What to Expect When You're Connecting
What to Expect When You're Connecting includes interviews with a wide range of industry subject matter experts who share their journey, advice, and the mistakes they've made along the way in IoT. If you're adding connectivity to your products for the first time or seeking to optimize and scale your existing connectivity operations – welcome to the conversation.
What to Expect When You're Connecting
The ERP of IoT: How Senzary Turns Data Into Action
In this episode of What to Expect When You’re Connecting, host Ryan Carlson sits down with Eric Schummer, CEO and founder of Senzary, to explore how modern IoT deployments go beyond prototypes and buzzwords to deliver real business value at scale. Eric shares how Senzary is helping enterprises overcome the technical and organizational barriers that stall digital transformation—by delivering plug-and-play wireless sensing, seamless protocol translation, and a flexible IoT operating system designed to unify OT and IT workflows.
From predictive maintenance and legacy machine integrations to air quality monitoring and leak detection, we unpack how Senzary’s "IoTLOGIQ" platform serves everyone from Fortune 500 factories to municipal water systems. You’ll also hear from Marlena Nickel, a former customer turned team member, who explains why scalable solutions win out over one-off “connected widgets.”
Plus, we talk about how Soracom plays a critical role as a trusted connectivity layer—keeping the data flowing securely and reliably, so Senzary’s customers can focus on results, not reboots.
00:00 The ERP of IoT: How Senzary Turns Data Into Action
01:29 The Origins of Senzary
02:20 Challenges in IoT Implementation
06:04 Bridging IT and OT in Enterprises
08:38 Mobile Gateways and Wireless Solutions
12:30 Predictive Maintenance and Use Cases
13:49 Customer Engagement and Solution Flexibility
15:46 The Role of IT in IoT Projects
17:34 Specialized Solutions and Industry Applications
30:47 The Vision for an IoT Operating System
46:50 Partnership with Soracom
51:53 Vendor Relationships and Customer Support
54:48 The Importance of Flexibility and Partnership
55:19 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
56:29 What is Soracom to You?
Welcome to What To Expect When You're Connecting a podcast for IO OT professionals, ampy iot Curious, who find themselves responsible for growing, executing, or educating others about the challenges with connecting products and services to the internet. You'll learn from industry experts who understand those challenges deeply and what they've done to overcome that. Now for your host, Ryan Carlson.
Ryan Carlson:everyone today on what to Expect when you're connecting. We're here with Eric Schumer, who's the CEO and Founder of Senzary, which is a company that does something that's near and dear to many of our hearts, which is monitoring things remotely, pulling in the data in a variety of different formats and making sense of it. Not just making sense of it, but making it actionable to the business units, to stakeholders, to users in the field, to people with a variety of different devices, putting that information in a way that we can act on it, save the company money, create things that are more efficient. But the question that we all have, Eric, is how do you get started in creating a product where you're having to put remote sensing out and then have something that people wanna actually use themselves to create value in their companies.
eric schummer:I thank you for having us, first of all. Pleasure. it started a long time ago mean, with things like voice over the internet and certain technologies that I believe had, transformed humanity even. So I had, the opportunity to participate in some of these things. And eventually, the last decade was more about transformation for businesses, be it an internet and things like that. Eventually I think, the pandemic came earlier than that, a little bit. We started thinking about industry 4.0. We thought about automation. We thought about things that, that still 20 years later, companies are still not doing for some reason.
Ryan Carlson:Yeah.
eric schummer:And that's why I started Senzary.'cause I thought there was a need make sense of all this complexity. At that time, IOT had maybe 5, 6, 7 years on all of the projects were failing. Most of them pilots not able to scale. So, different companies and different divisions were trying different things. And then again, we were supposed to be breaking silos, but we were making more silos. So I think that, all of this kind of was the motivation about launching Senzary. And maybe, in addition to that, we discovered as a company, I would think, the focus of, of wireless iot, which was, protocol. That, that jo, that, that the protocol is the one thing that all the sensors had to come to. So now we have a global ecosystem of sensors and factories and, and, and devices, but they're all forced to speak the same language, making them interoperable. And, and, and then there is a wealth of a short list really, of, of enterprise class applications in the market that help deal with all of this in, in, in a secure way, in a manageable and scalable way. So you have like Comcast in the US or Orange in France, which are big carriers having millions of sensors. at and t and also there are enterprises more, a lot of what we work with, like airports, enterprises, manufacturing companies, fortune five, hundreds, are right now understanding that they played with this and they discovered that they cannot under it. I think, people are now in the, in the stage of, of discovering and, and, and amplifying, and this is where sensor comes into place to bring the solution digested, plug and play wireless, and, and, and the whole sleuth of applications in the middle that, that make it work.
