John Sculley Keynote, History of Disruptive Innovation, The Noble Cause

John Sculley gave the opening keynote at 7x24 Exchange here at Boca Raton on June 2, 2014.

Conference Keynote:
The High Tech Tsunami that is Changing the World

Three explosive high technologies, Cloud, Internet-of-Things, and Unstructured Data Science are converging at an amazing pace. Their derivative effects will be that every major industry will be disrupted, reshaped or even reinvented. Sculley will explain how companies like Amazon are combining exceptional customer experience, disruptive price, and same day delivery by taking advantage of advanced high technology supply chain systems. New business models like Amazon don't require a large number of higher skilled middle mangers that more traditional companies depend on. Sculley will discuss the possibility of middle managers becoming an endangered group as heavy lifting robots are joined by smart robots and the Internet-of-Things. How can corporations adapt to this fast changing world? John Sculley has a unique position as a leader in disruptive high technologies, a global investor and successful entrepreneur who is mentoring CEOs in his own companies in the fields of: the consumer era of healthcare; next generation mobile technologies; IT supply chain; and big data analytics. John will draw on examples from his current experience in the US and South Asia.

John Sculley
Former CEO of Apple and Former President of Pepsi

 

Let’s start with the end.  John discusses the Disruptive Innovation in The Adaptive Organization with these points.

- The best innovators focus on a “noble cause"

- Focus on best possible customer experience

- Disruptive Innovation is non-linear

- Disruptive innovators … see something others don’t …are passionate and relentless that “there has to be a better way"

- Are willing to commoditize their earlier innovations in order to move to the next era of disruption

Let’s go back to some earlier slides.  John describes the Noble causes illustrating Bill Gates vision vs. Steve Jobs, and the passion of Steve Jobs focusing on the customer experience

Disruption of non-linear is Kodak going bankrupt hit by the growth of smartphones.

Being able to see things others don’t see are lessons learned.

John then went into companies he has a role in or is an investor.

John is chairman of Pivot Technologies. http://www.pivotac.com/home/default.aspx

An investor in Misfit Wearables. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10405648/John-Sculley-Apple-Misfit-Shine-and-the-future-of-technology.html and Artemis http://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/story/artemis-pcell-offers-personal-cell-every-device-promises-dramatic-lte-capac/2014-02-19

This post is a bit of cheat to get insight.  I had a chance to talk to John Sculley at Breakfast.  The last time I had talked to John was 20 years in NYC, and we caught up a bit.

Infrastructure of IoT, Beyond availability and scalability

I wrote this post for Gigaom on what the Infrastructure of IoT is.  My thoughts are it is beyond the typical abilities - scalability, availability, etc.  I included part of what I wrote below.  For the full text go to the Gigaom post.

I am moderating panel discussion on the Infrastructure of IoT at Gigaom Structure on June 19.  Please join me there or watch the live stream.  This event should be one the of best here are the headline speakers.

Here is my post on IoT.

Infrastructure of IoT, beyond availability and scalability

by Dave Ohara

 MAY. 24, 2014 - 12:00 PM PDT

 Comment

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photo: asharkyu

SUMMARY:

To handle the addition of billions more devices — including sensors that talk to each other, not necessarily to us — how must our infrastructure evolve? That’s a big topic on tap for Structure 2014.

Infrastructure is something that people are used to not thinking about. It is normally associated with roads, water, electricity, and telecommunications. Things it takes for a society to function. People just want infrastructure to work when they need it. When roads are being repaired, when the waterline breaks, when the power is out, and the Internet is down — that’s when people pay attention to infrastructure. Most would assume that the Infrastructure for IoT should be the same just like the rest of information technology (IT).

In IT, search, email, finance, social networks are the infrastructure for being connected. When people talk about infrastructure for IT they think of security, availability, scalability, and reliability, as the key capabilities to focus on. Whenever there is a security breach or services go down, teams scramble to remedy the situation. The internet of things is being driven by many of the same technology companies that users are familiar with. Running a Google Search for “IoT” the top three paid advertisers are Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel.

