19 | Industry 4.0 - Part 2 - IoT, Business, and Overcoming the Challenges of Technological Change

Today, a conversation with Jeff Bennett. Jeff is an IoT Cloud Architect out of San Diego, California on the Global Black Belt Team at Microsoft. Jeff's a notable speaker and writer, a highly knowledgeable practitioner at the intersection of business and technology in the IoT space, and brings with him over 20 years of experience helping businesses overcome very specific challenges at the core to how they operate.Jeff flexes his geek muscles throughout the talk with some great stories and advice for businesses that are struggling with planning, adoption, and strategies around how to plug in play across their bigger digital initiatives regarding IoT and beyond. We'll cover things from hybrid compute in the world of industrial and manufacturing, and how customers have now the option of deciding where to leverage their machine learning models (it doesn't have to be in their data center, in the vendor data center (the cloud), but possibly at the shop floor or at the location of interest itself - we call this, the EDGE. We talk about where the rubber meets the road with these complex IoT projects and how to get started (which is one of the toughest things about all of this, how/who/when to start) We focus on how to stay relevant as a technologist or visionary in the field, and discuss some things he's struggled with and overcome in his career and advice for others with similar experiences and goals.Specific key-Takeaways:~13:00 - 20:00 - The power of thinking creatively, about a future that does not exist~20:00-30:00 - Starting NOW with IoT: Understand your business criteria/vision, choose top workloads that map to these, and "figure out at quickly as humanly possible" how to execute on these~33:00 - 40:00 - Upskilling on the building blocks of IoT: Devices and machines, Connectivity, Edge processing, downstream workloads (machine learning, and data visualization)~44:00 - 55:00 - How to stay relevant, and the danger of becoming too much of a Micro SpecialistThanks for listening!Resources:Blogs: https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/spectrum/your-company-and-customers-are-doubling-down-on-iot-are-you/IoT StatisticsBooks: Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play Favorite Science Fiction Character: SerenityHow to reach Jeff (LinkedIN): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyrbennett/