Beyond the Blueprint with Cellular IoT: Dennis McCain (AT&T)
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Beyond the Blueprint with Cellular IoT: Dennis McCain (AT&T)

Jonathan Rosenfeld:

Welcome to the Innovators of Things podcast, a profile series series about the builders and leaders of connected devices, powered by hologram. Today's guest is Dennis McCain, IoT lead member of technical staff at AT and T and author of Implementing Cellular IoT Solutions for Digital Transformation. Now to our host, Gillian Kaplan.

Jillian Kaplan:

I am here with Dennis McCain for the first episode of this podcast series. Very exciting. And we are here to talk about innovators like Dennis and innovation. And I want to kick off, Dennis, talking about how you think about innovation. Because I think sometimes people think like, oh, if I'm gonna innovate, it has to be this huge, big idea.

Jillian Kaplan:

But, really, innovation can stem from something small and grow from there. So what are your thoughts on how to how to really ignite innovation?

Dennis McCain:

Well, thanks, Jillian. I mean, really good question. I agree with you. Innovation, doesn't have to be a dramatic sort of quantum leap in technology. I mean, I see it as more incremental.

Dennis McCain:

I like to go back to the smartphone days when, say, the iPhone and smartphones first came out in, like, 2005. I was working at Nokia, and Nokia was sort of the front lines for smartphone development. And no one really understood what that technology enabled in terms of smartphone apps that are ubiquitous now. I mean, there's an app for everything. And all of that is built on the foundation of that technology, 3 g technology that is right now considered archaic compared to, say, LTE and 5 g where data throughputs are extremely high.

Dennis McCain:

And that was even with 3 g technology. People were developing apps and the innovation was happening all around that. And so that is that's been the springboard for a lot of innovation leading up into the Internet of Things, which has only been around for probably less than 10 years or so. But it's now still at the early stages of evolving into newer and newer business models for companies that are using IoT to transform their company in many different ways. To your point, the innovation is is kind of building on the the technology sort of hallmarks of of various wireless technologies and technology development.

Dennis McCain:

So we're getting into sort of IoT and, you know, Indian cloud development and, you know, edge processing and even AI, which didn't exist, you know, 10 years ago. All of that's enabling these new business models and new digital transformations.

Jillian Kaplan:

I love that. Yeah. Starting with a small idea and kinda seeing how it sort of becomes different things throughout the process. And I had one of those Nokia phones, and I remember the coolest thing about it was you could change the cover. Do you remember that?

Jillian Kaplan:

Like, you could make

Dennis McCain:

I had a leveraged one. I had every one of them at the most. Yeah.

Jillian Kaplan:

It's awesome. So can you tell us a little bit more about your career and your background? I know you touched on your time in Nokia, but a little bit about your Sure. Over 2 decades in IoT and the the

Dennis McCain:

telecom space. So I was in the military before, and I I had a master's degree in double e before I came in the military. So I got out of the military. I worked for Texas Instruments here in Dallas doing hardware design. So real hardware design with TI's defense segment and for a couple years before going to Nokia.

Dennis McCain:

So I had 11 year tenure at Nokia, and I had the ideal job working in Nokia Research Center, which is sort of their cutting edge. You know, you had all the test equipment. You had all of the, you know, the budget to do all these very interesting projects. So we're doing all kinds of different wireless projects around, you know, WiFi and Bluetooth and cellular, of course, supporting the Nokia businesses. But we got to do some really innovative things.

Dennis McCain:

And those those innovations in wireless, the Bluetooth, WiFi, various, you know, wireless standardization activities really laid the foundation for for IoT. So after leaving Nokia in 2009 with the decline of, sort of, Nokia's position in the smartphone market, I went on to kind of a made a decision to focus more on IoT as a as a real sort of career path for me. So went to several companies that were actually developing IoT sort of wireless modules and devices and actually building applications. So utility companies building applications for smart meters, oil and gas companies building real IoT applications out in really remote areas monitoring, you know, oil and gas operations and working with, you know, short range wireless be with thermostats in homes. So all of these were various early incarnations, I guess you could say, of the Internet of Things.