Ryan Carlson:I think what's fascinating about, especially like the industrial Internet of Things or smart factory and we. We, we have all these terms. We've had M two M, machine to machine has been around
eric schummer:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ryan Carlson:and, so many of these different projects were like very specific to a particular line, a very particular stack. And the idea of, industry 4.0 or the idea of going from M2M to this greater IoT visibility, across different aspects of a factory or a warehouse. Is that like what you already, you already said is that you've got all these different devices, all these different, all these different systems that speak different protocols. And the hardest thing about moving from a prototype or a pilot a, a larger adoption, when you say digital transformation, this is companies leveraging modern day technology to solve problems in a new, more efficient way. Right? They say we're still writing off. Capital, CapEx expenses that we made on systems that have PLCs and they're pulling in data in a wide variety of different formats from analog sensors to some digital sensors. And so there's all these investments and then they're saying, so you're gonna, in order for me to do this, I need to buy more sensors or new sensors, rather than leveraging the stuff that they already have. And so there's this inaction and now you're asking for more money. And they're like, but I want the results. And so there's this like, middle ground. So talk to me about navigating from the boardroom down to the factory floor. Like
jason@soracom.io:how
Ryan Carlson:do you bridge the gap by leveraging modern day, cloud technologies and, software
jason@soracom.io:to
Ryan Carlson:help people leverage preexisting investments in infrastructure
jason@soracom.io:that
Ryan Carlson:already has data points
eric schummer:That's such,
Ryan Carlson:the
eric schummer:such a loaded question.
Ryan Carlson:well, maybe,
eric schummer:No, no, but it's, what? Lemme just try to address the big monster you just unleashed. the first answer comes to mind is 200 meetings,
Ryan Carlson:yeah.
eric schummer:which are required to accomplish this with large companies
Ryan Carlson:Mm-hmm.
eric schummer:because the layers within the companies are oftentimes the only obstacle. And so you have to talk, listen, when IT, first of all, at the infrastructure layer, we are a bridge between what's called IT and OT,
Ryan Carlson:Mm-hmm.
eric schummer:which best practices. For many years I've been to maintain this as separate as possible.
Ryan Carlson:Right, right. Operational technology being
eric schummer:The PLC.
Ryan Carlson:Software that they're using to look at quality or safety or whatever it might be, and it being the, that link all the stuff together over corporate infrastructure
eric schummer:Right. Or your DHCP servers or your, Google environment and things like that. Right.
Ryan Carlson:And you
eric schummer:so
Ryan Carlson:you can't put your stuff on my infrastructure.
eric schummer:that happens 300 times a week. Exactly.
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
eric schummer:so then there is, I think this is a table, not with two legs, but actually it's a table with three legs.'cause one leg being IT, which by the way, part of our solution, least as a strategy for the end users bypasses completely IT, and we'll talk about that question. Okay.
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
eric schummer:The second thing is, the second leg would be the actual end users from an operational perspective. Now these guys could be maintenance or operations people. there could also be the reliability manager as an example, or the person in charge of regulatory reporting who has issues because maybe they don't have access to all this other stuff that they have in the factory. So they don't have that visibility or they don't have access to it.
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
eric schummer:what we bring in this particular scope, it's first of all, we bring something that we can install immediately using our mobile gateways and all those stuff without touching the network. Allowing you to start solving the problem you called for and not the problem of talking to it before you can solve the problem you called for. Correct. That's very important'cause a lot of people want to test the technology, but then again it needs to be under a great deal of security and everything. So the best strategy I recommend and we use with Fortune five hundreds down to to mom and pops is we install these things completely mobile. We, we demonstrate the capabilities, functionalities with visibility, et cetera. then you organize the process by which you bring everything into the network in an organized manner.'cause that will have discussions about networking, firewalls, soup nets, how do you want to do that? Equipment, configuration, installation, implementation. That's another project, right? And you want this to be successful. So you cannot convert this little project into three projects all at the same time, because then it's added complexity, added risk of failure and so forth, correct, finger pointing timeframes, all that. the other thing is. That when, I mean, I like to cook, but I'm always one of those guys who, who use first what I have in the kitchen before I go to the supermarket. Right. so when, when I send you a second part of your question, definitely I'm completely against stuff that does not need changing. And and, and so is the problem visibility Is the problem? Outcomes is the problem. Insights. Are you looking for intelligence into your stuff? Are you looking just to see things?'cause you don't, I mean, we have clients that all they want to see is the temperature on their phone because on the weekends they don't know if their freezers are on or off. So that's simple. Right? But for him, it's a problem. Right. And, and so I think that the, the complexity of the solution also addresses the type of of, of, of use case and, and, and, and solution that's gonna be implemented. But we have nodes, for instance, not only sensors that are wireless and so forth, but we have a tremendous amount of, of, of, of nodes as I call them, that have analog inputs, digital inputs, serial inputs, we can, we can convert into machine language, as you were mentioning before, as an example, like MQTT or Mode Boost or backnet, all these types of protocols. So we have a lot of inexpensive and easy to implement ways to convert back and forth between like. The, the iot visibility stuff and all these traditional legacy, let's call them legacy, okay? For the purpose, machines or protocols. And, and it's, it's very common to hook up to all these machines to see how many packages you, you, created in, in a, in a minute or in an hour. But, but then you just hook up into the machine. You don't add a new sensor to it, right? We do that for cement companies on the big filter houses. So, so we, we, it's very typical to, to, to connect to existing equipment
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
eric schummer:then you add sensors whenever cabling, it's a big problem and it's a big tower, or it's an area that is remote or it's, it becomes so out of the budget to do cabling, right? And then so wireless is a better option in that case where the distances are too large or too long, or too complicated. Wireless is great, where there was, nothing and you want something new. Fresh wireless is perfect. So wireless has its place as one of the possibilities in the portfolio.
