The Impact of the Industrial IoT: A chat with David Purón, CEO of Barbara

We are at an inflection point where we are starting to see technology and use cases but it has not yet exploded. There are very interesting cases emerging and there will come a time when every industry will produce a use case - what we call the killer app - like the email application did back in the day, which will change the business model of that industry completely.

David Purón, CEO of Barbara

1. What is the real revolution in the IoT industry?

To understand the impact of the IoT or Internet of Things, the first thing is to understand what the IoT is and the key is in the word Internet and not so much in things, things have been there all their lives and not the Internet. With the Internet, what we achieve is to connect things to each other.

I like to put the equivalence with the traditional Internet that was born with the ARPANET project in the 80s, to connect humans. Nobody really knew what it was for until email was created and it was this use case that drove the development of the Internet and changed the business models of many companies.

In the IoT industry we are at a tipping point where we are starting to see technology and use cases but it has not yet exploded. Very interesting cases are emerging and there will come a time when every industry will have a use case - what we call the killer app - like the email application was in its day, which will change the business model of that industry completely.

IoT is here to do something so revolutionary that it will change the business models of most companies. Its impact will be such that it will create new revenue streams, new services and products; it will transform all markets.

Whoever now manufactures solar panels can then go on to sell energy through the Blockchain because the panels are connected to each other. The IoT is undoubtedly the foundation on which business model changes are going to take place in all companies.

2. In what time frame are we going to see this change?

There is one reality that is fully visible, and that is that changes are occurring faster and faster, the development cycles of new technologies are becoming shorter and shorter.

IoT is very much associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and indeed the industrial revolutions have been passing and we are immersed in another new industrial revolution that has been underway for some time now, when could we mark it as complete? I estimate that it will be no more than 6 years .

We are going very fast, the potential will be seen in 5 or 6 years, no more. We are having many meetings in which these use cases have already been identified and now it's time to develop them.

3. What is Barbara IoT's role in the immediate future?

We come from the digital world. we are digital natives - we come from the digital world - we are digital natives - we come from the digital world the traditional Internet penetrated companies when computer scientists, telcos came in and started to get into companies' systems.

The world of things has been governed by industrial technologies that are not digital.

We come to fill that gap in industrial companies that need knowledge of the digital world, protocols, communications, programming languages and standards. We come from working on the Internet all our professional lives and what we are doing is applying digital knowledge to the world of things.

In Barbara IoT we come from the digital world, to complement, but not replace, industrial technologies with IoT. There is talk of the IT - OT battle and I don't think there is a battle, there is no winner here, we have to agree.  

David Purón - CEO of Barbara IoT

4. What kind of industries can benefit the most from IoT?

The traditional Internet has always made sense for companies with assets that are highly distributed. Companies like utilities that have hundreds of thousands of sensors and actuators, or smart meters or thousands of GPS distributed across different locations and countries, that's where IoT is going to have a big impact and a real benefit.

Without IoT an electric utility with 5000 - 7000 transformer stations the way it manages its transformer stations is through human processes. It requires people to change equipment, perform maintenance or generate reports - it lacks a digital network to automate those processes and optimise them.

IoT has a huge impact on industries with many assets and very distributed such as Utilities, Mobility and Logistics, Oil and Gas, Water and Energy. Companies that are relatively automated but not digitized.

5. What are the main barriers for the Industrial IoT to take off?

Cybersecurity

A company in the water industry, for example, that wants to digitize its water management network, has thousands of valves that are operated manually and the first thing you tell them is that they have to connect that network to the Internet. We are all more exposed when we connect to the Internet and it is normal that cybersecurity is a brake.

In all the studies, it is said that the main barrier is cyber security, and I think that makes perfect sense.

Now, it's a psychological brake because the industrial world has always worked in isolated networks and they don't know that there are secure solutions . It's a fear of the unknown really, because there are solutions to connect to the Internet securely.

Scalability

The second barrier is scalability, how to achieve viable projects.

When we talk about highly distributed systems with hundreds of thousands of water meters, valves or sensors deployed in a city or in several countries, either you make it scalable or they are unaffordable projects.

Scalability means that when you add new elements to connect to the Internet, the cost is not linear but lower and it is done in a reasonable time. You need solutions and tools that allow you to deploy 15,000 devices quickly. We are talking about having a tool that allows you to manage, install and monitor many devices in a simple way.

Fragmentation

The third barrier is Fragmentation. The universe of things is enormous. In a company you can find a large number of device typologies and here the key is standardization, which is ongoing, but there has to be much more standardization.

The world of IOT industry is hyper-standardised and this is another point where we, as a digital native company, have an important role to play and that is to identify and understand which technologies can bring together this fragmentation.

In the same company you will find smart meters and large valves manufactured 30 years ago that want to connect to the Internet. Obviously they have two very different connection mechanisms. In the photovoltaic sector, for example, those responsible for the maintenance of solar parks find stations built in the 90s with very modern stations, we are talking about very different environments, this is what we mean by the challenge of fragmentation.

6. How does Barbara address these 3 challenges in the IoT industry?

From a digital technologies point of view, we have developed a technology that allows us to optimise IoT deployments - I don't use the word "solve" because there are many ways to solve projects.

But in our case we have developed the technology that addresses these 3 challenges in an optimal way and by that I mean in a safe way, in a reasonable time and with reasonable resources that make the project viable.