Dennis McCain:

So I knew that my passion was IoT and that led me to AT and T about 7 years ago where I am sort of their so much a subject matter expert for for IoT, especially around devices and the device ecosystem. But what I really am passionate about is helping partners kinda build that IoT solution. And that's really what I wanted to why I wanted to write the book is to, kinda, explain, really, for the layperson as we talk to a lot of different customers and partners, and they don't really understand IoT. They don't understand, you know, how to get into it, what's involved. So I thought it'd be really good to have sort of a an overview of of IoT and how IoT itself, especially cellular IoT, is transforming businesses and creating new business models.

Dennis McCain:

And then some of the pitfalls with, you know, taking you can't just take a device off the shelf and just build an IoT solution. It's really end to end endeavor. So to me, working with partners and customers and building IoT solutions and really staying at the front lines where cellular now with low power wide wide area, you know, LTM and VIT technologies are really at the cutting edge. So that's really the enabler for a lot of different IoT use cases and applications. So that's kind of my career in a nutshell, and I really love what I'm doing, which is kind of the reason I wrote wrote the book and, hopefully, share knowledge with others that, are also developing IoT solutions for their business.

Jillian Kaplan:

I love that. And I have a lot of questions based on what you just said. So I'm gonna start with a 2 fold. So you touched a little bit on it, but, like, what really motivated you to write this book? Was it just your love of the industry?

Jillian Kaplan:

Was there something else? And then a little bit about the verticals you talked about. Is there some verticals within oil and gas or the smart metering you talked about that you feel like have the most Yeah. Promise for IoT?

Dennis McCain:

Yeah. So so the the real reason I think I wrote the book is because over the years, I realized most people don't really understand IoT. They understand the buzzword. They are focused on the hype, you know, IoT, you know, IoT everything. It's kinda like AI now.

Dennis McCain:

It's really a lot of hype around it. And they don't really understand what's involved with building an IoT solution or, more importantly, what is the business? I mean, you could do something that's really neat with a Raspberry Pi and make some lights flicker and change and control your, you know, your home lights, etcetera. But, really, is that a business for a company? And it's not.

Dennis McCain:

So what why would you start developing an IoT solution for your company? And that's kind of the impetus for the book. So, you know, you you you investigate, you know, you start with the business model. You know, how how would I like to improve efficiency? How would I like for for example, supply chain monitoring.

Dennis McCain:

I wanna monitor my supply chain from, you know, source to destination all along the way. I wanna know exactly when I'm when my supply is coming in. I wanna know the status of my distribution centers. I wanna know what's in my warehouse. I wanna know when a step leaves the warehouse.

Dennis McCain:

And I wanna integrate that with my my own systems, Salesforce, etcetera, inventory management systems. I wanna have all of that integrated together. And so what you find is that you're now taking sort of this, you know, this new IoT technology and combining it with your your your normal sort of IT infrastructure. So it's kind of an OT IT convergence. So you say your operational technology and your information technology, which is your traditional business systems, and combining those together to create, a a nice solution.

Dennis McCain:

And it's not that easy to do. So it's not if you're dealing with it in a silo, it means you have an asset tracker and you have a, you know, back end platform for monitoring that asset. That's one thing. But having full visibility of your entire supply chain, even all the way to the point where the customers, you know, get gets delivery and you're able to monitor that asset over the whole, you know, supply chain, that becomes more of an IoT solution and a more of a digital transformation in your business. The other part of it is cellular, like I mentioned earlier, cellular is, kinda, the technology that enables that because you have ubiquitous coverage everywhere with cellular.

Dennis McCain:

But in the past, you didn't have the low power, low cost cellular options that you have today. So, I mean, we're we're, a big business in IoT and it's all around low power wide area, LTM technology, globally. I mean, there's countries all over the world that are deploying, IoT solutions on these technologies. So it's super exciting, really. Because now, like I mentioned earlier, how, you know, the iPhone and smartphones in general back in, you know, 2,005, seems like a long time ago, opened up the door for all these different applications, you know, iOS and Android applications.

Dennis McCain:

Well, now we have low power wide area cellular technology where modules are in the $6 price range and devices are really cheap that are opening up all of these opportunities for transforming a business that people have never thought of before because the technology wasn't there, but now it is. Mhmm.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yeah. So when we think you talked about, like, some of the promise, right, of IoT. When we think about some of the challenges, what do you feel like is gonna be a challenge to build all these awesome end to end supply chain IoT solutions? Right? Like, where do you see Right.