Ryan Carlson:And one of the things that you've been mentioning really lines up with, experience I've seen as well, is that most of these initiatives start with one group of stakeholders with a very specific user base. Who in essence, it's a check engine light. Right. There's so much lack of visibility into a business process. I think motor vibration monitoring, and predictive maintenance for a motor, motor failure is one of those easy, like beachhead a lot of things. Like, hey, we can put this little wireless sensor, it's gonna look at heat, it's gonna look at vibration, it runs it through an algorithm. It knows when too much load is being put on a motor, when it's asking for more power, when it starts vibrating too much. And we can tell you it's probably gonna fail in the next 72 hours. So I recommend, scheduling you within your existing maintenance cycle, swap'em out and then put the other one in for refurbishment or repair or further analysis before the line goes down. And you have workers being paid, standing around waiting for the repair, right? Like these are really. common use cases, but I know that, what you've been doing is beyond just the first check engine light. It's like, whoa, we're seeing success here. we do this? Could we do that? What I'm curious about, and I'm glad that Marlena Nickolas here, one of your peers at Sensor who has a background in being, on the other side of the fence. So, Marlene, thank you for joining us. We, it's so rare that we get the perspective of someone who has actually been at the factory or at the company or in the field representing the business interests. does that discovery process on your end, how does that, how does that typically start and then, before they go shopping, does that, what does that first conversation look like that makes someone a, I don't say a target. It sounds so bad, but someone that would be,
eric schummer:Qualified, qualified.
Ryan Carlson:Qualify. Yes. Thank you. What qualifies, self qualifies Someone to actually want to solve the problem with technology.
Marlena Nickel:Right. So it always begins with, some sort of a, a business problem or the business is trying to solve. But a lot of times we even have to tease that out of the business themselves. So, as sitting in the technology part of the business, a lot of times the stakeholder, or internal customer, if you will, will come to us with already this, shiny new solution that they heard about, read about, saw, at a conference. And so, always have to have them take a step back and say, okay, hold on a minute. This is great, but before we identify a solution, let's really dig deep into what the, what the problems are they're trying to solve, and then prioritizing, okay, well what. What are the biggest pain points here? so from there we, open up our toolbox and we'll, we'll do some investigation and perhaps, may even de-risk some new technologies and then, basically go from there.
Ryan Carlson:What does the conversation with it look like and when does that typically happen? In this process?
Marlena Nickel:Right. So hopefully it's, sooner rather than later sometimes. And typically with it, they're, it is, they're engaged early in the process.
Ryan Carlson:Mm-hmm.
Marlena Nickel:the technology side of the house, which, like for example in Shell was a little bit different. Sometimes we were engaged much later in, in the process, right. But. usually, typically the, IT will, they have their own processes and procedures in place that they need to follow and, products and tools that solutions that have already been implemented. So that can be a key challenge to looking at new wireless technologies. I think what Eric Ka alluded to earlier, that really kind of sit outside of the IT domain. then it's really bringing everyone together to come to an understanding, where where does the fit for IOT or industrial industry type wireless technology versus your traditional IT solutions.
eric schummer:Right, Brian. when you deal with mid large companies and more these days than before, there is. The need for the air in terms of cybersecurity and also if they are serious about it, there is what we call the future state. In other words, gonna try a pilot for predictive maintenance, following your example. what is the future state of this? We're gonna test this with two motors, great. But what happens if we like it and we need 3000, So we have customers like Michelan that have one of those things in each and every motor of the plant, that's a global. Thing approved by the corporation that it's a, an approved practice or what we do with a ES corporation for predictive maintenance as well. So we spend months approving it, through the channels.'cause it, I mean there's the technology, but then there's a process you're affecting, like in predictive maintenance, they have a a, a A a predicting maintenance or, or a maintenance department now has a tool for 27 24 by seven monitoring where they used to have a vibration route every three months. So how does this change your process in the company? Right? Now you can do things with one person across 20 locations before you needed one person at every location, potentially, right? or now you can have a super expert. For the entire company that can support less skilled 20 others who may be better resources at a better cost. So the return on investment comes in multiple ways. However, it, I agree, and I prefer when it gets involved, at least from the purpose of making everyone at ease, they're not playing with fire. That this is serious, that there is real technology behind that. We have our dogs in a row when it comes to understanding that, that we're not forcing a situation into a company. We're bringing a real solution that works and satisfies all of these multiple requirements surrounding networking, firewall insecurity, cybersecurity protocols, and so on and so on and so on.
Ryan Carlson:I know, I've spent about a quarter of my 20 years in IoT as a sales architect and a solutions engineer, and I filled out more security evaluations that you get from it, like, would you please go ahead and fill out this, 19 page questionnaire? And it's all about, security practices and goodness, but, but it, it's,
eric schummer:We did that for the state of Indiana. Yeah, I mean the state of Indiana, it, it was a a a 50 page document, 40 page document stock to type of, and because, and, and not only is the technology in addition to that, if it's not gonna be on premise, but you're gonna use our cloud services, they need to know that this is a secure facility, that it's all okay to use. So we use, we have county airport agreements. Airports are some of the most secure things you can think of. And so, so I think one of the things, going back to one of your earlier questions, I believe Senzary. It's positioning itself well the discussion of enterprise class iot, not just iot,
Ryan Carlson:100%, and I think this is that little bit of a takeaway, right? If it's what to expect when you're connecting. If you're building solutions that are going out into the market, having your ISO 27,001, having your SOC two compliance, having some of these ducks in a row so you can. Check one box in the security evaluation form that
eric schummer:right?
