Welcome to PR Vibes, created by Calysto Communications to provide you with insight into the publications, thought leaders and events in the communications industry. Today, we visit with James Brehm of James Brehm & Associates, a market intelligence firm with a unique focus on the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M), and Big Data analytics.
Prior to founding JBA in early 2014, Brehm held strategic roles at Compass Intelligence, Frost & Sullivan and worked in marketing, sales management, and business development at Rackspace Managed Hosting and Interland (now Web.com), two of the largest pure-play web hosting companies in the United States.
In this interview, Brehm shares how his college background in animal science and pre-veterinary medicine led to a career in technology, as well what’s next in the Internet of Things. Enjoy!
What is JBA?
JBA is a strategy and consulting firm. We are 100 percent focused on what’s going on in IoT and M2M communications. We take a look at the ecosystem from end users on through to the companies developing and deploying solutions, including intellectual property. People think of IoT or M2M as a singular market, but it’s not. It’s the device, it’s the connectivity and ultimately, it’s about the value you extract from the data as connected devices. When we talk about Big Data (and I absolutely hate that term), it’s more contextualizing that data and getting good quality information that allows the organization leveraging IoT to either make money, save money or be more compliant.
Vertical or Horizontal?
We actually don’t look at markets as vertical because often, they appear more horizontal. What we aim to do is crawl inside our customer’s head: “How do you view it?” We will then present the information the way they want to see it. We work with hardware and software companies, telcos and MVNOs.
Each company has different definitions of how they want to verticalize or deploy their solutions, so we work with each company on an individual basis to understand how they define their market and how they find their distribution channels to help them leverage that. Ultimately, we’re holding the numbers together because everything is based on metrics. We look at about 25 different application areas, such as consumer electronics, OEM automotive, commercial vehicle telematics, and usage-based insurance. We break healthcare into a couple of different sectors, including wellness. We also look at ad monitoring and much more.
What do your customers come to you for?
First, people come to us for numbers. Numbers are the foundation for everything and our numbers are probably some of the best out there. Often customers come to us looking for specific information — current market year, market size and vertical markets. Or, it could be forecasts. Or, a combination of both.
Then, we provide contextual information around those numbers. How do we get them? What do they mean to that organization? That leads down the path of strategy and guidance. It could be a go-to-market strategy, it could be a messaging strategy, or it could be a partnership, or merger and acquisition strategy. Our customers come to us at first for something simple and then it quickly gets complex.
For example, we’re working with some investment banks and financial and equity firms now and, as I’m sure you are aware, there’s a huge roll up going on. It could be as simple as a call from an investment bank saying, “Do you think we should be working on this deal?” It’s yes or no. Or, it could be a carrier customer that says, “Are we doing things right? No? Well, why not?” And we tell them.
We’re pragmatic. Often, I’m going to tell you things you really don’t want to hear, but need to hear. We’re not afraid to call the baby ugly if the baby’s ugly. Then sometimes companies don’t know what they don’t know and it takes somebody with an outside view to say, “Wait a minute, that’s not the reason. This is the reason why.”
How do you divide your coverage?
We’re a bit different from a lot of firms in that everybody works on everything together. We have people who have specialties, say security, and they will take the lead in those areas, but what we want is to be as collaborative as possible internally. My team hates it when I tell them that trading a spreadsheet is not collaboration! Let’s go into the conference room and talk. At the end of the day, it’s a team effort and if you truly collaborate, you come up with some unique solutions.
Any interesting recent market data to share?
We break down IoT by different types of connectivity, such as cellular, satellite, short-range wireless, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. We look at long range, low-power wide area networks and at wired and wireline communications as well. Right now we’re looking at how carriers — T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon — deployed their numbers for M2M and connected devices for the last quarter and we’re seeing some really good movement. AT&T had perhaps the largest movement outside of China in the first million-connection quarter that we have ever seen for a carrier. It’s just tremendous. We believe right now in North America there are probably around 43 million connections out there, and probably 45 percent are what I would consider to be straight-line telematics solutions for vehicles for a connected car.
Let’s talk about your background. You attended Iowa State, where you had an, um, unusual major for a technology industry analyst.
I majored in animal science, pre-veterinary medicine and agriculture business.
Okay, that’s a different start. Did you ever envision doing what you do now?
No. I had no idea. My first five years out of school I worked in the meat packing industry as a buyer, believe it or not. It was a time of transition and the company I was with was going to computerized buying. As a young guy, they sent me out to try to figure out how to do it. I worked with the systems integrator and a large computer company to create the buying program and then rolled it out to the organization. I got into technology through the back door, but from there, I was hooked.
What made you focus on IoT and M2M?
I didn’t choose them, they chose me! I’ve got networking, hardware and cloud experience in my background, but what I found at the end of the day was that I was always driven to things that were fairly technical and required all those pieces — network hardwire and ultimately the Internet and the cloud. I also worked in mobility and as mobility pushed closer to the cloud, I worked on a lot of projects around telemetry, telematics, the early stage IoT. It’s not as if I went out and said, “I’m going to be an IoT analyst or a M2M analyst, it’s like I was drawn in.”
What do we need to understand about this emerging market?
We interact with IoT and M2M on a daily basis, but there are some aspects that have far-reaching implications that can change our daily life. I recently met with a smart metering company and we talked about their solution and the need for it. This metering company is working on both electricity and water. The EPA statistics show that 26 percent of water pulled out of the ground from wells is wasted before it gets to the tap.
Why? Poor distribution, government hikes, just pure waste and, some unknown factors, possibly theft as well. Another interesting statistic is that 11 percent of electricity generated in the United States goes towards water, pumping it out of the ground, or pushing it through the system to the consumer. If we could eliminate that 26 percent of waste, how much power would be saved? GE is talking about the billions and trillions of dollars in energy savings that are achieved from a one percent reduction in power. This is a three percent reduction in power from harnessing water!
If you are using smart metering solutions, you can shut off different valves to pinpoint leaking spots to eliminate water waste. Eliminating wasted water is huge! I live in San Antonio, and our water system mandates low-flow shower heads. We’re allowed a gallon and a half toilet, filling to a level of 40 psi water pressure. However, when I bought my new house, the pressure was about 110 psi at the meter. Even though I’m supposed to have this low-flow toilet that’s a gallon and half, because it’s almost three times the pressure in my house, I actually have a high flow toilet that’s about a three or four gallons each time it’s flushed. Instituting IoT solutions to slow that loss and flow can help that water loss.
As for healthcare, think about the implications of what remote patient monitoring can do in a third-world nation using RFID and connected devices and sensors from a quarantined standpoint to stop the spread of, say, Ebola in Africa.
Now because of Moore’s Law, we have more intelligent devices getting faster, smaller and cheaper by the hour, with more intelligent decisions happening at the edge of the network. We also have Metcalfe’s Law, which basically says the network is more valuable in direct proportion to the number of connections we have on it. All of these devices can be connected, and that’s what is going to cause what I think is tremendous innovation at a faster rate than we have ever seen, and things are going to get better at a faster rate because of that. Think about traffic solutions and connected vehicles. We can virtually eliminate the traffic in downtown Atlanta!
(Editor’s comment: Ha! We’ll believe that when we see it.)