Building IoT Infrastructure the same as other IT Infrastructure

If you take a traditional approach, the IoT is the same infrastructure approach for IT but scaled to work with billions and billions of IoT devices. Servers, network, storage are now at a scale to allow billions of devices to be connected to cloud services. Along with this scale comes millions of failure events, which could be a degradation of device performance or outright failure. One view is users will get another device run setup based on the new device, connect a replacement IoT device, and the old one disappears. Another view is we have the history of your IoT device, we can help you repair it, replace it, or upgrade it. The damaged IoT device is part of a bigger experience and a device failure is an opportunity to build a new and better experience.

Tamar Budec, VP of portfolio operations at Digital Realty

Some of you may still think I just want to build highly available, secure, and scalable Infrastructure for IoT, that users will expect it to be no different than their existing IT services. But, I would argue, that we need ore than that. we need IoT infrastructure that does more than compete on availability, security, and scalability. We need infrastructure that provides a sort of institutional memory of what you’ve done with your devices. Where do you think the money is in the infrastructure of IoT? A low-cost infrastructure that quickly gets commoditized or a value added service for the Infrastructure of IoT users will stick with?

Reality of Nest exposed by Consumer Reports, Nest in Operations has issues

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham posted on Consumer Reports issues with the Nest.

In the “never mind” category, Consumer Reports tosses the Nest thermostat and Nest Protect under a bus because of customer complaints about the heating turning off after updates and a lack of sensors on the Protect.

My Mom has a nest and my sister provides tech support.  I think the Nest has wasted more time than energy it every saved.  What kind of problems does a Nest have check out this tweet by Mark Lucovsky.

mark lucovsky ‏@marklucovsky  Jan 14

@google, thx for buying @nest. Any chance you can "unbrick" my 3 nest thermostats? 2 dead in NYC, 1 dead in SF. #IoT == don't autobrick T's

Here is what Consumer Reports says.

Never mind

Nest Learning Thermostat, $250
Programming a thermostat can be a pain, so one that programs itself and adapts to your schedule sounds great. And you can ­remotely change the Nest’s setting using its app if your routine changes. But the initial setup wasn’t as intuitive as other digital or smart thermostats we tested. The Nest thermostat is also connected online via Wi-Fi, so it automatically updates its software. But there’s the rub: User reviews have complained of Nests shutting down the heating system ­after updates, with a few ­reports of frozen and burst pipes as a result.

Can you see the IOT Vaporware? Missing things like integration and features

I was reading GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham post on the Vaporware associated with connected devices.

How to recognize the three types of connected device vaporware

by Stacey Higginbotham

MAR. 28, 2014 - 1:02 PM PDT

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photo: Thinkstock/Pavel Losevsky

SUMMARY:

After the launch of a connected device, for many people the waiting begins. They are waiting for the actual product, or an integration or even a promise that the device can’t deliver.

Earlier this week I was at OSIsoft’s User Conference and one of the lessons I learned years ago is integrating the machine data is much harder than people think.  Why?  Because interfaces that are in the specification may be in beta or not work at all.  Or if they do work, they may have latency issues when information is passed from a sensor to a gateway type of device that is responsible for communications.  This is like bad drivers.

The integration of low level communications is not the sexy stuff and gets dropped on the cutting room floor to ship.

How many of you have tried to integrate systems and been frustrated when a piece of hardware doesn’t communicate the way you thought.  As Mike Manos told me once we can show you the pieces of equipment we have in the data center just don’t share how we did the integration.  The integration is the hard stuff.  But too many times this hard stuff is not valued by those who make the purchasing decisions.

How Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Greens the Data Center, by using standard Server Power Management

Part of the point of NFV is the lower power use vs. the current state of equipment.  How is this done?

in the first paper on NFV here is the part that explains how the power savings will be achieved.

Reduced energy consumption by exploiting power management features in standard servers
and storage, as well as workload consolidation and location optimisation. For example,
relying on virtualisation techniques it would be possible to concentrate the workload on a
smaller number of servers during off-peak hours (e.g. overnight) so that all the other servers
can be switched off or put into an energy saving mode.

The number of telecom equipment that goes into lower power mode is probably amazingly low.

Besides saving power this same feature makes it easier for maintenance operations.

Option to temporarily repair failures by automated re-configuration and moving 
network workloads onto spare capacity using IT orchestration mechanisms. This 
could be used to reduce the cost of 24/7 operations by mitigating failures 
automatically.