Jillian Kaplan:

The issues or the potential issues?

Dennis McCain:

Yeah. So so as I as I discussed in the book, I think that's, like probably the most the second most important piece. 1st, understanding IOT and second is really understanding the sort of the challenges in in deploying, executing, implementing an IoT solution. The first thing is really getting the buy in that you need inside the company, you know, across all, you know, departments and saying, look, this is something that's gonna be, you know, a cross functional solution that's going to combine our OT and IT systems together. And it company.

Dennis McCain:

That's probably one of the biggest things. The other thing is that getting the technology, is one thing. Getting the device, building the solution, but really partnering with the right partners along the way. You know, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to build your own device.

Dennis McCain:

You don't have to build your own platform. There's so many partners out there now. It's a huge ecosystem out there for the whole end to end. From the device to the connectivity, carriers, supplying cellular wireless. You have Bluetooth, you know, sensors.

Dennis McCain:

You have WiFi devices. Then you also have all the different Cloud providers. You have Microsoft Azure and Amazon Wireless Service, AWS, that provides the back end piece of it. And they have an IoT focus as well. So a lot of the things that you you you may need to do, you can piece together working with really good partners to integrate that system to create the solution.

Dennis McCain:

And I think the third thing that I would like to point out is really, it's not a very fast process. This doesn't happen in in months. This takes probably year or more in order to have a real solution that demonstrates a, benefit to the business, a real value to the business. And that's the part people tend to miss because if it takes longer than, say, 6 months to really show anything, people lose interest. The technology may change and, you know, partners go away or partners aren't there when you need them And it it loses that focus.

Dennis McCain:

So that's why I go back to my first point, which is getting that buy in to say, hey. This is gonna be a long process. And we need to think about this as a company to make sure this is the direction we wanna go in. But the end state is so attractive in terms of your transformation of the business that it becomes sort of your your standard. I mean, you don't even think about not having your smartphone.

Dennis McCain:

You don't think about not having IoT in your in your business. And there's lots of businesses, like I mentioned in the book, that that really benefit from this. I would say asset tracking, asset monitoring, definitely one of the biggest for sure. Utilities, the water metering, gas metering, electric metering, all all going to cellular because it just makes sense because you have that coverage and you you have the systems already in place to integrate those together and make it really easy for utilities to monitor those assets without having someone in a truck going around reading meters or, you know, it just it it just makes sense. And it just becomes the standard now.

Dennis McCain:

So it's really becoming the standard for utilities. And I would say the 3rd major vertical for for IoT IoC that that we've seen is really in the health care market. Remote patient monitoring. You know, as as our as our parents age, my dad is 88 years old. He'll probably hear his podcast at some point, but he he needs a lot of a lot of support.

Dennis McCain:

And so remote patient monitoring really, really begs for an IoT solution. Being able to monitor remotely blood pressure, fall detection Is is the is the senior going getting up and about? Are they able to, you know, get their own food and breakfast in the morning? Are they taking their medication? All that really lends itself to an IOT solution.

Dennis McCain:

And then the aftercare part, when you go to the doctor and you go home, they wanna know, you know, are you taking medication? Are are you following up on what we on the advice that we gave you? And IOT and real patient monitoring is the perfect solution for that. So really those those are 3 areas that there's many what many, many more. And there's more coming down the road.

Dennis McCain:

There's no doubt that we're at the early early stages of IoT even now. And it's been in the market for, you know, like I said, more than 10 years. We're still at the very early stages. They were still hearing, you know, new solutions and new Yep. Yeah

Jillian Kaplan:

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. You talked a little bit about the convergence of IT and OT, which is incredibly important, leaning into that open ecosystem because you cannot do this alone.

Jillian Kaplan:

No one can. And being patient because it takes time. Is there, like, one amazing solution that you've worked on that you're like, this has been the coolest IoT solution I've deployed?

Dennis McCain:

So there's one there's a couple case studies in my book, and one of the case studies is with one of our customers, a big customer, that has energy drinks. I won't say the name, but, they have coolers deployed all over the world. I mean, thousands of them. In fact, every every store you go in, you see a cooler. So they said, hey.