To give an example, we have the case of a customer in the logistics world who had been trying to build an IoT solution for two years. The solution worked in a controlled environment but when they had to deploy it in a large warehouse they couldn't, they had the problem of scalability. We came up with an IoT solution that we managed to develop in 2 weeks.

Our approach to the challenge of deploying IoT is that we are able to respond 10 times faster and within a budget that makes it feasible.

7. The world of the IoT industry is a very broad field that needs multidisciplinary profiles. How does Barbara approach it?

In the industry IoT Ecosystem is key. It is impossible for a company to provide a solution to the end customer alone, regardless of the size of the company, the big consultancies ultimately have many partners to provide a joint solution. The IoT is so big and multidisciplinary that no one can know everything.

In Barbara IoT we are focused on a very specific part of the IoT which is the firmware that goes inside the devices, it is a central piece but it is one more piece of the puzzle. We provide final solutions, but we give them together with other partners.

We have solutions in the Energy, Logistics, Telcos and Water sectors and we provide these solutions through partners. There is a lot of expertise outside and in companies that are our partners. In the world of hardware, for example, we have top-level partners.

On the technical side you need firmware and cybersecurity experts, people who understand technology, and on the soft skills side you need people with a vision of the future who look ahead to today. In the interviews you obviously talk about the past, but it is something anecdotal, we are looking for people who have a vision of where the world is going, who have ideas and proposals, who are curious and like technology, this is the profile we are looking for and we have in Barbara IoT.

8. What is Barbara's contribution to the world of the IoT industry?

We are one of those companies with the ability to make IoT happen in the next 5-6 years.

Companies like Barbara IoT we are the Challengers, if we didn't exist, the process of digitalisation in industry would be much slower. It's a big world out there and IoT is moving fast. I see that some companies are going to multiply their speed of digitisation exponentially in a very short time.

I see the company helping large companies to enter this unknown world that is the IoT and digitization. If the more traditional companies, large companies do not partner with digital native companies and with the vision of the future that Barbara IoT has, their speed will not be able to be the one that will impose the market and they will be left out.

9. Are companies that come to Barbara IoT looking for solutions to digitize or are they asking for an IoT solution?

I don't know if it's the chicken or the egg first. I don't know if it's because the big analysts create these trends and the companies want to join or the companies join and then the trend is created.

What is clear is that IoT is a trend now. And many companies are coming to us to helpthem define the use case.

They want to know what they can do with IoT and the good thing for us is that little by little we are becoming experts in many verticals and not only in the technological part but also in the business part.

We can provide a vision of what IoT can be used for in verticals such as Energy, Logistics or Telcos but also how to do it in a secure and scalable way.

75% of the companies come to us to help them with the use cases and 25% come with the use case already tested by their R+D+i department and are looking for cybersecurity and the scalability of our technological solution.

10. How does Barbara IoT stand out from other Industrial IoT proposals?

One of Barbara's strengths is the experience of its founding team that comes from working in senior management in large corporations, in that sense we are not a startup to use, we can sit face to face with a large company. We understand the corporate and industrial world and we have profiles of very visionary, very technological and innovative people.

The second strength is our track record in cybersecurity . Cybersecurity is a very difficult intangible to sell, when you buy something you can check if it is reliable and secure. The only way to be credible in cybersecurity is through your track record and your history.

We have been in the market for a long time and we have experts that allow us to give a credible speech, we have managed to make products that the industry has adopted and that have been serious products from a cybersecurity point of view.

The third is to create a concept that is innovative in the world of the IoT industry and that is the management of IoT devices or nodes, something that has been done in the Internet world for many years.

For example, we are used to Windows updating our computer with a certain periodicity. In the industrial world these updates either do not happen which is a very big cybersecurity problem, or if they have to be done has to go a technician with a USB stick factory to factory updating systems.

-You may be interested in: Barbara IoT presents its solutions for the Industrial Edge at BeDigital 2021.-

For the current type of industry where you have 20 PLCs in a factory it may be viable but when you talk about the IoT where things are interconnected and there are hundreds of thousands, it is not scalable. And scalability materializes in being able to manage those thousands of devices.

We have a tool, a management console for the IoT nodes that allows us to do these managements remotely; it allows the installation of a device to be simply turned on, like a plug and play , so that if we have to install an IoT solution in a transformation center, it is a matter of hours and not months, .

This remote management tool is what allows us to provide scalability in deployments, maintenance, updates and monitoring of thousands of devices.

11. There is talk of the Convergence of IT - OT How do you see it?

When we talk about traditional IT systems, we talk about a modern database that allows analysis of hundreds of thousands of data in seconds. These systems are traditional IT systems and these systems have to be adapted to be able to receive data and connect to industrial machines whose objective is to manage a physical process; and these machines have to be adapted to talk to the IT systems.

Convergence is not going to happen in my opinion and that is because neither of these two systems is going to change. The industrial engineer is not going to be convinced to incorporate a protocol in his machine to talk to an IT machine and the IT engineer is not going to be convinced to develop an industrial protocol.

For me a key concept is Middleware whose function is to connect these two systems. It can be tangible in what we call IoT nodes that interconnect the physical and the digital world.

In the end, this IT - OT convergence comes from the creation of networks, from the creation of new equipment that is neither industrial nor IT, but is a mixture, and this is already underway.

There are manufacturers that are creating this type of equipment that we have partnerships with and where we provide that layer of firmware, cybersecurity and remote management so that that equipment can really be deployed in critical industries and in projects of hundreds of thousands of connected things.

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