Ryan Carlson:us, you don't have to fill the next three pages out, right? It's like, do you have SOC two? Yes. Cool. If no, then you have a whole lot of other stuff to document. Same
eric schummer:Correct.
Ryan Carlson:Do you have your high trust compliance? Oh, you don't. Okay, here's 13 pages that you get to fill out.
eric schummer:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:And so it's, it's wild to think about how much of what we do as technologists has very little to do with the actual solution implementation. From a technology standpoint, it's greasing the wheels or, or creating less friction. In the actual deployment, implementation and acceptance. Right? Like the adoption always seemed to be like a big, big area of, that's where the office, the ci know, to stick their,
eric schummer:Yeah,
Ryan Carlson:their nose and it go, yeah,
eric schummer:yeah,
Ryan Carlson:We're not gonna do that. Right?
eric schummer:yeah. We talk a lot about deployment, automated deployment. I mean, everything you say, and I hear you and, and actually this is part of my analysis since I started this company. One of my most important jobs is to identify and understand all of the barriers. And, and issues surrounding a successful deployment and in a massive way and that the cost and the time associated, I mean it, it is e evident that there's numbers of companies that you tell them that you want to install 20,000 sensors that would do it. The question is how much did that cost? How long did that take? How many people had to get involved? That's where we make a humongous difference'cause we have developed methods, like you have this electrician that a company hired to go to install one of these nodes in a controlled panel in a battery factory. The guy has no clue of who's Senzary, what's iot, and he what that sensor he's installing or connecting that cable. Two. So our staff needs to be prepared to facilitate that guy's job that morning in that panel in the easiest possible. Painless possible way. We're deploying hundreds of data centers across multiple countries. think we have more than one person maybe even half a person involved in the entire project, because everything else has been relatively automated to a point that the system is smart enough to even deal with some problems or let exactly what the problem is and where and when and how. So the point, the point is reducing to a minimum, the path between whatever the problem is and its root cause what the, the, the solution is, is they, the, the gateway was not installed. That's why the sensor doesn't connect. maybe the problem was here or there, whatever, So, but bringing that intelligence is, I think what's key to, to, to our, our, our fabric of what we're putting together. It's it's not just iot. Anybody can do iot. It's, I mean, iot now it's, it's like. French fries, right? so what makes your product different? What makes your company different? What makes you different? And, and I think this is one of big aspects of what makes us different, is that we can, we can create solutions the speed of light, and we can also deploy things I think very, very effectively.
Ryan Carlson:Since this is the second time we've had a conversation, the one thing that sticks with me is that noted that there are solutions that are like the big bin of Legos where you could build anything you want, but it's still. Some or a lot of assembly required, which requires a company to have internal subject matter experts, development teams, people on staff that can do the systems integration work. And that is what some companies want to do as part of their digital transformation initiative. And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got companies that they don't have a lot of infrastructure. The reason why they have a digital transformation initiative, or even an officer or someone in the company responsible is that they're still just starting that journey. And the solutions that you'll see are just hyper-specific. This is our connected bathroom sensor. That's it, that's the only thing we're solving. It's a very narrow, a very narrow solution.
eric schummer:Yes.
Ryan Carlson:it's not guaranteed to talk with the next thing you buy because they're just solving something for their head of maintenance or they're, surface engineer department. Right. Whereas, this being the second conversation, our first conversation, I walked away hearing that it's, you're meeting them actually somewhere, not even in the middle, but it's that third vector of the operational technology as well of, you'd said something like the ERP of IOT, right? Where it's
eric schummer:yes.
Ryan Carlson:creating a hub that pulls, that specializes in pulling information together then putting it back out to where you need it. So it's not that you're replacing the systems that IT OT stakeholders are responsible for, because that is a danger in a lot of the iot space when you've got your very narrow solution. Here's another portal to log into. You're, you're, you're kind of sitting in between. What I'd love to hear actually is Marlena, you made the jump from one side of the table. something, something about what Eric and since are doing clearly resonated with you, what is it that you feel that they're doing right, that you joined the team and what, what are you feeling passionate about at Sincere Zero?