Dennis McCain:

We wanna monitor the temperature of the cooler inside and door openings. So door openings, they would be able to determine, you know, how often are people, you know, getting, you know, drinks out of the coolers. These are our coolers, our branded coolers. And so we built the device. AT and T partnered and partnered with an ODM, which is a original device manufacturer, and sort of built an AT and T device for cooler monitoring, which was really cool.

Dennis McCain:

Learned a lot of lessons from that deployment. And that a lot of that's in the book as far as what we've learned for that. But you you really understand when you're when you're doing a deployment like that, the importance of, say, for example, device management. Being able to manage your devices remotely. Being able to do, firmware updates, configuration updates, being able to troubleshoot devices remotely.

Dennis McCain:

All of that really comes to a head when you really need that and when you really have the scale. So once you get to scale, you start seeing issues you've never seen seen before. So it's not as easy. You you deploy, say, you know, a 1,000 devices. You don't see any problems.

Dennis McCain:

Everything seems to work okay. Reports are coming in fine. But when you get up to, you know, 100 of thousands of devices deployed, really, almost every country in the world, there are a myriad of issues that could happen and that you've never even planned on, that you could never even test for. Mhmm. And those are the ones that become the challenge.

Dennis McCain:

And then you you really understand what you need in your IoT solution in order to mitigate those those issues that that could happen from that. So it was really interesting. It worked really well. We ended up with, 520,000 deployed, devices globally. But the interesting thing was, for me, was that it was not just in the US.

Dennis McCain:

We were deployed in, you know, countries in Africa. We were all in, you know, Southeast Asia, all over the world. And you could actually track the coolers from where they're manufactured across the ocean, kind of, all the way to these distribution centers and then eventually to the stores. And then you can actually walk into the store and because the device had a Bluetooth beacon on it, you can actually find the device or find the cooler in the store and go get your drink, which is really cool. So I mean, real a real IoT remote monitoring use case, that was that was fun.

Dennis McCain:

A lot of fun.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yeah. And, obviously, like, really applicable to a lot of people's lives. Right? Something a lot of people probably use based on what you're saying, which is very cool. And where do you see, like, the future in the next 10 years of IoT?

Jillian Kaplan:

I know you said there's a lot of development happening. Like, is there something big you see coming? And for people wanting to get into the IoT space, is there advice you can give them to keep up with the next big thing?

Dennis McCain:

So there's there's lots and lots of information, new releases for for IoT. Mhmm. I would say the biggest thing coming in the future is 5 g. So LTE, unfortunately, is eventually gonna go away. They will eventually be sunset at some point.

Dennis McCain:

And eventually, LTM and l l low power wide area technologies could be part of that. So we're kind of in a transition point where we're going from LTE like we were with, you know, 3g to LTE. Now we're at, you know, LTE to 5g where carriers are deploying their 5g networks. And 5g has had some benefits mainly for high bandwidth applications, high data throughput requirements. And they also they technically include, you know, low power, wide area, and LTM technologies, but the RAN would be different.

Dennis McCain:

So most carriers are not including those, you know, legacy LPWA technologies in 5 g, even though you see it marketed that way. But 5 g has its own version of sort of its lower cost, solutions with Redcap reduce it's called reduced, capability 5 g. And then in release 18, there'll be enhanced Redcap, which is closer to what we see today with our low power wide area technologies, where it's a lower cost solution that still takes advantage of the 5 g network. And you can still deploy your your IoT solutions out there with, these technologies. It's just that right now, we're at the sort of bleeding edge where the cost of the modules and the cost of the devices for 5 g are pretty high.

Dennis McCain:

And LTE's got a good bit of longevity left in it for companies to consider. So we're kind of at that pivot point. So we get that question a lot around, you know, I want I'm I wanna future proof my solution. So I'm a, you know, an alarm panel manufacturer. I'm a utility.

Dennis McCain:

And I need my solution to be out there for, you know, 10 plus years. So should I consider 5 g? Well, the answer is yes. So the question is, how do you how do you build a, an I I o IoT solution around a 5 g Technology that's cost competitive with what you have today with LTE, and it's really the that's really the challenge. But, fundamentally, the the IoT solutions out there are still gaining traction.

