The IoT company behind the curtain

Greenwave Systems is sort of the BASF of Internet of Things: It doesn’t make the IoT products you buy, it makes them better. Greenwave (one of Network World’s recently named IoT Companies to Watch) provides software and services that help consumer-facing companies like Verizon deliver IoT features to their customers. IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant talked recently to Greenwave’s Chief Scientist, Jim Hunter, about how the company is empowering IoT applications and how new voice and social-media-driven capabilities will change the market. Hunter also explored the evolving IoT market and offered a candid assessment of how data ownership and security issues could hamper the IoT revolution.

Tell me how Greenwave got started and what you’ve set out to do for customers.

Greenwave started out in energy looking at some challenges that existed among companies that were vying for energy solutions. The CEO and one of the founders of the company is Martin Manniche. Martin was the chair of the Human Network at Cisco and the CTO of Linksys. When this all started in 2008, IoT was a very different animal than it is now and it looked like a good opportunity. Because of funding, because of a lot of the opportunity around the world with regards to energy, it looked like a great space to get into.

As the company began to grow we realized that we had a lot more expertise than just energy. We started to build a product that was a horizontal application for connectivity. I’ll tell you where that has evolved to in a second. We are today 250 employees. We are spread out around the world. We’ve got about 110 employees in Singapore, we’ve got 15 in Korea, we’ve got about 60 in Copenhagen and the rest are here in the United States with headquarters in Irvine, Calif.

We are something that most IoT companies are not and that is profitable. We actually have been profitable year over year for the last three years. The way that we go to market and the way we get profit is through our partners in our channel. We work not directly with consumers but with businesses that sell to consumers and those businesses have big footprints among consumers – tier-one telcos, cable operators, utilities and retail. We look at the challenges of IoT and we say -- It’s not just a software problem. We are a software company but because we come from Linksys and Motorola and Belkin and all these companies, we know hardware really well. We marry our expertise with hardware with our professional abilities with software and create great solutions for our customers.

What was the problem you were initially setting out to solve in the energy industry?

It was user capabilities; the ability for the user to be involved, the ability for the user to actually invoke change to save energy. It was around the time that demand response was really big, with a lot of the financial initiatives going on. There was $300 million being deployed across the grid and it was a big push back then. There was a lot of activity and there was a lot of interest but it didn’t seem like it was enough interest from the consumers’ perspective with a platform that could enable them to easily see, visualize and save energy.

That was the original. I’ve been in IoT for 24 years. I’ve founded two companies and sold them both to Motorola. A lot of my team is here as well so we know this space probably better than most of the players that are out there. We do a lot of writing and speaking in the community to help people become aware of some of the challenges and the opportunities that we have to think about IoT from a different perspective. Specifically, all of our thinking revolves around usability ultimately for the end consumer.

Let’s talk about the products. What does the Axon platform provide?

The biggest challenge that exists with all the different standards is the translation. You need to be able to translate into and out of languages easily. That needs to happen at an abstracted layer. Languages, whether they’re standards that are IP based, whether they’re standards that are an essential part of your radio, whatever that connectivity is for us, is abstracted away at a deeper layer.

Our software platform starts all the way down in embedded devices. By embedded devices I mean the gateway. Somewhere where you need a physical connection to bridge to a given technology, whether that physical connection needs a secure element, whether that is because you need a different radio, you need to put a ZigBee or a Z-Wave radio in place, you need Bluetooth to be hosted, something that’s different, we land in some piece of hardware in the home.

Then there’s this abstracted layer that we go down into on this hardware. We put pretty much our own little operating system for IoT on there, which is extremely modular. In the past when you put software down onto hardware, that was called firmware and you’ve got this huge issue that I’ve got to replace the firmware every time I want to upgrade. We identify the abstraction where there’s a layer of firmware and then there’s a modular layer very much like an app store.

We have basically taken that layer above the firmware that is very static once it goes in. It’s really dependent on the hardware that’s there. We build an entire modular architecture very much like an app management system. With these apps, these modules we call them, we’re able to connect and to extract all the things that that single piece of hardware has to offer through what we call the embedded core API. This entire piece that starts down in that piece of metal, that device in the home, we call that the embedded core. Then we can build modules of functionality that we or third parties write. We have an SDK and a developer kit to allow people to write rules.