Marlena Nickel:Sure. So, it's hard to really pinpoint just one single thing. I think it's really, multitude of things that, had really impressed me about Senzary. I think it's, this, very, forward looking approach, that Eric and his team leads, they think outside the box, they're able to execute and deliver and deliver at scale. To spin up prototypes where traditional teams, know, may take weeks and weeks and months, It's just, it's just amazing. And then secondly, hi, his product, the iot Logic is basically a business in a box. So whilst you may contact him initially for preventative maintenance, there's always new modules being built that they're like, well, hey, what about this? And he always has something in his, his bag of tricks to pull out and say, well, here we have this available. And if he doesn't, he can, whip it out. I mean, so quickly. So it's just that, rapid way to develop and deliver and, customer service first. Or some things that, that had really, impressed me. The product, the people, the solutions. It's, it's all. A great combination. And I want to also mention that, about a week ago, Eric and his team at SUNY had won the, 2025 industrial IOT product of the Year award. So for IOT logic, so big kudos to Eric and his team for, for delivering that prior to me coming on board. But that in itself, is, is, is quite a, distinguished honor to have so well, the fact that you.
Ryan Carlson:you crossed over and had actually been working with him and now working for, Senzary, I think it's a, a, a real testament to, believing in what the technology is like capable of. wanna unpack something I think I just heard. So, Eric, what I'm, what I heard was that you guys have kind of like that Zapier model where there's a bunch of recipes, maybe a marketplace of prebuilt recipes that you can apply. Like you may not have a need for, a fleet fleet management or a facilities management solution now, but hey, look, we could actually click and implement that. Talk to me about the. decision to, to go for that type of, the, the architect,
eric schummer:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:your solution to have that more marketplace or recipe based approach.
eric schummer:Well, it's a, that's an, That's an interesting question because that's probably the biggest and most difficult bet. That I made when I started this company. And I think that's what has made this journey so hard has been keeping that flag up and high.'cause when you look to, for instance, investors, they don't like what I do because they want you to focus in that little thing. They wouldn't, that specific niche where you're gonna be the 80% guy for that particular niche. And I can understand that, but it just does not apply to what our vision is and what I think our customers need. I think, we were talking about the future state and for me that's very important.'cause we're living, living in the middle of a technology and, and, and a history that is evolving. We're part of history right now. 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we're gonna look back. What are we gonna see five years ago, 10 years ago? It's like, it's like I, 25 years, 30 years ago, I were to tell you, Hey dude, this is this company called Oracle that's just coming up and it's gonna be big, we should invest in that thing, right? So I think we're in the middle of something like this right now. Okay. so I believe, truly believe companies miss right now, an iot operating system, not an iot solution. So, So, in order to serve, you don't have four CRMs. don't have five accounting applications. I mean, you have, you have, you select your courses and you go for it, right? So when you have now, finally, finally, after so many years, we have, we as a collective have a, the ability to have a technology that can serve just like an intranet. All of my departments at once in parallel and, and, and, have all this interoperability of data just there without me having to build it, right? Being able to serve my corporate people, my operations people, my warehouse people, my fleet management people, my safety worker, safeties, environmental groups, re regulatory stuff. And, and, and I mean, you name it, and now you can do it. So, so that's, for me, a very compelling argument. And that's, the, the, the flag that we carry that makes us be so horizontal in our approach. And, and so when we talk to, to customers like big customers, right now, more about first, I wanna do predictive maintenance. Great, your horses, let's talk about your future state. Let's talk about your infrastructure that needs to be there when this, because this is gonna be successful. So when this is successful and I start talking to your other departments in your company, and they all will want something different, gonna happen? And, and, and obviously I try to, to, to, I learned to, to work slow, like Napoleon, dress me slow because I'm in a rush. And, and corporations are a lot like that. So you take this conversation, which is so nice, can easily take a year or two, right? But in the meantime, you have a lot of people with very simple requests. The, the state of Indiana needed a solution for aquifer monitoring. So that's what we do with the state of Indiana. But in the airport, in Jacksonville Airport, we started doing air quality monitoring, and now we're also doing predictive maintenance on the, on the baggage handling system. And we're counting people. We counted more than four or 5 million people with these little counters, that you put in the frame of a door. So for me, it was amazing that we put this little thing on the frame next morning. 15,000 people counted. That's super powerful. So being able to do that wirelessly, inexpensively, but then the airport just call us with, Hey, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. Now they know they don't need to launch a new RFP, they know they don't need to launch a new technology vendor. And, and so, so I think for me, this is what I consider a winning strategy as corporation, we signed a multi-year agreement for all of the technology, which is now being implemented on their premises. So, so
Ryan Carlson:really interesting approach that you're taking right by, by saying we represent an IOT operating system.
eric schummer:yes,
Ryan Carlson:And so it's not just by this one solution. as someone who has sat in matrix organizations looking across multiple divisions, making that investment, I mean even IT and ot, right? Like making an investment in something that will scale across multiple potential solutions. far more attractive in many cases than looking for just the one thing. But I, I also can see the flip side where I've, no, I've known buyers who are like, ah, the thing you're making, it's just so generic. I'm looking for someone that does this one thing really well.
eric schummer:We have a great answer for that.
Ryan Carlson:that?
eric schummer:Number one, we are agnostic from a technology perspective.