Dennis McCain:

We're seeing more and more customers, partners that are building innovative IoT solutions in in many areas that technology comes down to the price points that we need. And then eventually, 6g technology comes down to the price points that we need and then eventually 6 g. So, you know, we would like to have it so that we're not, you know, bumping, technology every 10 years and forcing people to upgrade their technologies, which is not good for the carriers. It's not good for anyone. The module suppliers, the device OEMs, the solution providers because it requires a kind of a retrofit that is, pretty disruptive.

Dennis McCain:

So, you know, we're obviously working on how we can make 6 g more future proofed, maybe leveraging the current technology that we have today and rolling that into a 6 g type solution. But I think that's the biggest thing that's coming, and I think that's the the biggest question people have about technology. The other thing, I'll mention is that, the SIM technology is also changing pretty significantly, in terms of being able to have multiple profiles on a SIM. Traditionally, you would get you'd get AT and T, Verizon, T Mobile, whoever, and get your SIM, plug in your device, and you're you're good to go. And now the the thinking is we don't need to necessarily pick them to begin with.

Dennis McCain:

We can do that later. We can just manufacture the device and put what's called an eSIM in the device and download the profile that we want later. There's no need to, you know, lock yourself in to a carrier at the very beginning. That gives you a lot more flexibility in manufacturing, and it makes it a lot easier for customers to, you know, deploy with, you know, various carriers. So it's it's interesting and it's something that's really gaining a lot of traction in the market.

Dennis McCain:

So I'd say those 2, the 5 g transition and eSIM or e u I c c, are really the the 2 biggest, sort of, innovations that are happening for cellular IoT, I think, going forward in the next 5 years.

Jillian Kaplan:

And you talked a little bit about the upgrade to 5 g being big as well, obviously, and having devices that are 5 g enabled. Are you seeing a lot more come down the pipeline, especially that are ruggedized? Right? Because a lot of these situations, they're not they're not in a data center. Right?

Jillian Kaplan:

Like so that's where I've seen the struggle is I have ruggedized. That's not 5 g. I have non ruggedized. That's 5 g. But, obviously, we need both working together, like, device wise.

Dennis McCain:

Right. So so as you would expect, the the first five g devices are really gonna be routers.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yep.

Dennis McCain:

And some of those routers are are ruggedized, depends on how you define ruggedized. Yeah. But you'll see, MiFi hotspots, which is kinda what we have today. We have, 5g hot spots. So then you have our dongles that will plug into another device, a USB dongle that plug in and and be 5 g capable.

Dennis McCain:

So make sure device 5 g capable without you having to buy the device with the integrated 5 g radio inside. The other aspect is what's called fixed wireless, which is really kind of a router, but you you have 5 g fixed, radios that can be deployed almost anywhere. And you can take advantage of that, you know, high throughput 5 g, you know, wide spectrum for really broadband access to, like, locations where you wouldn't necessarily have fiber or copper to your house. And that is that's something that all of the carriers are are focused on is how how they deploy fixed wireless. So, really, what you're seeing today are kind of the kinda what you would expect for the new technology, higher cost routers and gateways, fixed wireless devices, and less of the sort of asset trackers.

Dennis McCain:

You know, you know, you don't see 5 g asset trackers yet, but that's really where the LTM technology has taken us to really, really low cost asset trackers that can monitor an asset from point a to point b anywhere in the world and provide, you know, real time information on the status of that asset as it's moving. So we're not quite there yet for 5 g.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yep.

Dennis McCain:

So it's, it is a challenge because the cost of the 5 g modules, which plays into the cost of the 5 g devices as well.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yeah. Yeah. And I and I love, like, you touching on all the future technologies so that people that are looking to get into space can start thinking about those things. If we take a step back into, like, you know, your career, what advice, like, would you give we talked, like I said, about the technology space, but what, like, other career advice would you give people just career wise in general? Like, what would you wish you would have known coming into the space?

Dennis McCain:

So it would depends on how far back you go. So the advice I give sort of college students that are thinking about the majors or even graduating is that you probably not do what you majored in. You'll probably do something different because technology is changing so rapidly. So as an example, I mean, it's it's questionable why you'd wanna go into computer science when you have, you know, AI generated code that is, you know, comparable. I mean, it's actually doing most of the work that you would be doing as a computer scientist.

