberry Pis and Arduino's kits and ecosystems. And then a lot of companies are getting into, you know, the old innovator's dilemma. You know, if I just do what I've always done faster, you all 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 innovator's dilemma book to.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Because it's just a lot of people are kind of struggling with this and it's understandable. But you really have to kind of change the way you do things if you want to keep up 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 because I figured it would go this way. And I knew that Square, you know, the mobile payments solution had really kind of impacted that industry, the traditional payments, you know, processing industry. And we get in there and we're having this call and they're saying, oh, we don't know what to do. You know, 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.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  And it was just kind of spinning and you could tell that they're just stuck in the innovator's dilemma. Like, what do we do next? What's the big thing? 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. To be respectful, it's like the fact that this blew your minds is why another square is going to happen to you. Because you're not changing how you do things. And or changing how you think about things. And so when it comes back to 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 we're working on with a bunch of folks.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I know the IOTA folks are working on, we're actually collaborating with them closely here. We're doing some stuff in Lend It's Foundation, Edge Project and EdgeX. 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 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 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 get fixed? But better than that, how about all of the machines in a region all look at themselves and collaborate and say, hey, look, we're all having issues.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And so why don't we send out a tech to replace, to 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 this 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, now let me talk about different stakeholders crossing UN cities and public and private boundaries and all that. You know, imagine a world where you're Your refrigerator could order food from the local grocer and make a payment.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  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, 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. They're doing great things, don't get me wrong. But to be able to do these types of automation things, these systems of systems, we cannot have any single entity own 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

• 29:30Speaker 02

  with things like EdgeX, but then also, you know, this distributed trust, the stuff we're doing with Hyota 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.

• 29:53Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess, can I 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. What does that look like? Or what's one of the examples that you're super excited about?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, of course. So, yeah, so many cool things. You know, I know I'm talking a lot of bigger stuff and, you know, I always like to say it's good to start, start small. I always say, think big, act small. And another thing that we're finding with Delta 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, is not the use case that you end up with finding the most valuable. 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.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  This steel manufacturer uses more power to produce steel than the city next to them. And so the initial question was, hey, how do I save some money on my electric bill? It's crazy. 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 in a sense. So it's really cool when you start seeing these types of things where when you talk

• 31:42Speaker 02

  about automation, you talk about the art of the possible. If you set things up right and you kind of architect 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.

• 32:16Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  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

• 33:19Speaker 02

  that we've talked about. You need to collaborate on the, the, 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, 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, you know, taking a, a good hold in, in the cloud, extend those principles to as close to the edge as possible.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  So I have that flexibility to rapidly assemble components from heterogeneous suppliers around kind of common, you know, baseline frameworks. And so EdgeX was set up to extend cloud native principles to the IOT edge as close as you can, where, where all of a sudden the devices become so constrained, they can't support containers and things like that, virtualization. But I want to be able to run, compute across that continuum and, and literally move workloads anywhere along that, that line and kind of automate that, that analytics. And I want to be able to do that with, with providers, domain experts from many different domains around that open API, around that interoperable base.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And so the technical challenges really kind of come into architecturally, how you do things, making sure you abstract the, the data and application from the underlying infrastructure, focus on these different tools that, that ensure security and, and trust, you know, at scale. And, and just kind of build out things in a collaborative fashion, 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 need that open plumbing to get there. So the technical challenge, a lot of people talk about security. Security is certainly a big one. It's all about defense and depth. Many of the breaches that we've seen in IOT has been where there's basically no security

• 35:31Speaker 02

  applied. So we do need to separate out, you know, can it be done versus was it done and did someone make a mistake in terms of not allowing people to change their password? I mean, the breach that took down the net in the Northeast of the US a few years ago was literally the millions of cameras got into part of a DDoS attack because I think it was like under 20 sets of usernames and passwords that went into all those cameras. So, you know, A, change your password, but B, it's really about how you apply it. And ultimately for security as a technical, when it comes back to technical challenges, is more about the, how do you apply security technologies in a usable way? If you make

• 36:15Speaker 02

  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, as I keep saying, how do you collaborate on the necessarily open parts to get to the true potential?

• 36:32Anthony Pompliano?

  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, the Dell Technology, kind of your background, not only on the, the kind of mechanics part, but then also the software, edge computing, etc. So just thanks again from all of us for taking time, frankly, to just educate us. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill

• 37:14Anthony Pompliano?

  those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.