Ryan Carlson:Mm-hmm.
eric schummer:I don't know, 50, 60 different vendors from all over the world on different categories. Number two. We are experts in at least three or four or those categories, predicting maintenance, being one. think we represent the best products the planet for predictive maintenance. And not only that, we can hold our home with the most, the SAVs of, of predictive maintenance technicians in the factory. We can talk to them eye to eye about predictive maintenance this is about technology, engineering and consulting. And I think that when it comes to asset management and asset tracking, indoor, when it comes to predictive maintenance everything that surrounds that topic when it comes to industrial telemetries, when it comes to some very specialized things, we're designing, for instance, for the cement industry. Now there's new regulations about silica. And, and, and respirable issues of A-P-A-P-A, osha. I just came, delivering a seminar last week in Texas for a number of companies in the Permian basis, and we're actually deploying. Specific, very specialized solutions along with engineering companies in the field replace control boards on, on backhouse filters that are a hundred million dollar assets, right? But then, helping these companies automate dust depression systems to understand like forever they were using this laser sensor stuff for the rotary dryers. We're coming and disrupting those, those markets with, with our approach to solving those problems. So I think we're disrupting, we're creating very specialized solutions and, and, and, and in the Lego. So, and I'm happy to report, I think that we're very unique that way. And, and thank you for pointing that out because I agree with those people that say that. And it makes a lot of sense. I would probably think like that. the moment you start talking to us, you, that we know stuff.
Ryan Carlson:I know I've been, since, since the last conversation a whole lot of, yep. You, this guy knows what he's talking about. I think it's, I think this is such a unique approach though, that IOT operating system versus the one platform to rule them all and where that's where you're always having to log in. Like the fact that you see yourself within the ecosystem of OT and IT systems and it's not a replacement. I think that's a really dangerous place that, that I've seen other solution providers go into where like, well use ours, just like you said, you don't have five CRMs. They're treating their solution like, well, you've already got your own reporting tool, but now use ours as well, rather than finding ways of moving the data where it needs to go, where you can do the heavy lifting. If you don't have preexisting solution tools, whatever it might be. If you don't have those today to pipe into, you have those visuals in the front end interfaces to look at as
eric schummer:Right, and you're totally right because also, think of this, let's just say that the, the, the iot operating system is like a, a big piece of the discourse, so to speak. But at the same time, also play. The utilitarian side of the business
Ryan Carlson:mm-hmm.
eric schummer:examples, have a very large, company that manages hundreds of buildings. They're in bed with Siemens, but with Siemens, they handle what I call the macro side of the business with iot logic and Senzary and all of our wireless sensor portfolio and solutions, we bring in the micro title of this thing. So for instance, we're developing, with them a pool management system for condos and also the conditioning irrigation solution, which are things that you don't get with Siemens as an example. In the BMS side, and we're talking with Proctor and Gamble has Siemens as well, but maybe for manufacturing. But then they want us to integrate our stuff with the Siemens app, so it's another app within their ecosystem. We do that.
Ryan Carlson:Yep.
eric schummer:s wanted us to integrate with Orion and OPC server and what have you. We did that, in, in, in the Aruba, maintenance, for the, for the water management thing. We're integrating with some Spaniard company as well. So the real answer for me is that, and you have another thing coming to you, I think, because you have the other side that is popping up, which is Snowflake, Tableau, Google Storage, all those people are looking for companies like us who can deliver content. Into those networks of storage who can deliver content into those analy analytic platforms that they're selling the same corporations.
Ryan Carlson:which requires a level of normalization of the data and, and massaging of the data. Date formats, time series, like all of these things are
eric schummer:Yeah.
Ryan Carlson:because you're coming from different systems, you need to have that operating system to. Put it into a format and
eric schummer:Yeah. And then you have Microsoft and you have AWS so both of them will tell you, Hey, we do the 100% iot perfectly Well, I mean, I, I beg to defer a little bit in that, but again, our platform, it's an intermediary platform that fits AWS that fits Azure. And, and, and so, I think those, that, that's kind of the place for all of this. And when you think of wireless are a hub. For wireless iot coming into the stream of, of the corporation and all these multiple data flows that, that had to happen at different layers. And, and also when you think of the Googles and AWSs and all that, are at the executive floor. They're not on the floor floor. Right. And then you have it, you have OT and you have and, and that's the third leg of the, of, of, of the table. That that is part of. Now, because they want to benefit from data is not on the floor. They wanna see it on their desks, wanna see it on their, schedule reports. They wanna see on their, sustainability initiative reports that are on the top level, not on the production layer.
Ryan Carlson:So the way that I've always classified software and any sort of technology initiative is that you're either gonna fall into the engagement camp or the alignment camp
eric schummer:Explain that to me.
Ryan Carlson:So example, salesforce.com, that is an alignment tool. It helps leaders at a higher level within the organization understand all of the moving pieces. It aggregates a bunch of activity up and tells them, forecasting tells them where we at. It doesn't actually make the job. I mean, how many salespeople do that actually want to be using their Salesforce instance
eric schummer:Mm-hmm.
Ryan Carlson:sure that they're plugging all the information in. It's not a great engagement tool. It's not something that helps you do your job better versus the, let's call it a mobile app that's got a check engine light for predictive maintenance or motor monitoring or, leak detection. That's an engagement tool, right? It's an actionable thing that helps someone do their job more effectively,
eric schummer:Yes,
Ryan Carlson:better. Right? It's a quality of life improvement
eric schummer:yes, yes.
Ryan Carlson:people that are actually doing the work.
eric schummer:You're right.