Dennis McCain:

But technology is changing so rapidly. Data scientists, for example, you know, didn't really exist 5 years ago. But data science is huge because we have all this data now, and a lot of it's from, like, IoT solutions. What do you do with it? How do you how do you digest that data?

Dennis McCain:

And then you need AI to take that ingest that data and, you know, generative AI even to to iterate on it and figure out, okay, what are the anomalies in this data? How do I distill this data in some way? So that's becoming a a big area, but there's not there weren't any data science programs that I knew of in college. So we have a lot of guys that had no background at all in any maybe they had a little bit of engineering background, but the other data scientists and they're doing data science, data analytics. They're doing AI stuff.

Dennis McCain:

They're doing everything related to basically data that needs to be ingested and and distilled to figure out, well, what's going on? So AT and T is doing that today. And a lot of other companies are doing the same thing. It's figuring out how to handle the the mound of data out there. I mean, you've heard of cloud data and then, you know, now we have, you know, these massive amounts of data from various sources coming in that you have to, you know, kind of bring together somehow.

Dennis McCain:

So I guess the my my primary advice is be flexible. I think having the flexibility to to adapt to changing technology, and it is changing much more rapidly it was IoT. I mean, you could think of IoT as kind of a, a a it was IoT. I mean, you could think of IoT as kind of a, a a journey that kinda started with with with, you know, technology with Nokia and cellular, but now it is truly a cellular technology in my opinion and something that will continue for the next, you know, 10 10 years or so. And obviously, you know, in undergraduate and grad school, there's there's no courses really for me on IoT or even what that was.

Dennis McCain:

So it became it became a a technology that evolved, that didn't exist, you know, when I was in school a long time ago. But the, the technology now is changing more rapidly and being able to be flexible and jump into something knowing that, hey, this is probably where things are going, like data science is is a good good choice.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yeah. Yeah. And and I think it's incredibly important in all the technologies we've talked about, how important, like, companies like AT and T are in the network. Like, none of this stuff can happen without a network. We often forget how important the network is unless it doesn't work.

Jillian Kaplan:

Right? Like, you know, we just we forget it's the backbone of everything we're doing in this space. So

Dennis McCain:

In a lot in a lot of ways, that's what you want. You want it to be transparent. You just want it to work, and you just assume it works and it's there. And that enables all of this other stuff, all of IoT solutions, mobility solutions, everything that's kinda built on that network, you don't even think twice about. It's kinda like your home broadband.

Dennis McCain:

You don't Yep. Really think that your Wi Fi is gonna go out. It just works.

Jillian Kaplan:

Yep. A 100%. This is awesome. Such a great conversation. I'm gonna pivot before we conclude to a little section we're gonna call DataDash, where I'm gonna ask you, like, 5 this or that questions just to learn a little bit about you.

Jillian Kaplan:

Should be fun. So we'll we'll kick off. Pizza or pasta? Okay. Pizza.

Jillian Kaplan:

Okay. Running or

Dennis McCain:

You did pizza or pasta. Right?

Jillian Kaplan:

Yeah. Pizza or pasta. Yes.

Dennis McCain:

Or running?

Jillian Kaplan:

Not after the pizza or pasta, just in general. No. Flying or driving?

Dennis McCain:

Driving.

Jillian Kaplan:

Driving. Dogs or cats?

Dennis McCain:

Oh, definitely dogs.

Jillian Kaplan:

Okay. Do you have a dog?

Dennis McCain:

I do. We have a 5 pound back a 5 pound Baxter. 5 pound chihuahua. Oh, cute. Baxter.

Jillian Kaplan:

Cute. Hi, Baxter. Skiing or the beach?

Dennis McCain:

Beach.

Jillian Kaplan:

Me too. Awesome. Cool. This concludes the first episode. Really happy to have you.

Jillian Kaplan:

Thank you again for joining us, and I can't wait to connect with you again.

Dennis McCain:

Thanks, Jillian. Really appreciate it.

Jonathan Rosenfeld:

Thank you to our guest, Dennis McCain. Please make sure to check out his book, Implementing Cellular IoT Solutions for Digital Transformation. It is available on Amazon, and it is a great read for all things cellular IoT. Please make sure to check out our next episode with Adrian Valenzuela, senior IoT specialist at Software AG. Until next time.