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Creating Business Value with the IoT, Part 3

Making the Business Case for Investing Now

In this video, Mike Piech, General Manager for Middleware at Red Hat, explains how existing infrastructure investments, knowledge, and skills can be leveraged in IoT projects today.

Learn more at www.RedHat.com/iot. Have a question? Email us here.

Watch the series from the beginning here.

Transcript

Adrian Bowles: Hi. I’m Adrian Bowles with RTInsights and STORM Insights. We have a series here where we talk to executives of innovative technology firms about issues that we see buyers of technology facing, and get their input on how they’re seeing things in the marketplace and how their products and services address those issues. What we want to talk about today is looking at, from a business standpoint, a product manager, a VP of products, someone that is trying to make a business decision about a new investment in IoT apps. You know it’s going to have some good things, but there’s a fear in a lot of people that we talk to about: How is this going to integrate? How is this going to disrupt the existing portfolio that I have?

My guest today is Mike Piech, general manager of middleware at Red Hat. What do you see in this area? What are people worried about and how do you help them out?

Mike Piech: Yeah. It makes sense that folks have a little bit of, maybe, fear of the unknown when it comes to IoT. It sounds glamorous in some ways, but also very complicated. There are all these new devices that folks are not used to thinking about and dealing with from an architecture standpoint.

For the business person, the good news is that, ultimately, a lot of the investments that have already been made are very much leverage-able, very much usable in the new world of IoT.

Perhaps even more importantly, the knowledge that your developers, your architects, the folks who are building those apps to make your business more competitive and run better, most of that knowledge is transferrable. There’s not like, you’ve got to go hire a whole new team to go build a whole new type of application in order to be successful.

Adrian Bowles: Okay. Great. We’re looking at leveraging a lot of the existing infrastructure at the middleware level. When I think of Red Hat, I think of the open source, open systems background. Is there anything about that, that helps one get into the IoT world?

Mike Piech: Yeah. One of the key things to think about when thinking about open source is not, my developers can look at the source code or even, it’s open source. It’s free. It’s cheap. Et cetera. There are certainly interesting benefits in both of those areas. However, what’s really, I think, compelling in the context of IoT is the rate of innovation that happens out there in the IoT space. In general, in enterprise computing, many of the frameworks, many of the middleware components and so on, that are coming out of open source, really are the latest and most cutting edge of anything out there in the industry, compared with, maybe, proprietary alternatives.

That is at least as true for IoT as any of those other technology areas. From the business person’s standpoint, one of the benefits of going with an open source based provider is, you’re really going to tap into that stream of the latest and greatest innovations and not miss out on those.

Adrian Bowles: Great. Let me see if I can summarize. The key thing from the business perspective, the key points, are that you can leverage existing infrastructure. You can leverage existing talent, skills. Using an open source or open stack, if you will, for IoT, you’re going to be getting the benefit of the larger community, so faster rate of innovation.

Mike Piech: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Adrian Bowles: Thanks.

Mike Piech: Thanks, Adrian.

Adrian Bowles: Thanks for watching. If you’d like more information, go to the URL RedHat.com. More in the series at RTInsights.com. Thanks.

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Creating Business Value with the IoT video series

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Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, delivers reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux®, middleware, storage, and virtualization technologies that help you collect, communicate, transform, store, and act on critical data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). Red Hat offers a single, extendable, and secure foundation to support the end-to-end life cycle of IoT solutions—from development to production.

Red Hat brings intelligence to the edge, bridging the gap between IT and operational technology for connectivity and interoperability between IoT devices, gateways, datacenters, and the cloud.

Learn more at redhat.com/iot.