Ryan Carlson:There, there's engagement initiatives and there's alignment initiatives, and sometimes it's both. I see things like smart PPE actually kind of falls into two camps if the solutions are designed appropriately.
eric schummer:Right. But let me ask you this question then. Like right now, we're working on these projects that are very dear to me I finally, I think our company, myself personally, we, I, I think I enjoy a lot when I have the ability to be the Picasso of iot. All right? What do I mean by that? We have this project idea where, a city wants to do leak management control. Then there's the entire completely traditional way of doing this that we're gonna deliver anyways. Which is, you have a crew and you have a, a supervisor. So you have stakeholders in the process, right? And then they need to, to these, these people go through the route, they see a leak, they, enter, has to give them a screen where they can interact, like you said, to enter that there is a leak, and categorize the leak and so forth. There's another stakeholder, which is the one receiving all the information from all the leak detectors, which are all human, right? And then, and then the, he needs to think how he's gonna organize the three fleets that he has, let's say, to go and fix all those leaks. But. The word optimization is not in that dictionary yet. The word, route optimization is not there yet. The, the efficiency index of the crews and how long they take to do the job is not there yet. mean, there's this ledger of analysis improving and, and ai, so to speak, will take over a lot of the, the intelligence of this process. So now we have applications then we can add trackers to. There's also iot devices that we can add in portions of the pipes, but we're combining that with the ability to predict in the future when the failures or the leaks might take place. We have now the ability to predict and tell them, based on a number of factors, that one single brain is not going to compute. This guys, this crew needs to go here, here, here. This crew needs to go there, there, there. And, and this is the most efficient way to do this. And, and so I think that's alignment and engagement at the same time.
Ryan Carlson:I think, I think you
eric schummer:Does that make sense?
Ryan Carlson:It, it makes perfect sense. I, I see what you're describing as they don't always know what they need. Right. You don't have the adoption
eric schummer:Exactly.
Ryan Carlson:for like route optimization. People don't know there's like, is that to replace my job or is that gonna make my job better?
eric schummer:Yeah. Exactly.
Ryan Carlson:many times your job in this role is to also be evangelian. Right? Bringer of the good news.
eric schummer:Mm.
Ryan Carlson:from place to place letting people know, Hey, this thing's available and it's actually gonna help you and here's how.
eric schummer:Yeah. But we have customers that cannot mention that that number of savings reaches 20 and$30 million per year
Ryan Carlson:Yeah.
eric schummer:because of we being able to optimize these processes.
Ryan Carlson:So I'd like to pivot for a moment here. I think we've got a, painted a pretty good picture. Being the Picasso of I, OT of what sensor is doing and, and how you're bringing, this, the ERP of iot, this operating system of iot, a different approach beyond just the. Here is a very narrow vertical solution, but instead the underpinning automation and the tools for quickly spinning out own discreet and integrating into a more of a macro solution,
eric schummer:While, while, while also being super experts on each one of those buckets.
Ryan Carlson:Right. And, and I think that starts with just, you seem like very curious individuals who asks lots of questions, right. To try and get to the bottom of some of these, these needs. I've got a question for you, Eric. Take me back to the day when you first evaluated Soracom. What happened?
eric schummer:It was something I needed. And, and it works really well. we have lots of challenges, lots of things to solve, lots of problems day in, day out. Good ones, bad ones. I mean, we're here to paint a great story, but it's full of challenges and issues and, and, and things to resolve both with customers and internally and, and as a startup, even worse, right? Because the turnaround of people getting to the right, people growing, my list of problems goes from here to Hong Kong, right? And, and Soracom in particular represented a great solution for me a number of reasons. Number one, as you can figure right now, I believe it's important for Senzary and Senzary customers that we have control over every little aspect of the, of the, of the flow of the data. And, and when we think about wireless, IOT then, then there's wireless as in wifi, there's wireless as in LoRa one, and there's wireless as in L-T-E-J-S-M, geo, et cetera, et cetera. So being able to deploy our gateways, uneven sensors, which are also, mobile enabled, and being able to have your steam cards that we control, that we manage, one, number two. I think things that are maybe not well known about your platform, which not even I use as much as I want to, is like for instance, but I've used it when I needed it, which is, having like a mini VPN into the sim card I can VPN myself into your, into my gateway without breaking protocol, without, being on the out. I think it's super important and it's a little thing, but it's a super important thing. And, and then finally you aggregate Verizon, at and t T-Mobile, everyone, and you choose automatically whatever carrier is the most adequate for the moment, which has proven to be important in different places. In for real, like the, like in some cement companies in Las Vegas, we had issues and we were able to kind of roll this over to Verizon it was a real example. and then, the ability also to aggregate everything into a single plan. Or groups of plans if we made a great agreement with you guys, where we categorized, I, I wanted to have like a fixed thing with my customers because, I mean, I'm not in the telecom business per se, so I, I just wanted to have like a fixed yearly budget for, for the gateways, for the airport, for this, for that. And, and now it's, it's a fixed part of my accounting thing when we quote something and I don't have to think about it, and I love it. Right. So, so we, we, you brought that, stability in terms of, of, this is just another item into my quote that includes a year worth of connectivity for a gateway. and I don't care. The carrier, I don't care anything. I mean, it's just Soracom, right?
Ryan Carlson:I'm hearing I've got a whole lot of problems, but my connectivity provider isn't one of them.
eric schummer:That is absolutely correct. That is true. It's, it's, it's real. since we started working with you guys, this has been smooth everything works the way it's supposed to. And when we have had problems, which is another big aspect for me with vendors, you have a great technical team, which we have used, so I can attest to that. And, and everything has been addressed. Always, I have the opportunity to meet with your CTO and some of the shows that we attend together. Great Visionary guy too. You keep adding stuff too to your platform all the time, so it's hard to keep up with you too, not just with me. And, so it's a great, happy relationship
Ryan Carlson:Well, thank you. that's always encouraging to hear. I always love talking to people who are doing great things out in the world with connectivity or taking it to your end customers and solving real problems that improve the quality of life for workers in the field. In a factory, a restaurant, in an airport,
eric schummer:I mean, you have a job. Your, your job is to deliver the data from my customers to us. That's a very important job, I would think. Right.
Ryan Carlson:If we're not doing our job, then you can't do yours.
eric schummer:if yours doesn't work, mine doesn't work as simple as that. So you're a piece of the fabric of our services. That's how I look at it.
Ryan Carlson:Eric, if people would like to, learn more about Senzary and the work you're doing, how would you recommend they look into that?
eric schummer:I mean, they can go to a website always, but I think that, both me, Eric, eric@senzary.com, Marlena, marlena@Senzary.com, we're always open to talk to anyone We enjoy and very passionate about talking to people about their needs and their ideas and help them, bring them to fruition And, we work with lots of vendors outside in, of the, of the world. And, I think that it's important that, the first question I asked to, to one of my vendors is I don't sleep. Do you sleep? Because I mean, I'm the kind of guy that if my customer has a problem, I have a problem. by the same token, if I have a problem, you have to have a problem. And if it doesn't, don't work. I mean, we cannot have a relationship, right? So I think that if people want to learn about this, number one, I hope if anything, this podcast set serve to, to at least demonstrate that this is absolutely within reach, easy to deploy. I would think even inexpensive to deploy. So, so it it really follows every question anyone's gonna ask. we've answered that a hundred times. And, and why would you not do it? Why would they not do it?
Ryan Carlson:So I think there's a, a, a question that in the consumer world, they're like, would you recommend this service to, like friends or family, right? And that's that whole marketing score piece. And like, it's either a yes or no, and it's great. My question for individuals like yourself where you kind of sit. In the middle, and you serve a lot of customers, it's in the commercial and industrial space. Would you allow people to talk to your customers?
eric schummer:A hundred percent actually the, the Jacksonville airport manager, it's available, and I say that publicly because he loves what we're doing together and he's completely, I mean, available for this and others are as well. But yeah, totally, a hundred percent.
Ryan Carlson:Yeah. I, I think I, I love the, I love your answer. I love the fact that, you're so open about that because that right there is the litmus test I find
eric schummer:Oh yeah.
Ryan Carlson:many solution providers, if you sell vaporware or you, you don't have, don't follow through on what what you do. Your say and do ratio is off. Ah, then no, no. You can't talk to my customers
eric schummer:The things. It's, it's,
Ryan Carlson:and because
eric schummer:know, but what, Ryan, it's not always about money. I, I mean, we do so many things for customers, so way beyond any economical conversation. Most, most of the time. know, I mean, just did that yesterday to, to, to get, I mean, our engineering partner came to us with a request, which I think brought down something like to a quarter of the cost, and we went for it because in the aggregate. the relationship and the aggregate of, of, of, of everything we're doing together. I think that that, that, that dissolves itself, and, and so, it's, like a lawyer of mine said sometimes a long time ago, what I call animals. So which are you willing to partner?
Ryan Carlson:Yeah.
eric schummer:What's, what's your willingness to partner? It's a very important approach. Are are you flexible? Are you open? and, and not is, is your stuff works, but can we do business together? Can you accommodate to what I need and I want, so if the answer to all of those things is to the extent that we can, yes. I think that's the kind of people you wanna work with. I, I, and I hope that's the company I, I, I can build.
Ryan Carlson:So if you are a creator of connected products or thinking about them, or you're looking to solve a particular problem with connectivity, just know that there are operating systems for IO OT out there like sensori that you should be looking into. If you make products and you don't currently integrate with an operating system of IO OT to reach larger enterprise audiences, I recommend reaching out to Senzary. I think you should also consider that there's more than just the technology to solve problems. You need to be ready to answer the questions of how do the people who are responsible for administrating, operating, supporting, and servicing this particular product and service, are you talking to their systems? Not everyone wants to log into another portal unless it is a very use case specific thing. So everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. Eric and Marlena from ri thank you so much for coming in and sharing your story, talking about your philosophy on building connected products, and introducing us to the ERP of IOT. And I've now met the Picasso of iot.
eric schummer:you, Ryan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Ryan Carlson:you
eric schummer:I
This has been another episode of What to Expect when You're Connecting. Until next time.
Ryan Carlson:what is Soracom to you?
eric schummer:I don't think of you as a vendor. I think of you as part of my business. think of you as, as an extension of my business that that's how I think of you.