The reason you would host a module there is first, if the Internet goes down things continue to work. It’s also great because in any kind of architecture there is a certain amount of processing done in different layers to take advantage of distributing the processing that becomes available. There may be times, for example, where you want a module that can collect different data points and summarize that as a new piece of information, a little bit of analytics that can run locally.

There may be a module that needs to abstract the devices. Say you get a Z-Wave and a ZigBee and a bunch of different protocols of devices that are in a home. You need to recognize that the light bulb is a light bulb is a light bulb. It doesn’t matter about the technology underneath it and the consumer doesn’t care about technology. What you do care about is that you can represent them in a consistent way.

That’s the first real opportunity that we have to actually bring these abilities, by making everything consistent; that is, these modules that communicate. We have a module that represents virtual devices, data that represents an object and then that object is Splunked or connected into whatever that deeper layer is through this abstraction layer. The light could be a fixed light, it could be a [Philips] Hue light, it could be a Z-Wave light. We really don’t care. The functionality of that light should not be affected by anything above the layer that’s specific to that light.

Give me an example of how one of your partners is using this.

In the United States, Verizon has a high-speed network called FiOS. With the FiOS network there is a router, the Quantum Gateway. We went to Verizon and said: ‘Listen, through our software we can give you better network coverage. We can give you better streaming, better working with other devices in your home and we can put Z-Wave on board and give you all kinds of features for your customers today and tomorrow. We basically won the bid for the fourth generation of broadband router for the home called Quantum and we began deploying those a year ago last November.

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There are over 3 million of those now in the field. We did hardware specifications. We did the industrial design. We did the software configurations. We got through integration testing because it’s one company providing this product. We got software and hardware integration testing in a record time, in a matter of weeks versus a matter of months as the previous generation. What we do is we build reference designs.

This is an example of the reference design that we built for them to help them maintain that product, know more about that product and offer new services on that product to their consumer. The end result of that has been a highly successful product compared to previous generations as well as the ability to engage with more technology in the home.

There are three core pieces of Axon that when we talk about IoT, we talk about the underlying network and being able to maintain a network. That’s a core for us for IoT. If you don’t have the network you’re going to have problems with everything else. For us, media and entertainment is also a core feature of IoT and quite possibly the only thing you could actually label a killer app. Third is the connected home, the automation.

Those three come together, they communicate exactly the same way. I mentioned the lightbulb is a lightbulb is a lightbulb. Through our API, if a developer knows how to turn on a light, the developer also knows how to manipulate a stream on a set-top box. It’s the exact same API whatever we touch, horizontal across everything that we do. For us it’s actually a fourth piece of this functionality that we talk about and that is mobile IoT, being able to bring remote sensors in the field that may be LTE and bring those to bear in certain solutions.

They’ve got this capability embedded in the Quantum Gateway, but what are they intending to do with it that turns into functionality for that consumer?

There’s a challenge when you’re a B2B2C company. You can empower them, you can engage them, you can partner with them but you sure can’t tell them what their schedules are and what they’re going to deploy. They have yet to activate that connected home feature. They absolutely use the networking piece of it. They absolutely use the media capabilities of this product, but the connected home is yet to be turned on by them, I think because they want to make sure they do it right. The use cases are around lifestyle, comfort, convenience, savings - anything that makes a consumer better off in their home. From our perspective, our platform easily is able to bridge.

Is it also a platform for third parties now to develop within that?

Absolutely. There are things that I can’t talk about and if you just follow some of the press releases that Verizon has said about IoT and things they’re doing in IoT, you should know we’re smack in the middle of that.

You were going to mention another.

E.ON Energy, the biggest energy provider in Europe, has a solution that they now have deployed in the U.K. called E.ON Touch. Again, it’s to make consumers more aware and make it easier for them to interact with their home. There are national commercials running on TV. That is all us. The reference designs that we’ve done have been anything from a single bridge where you have one protocol to Wi-Fi bridge, the Z-wave or the ZigBee plug-in module. It plugs right into the wall, nice and clean, to a free radio where you’ve got ZigBee, Z-Wave and Wi-Fi all in one device to a broadband router or a set-top box. We have form factor set-top boxes that are an HDMI stick. All of these are reference designed because the challenge of IoT is not just the connected home.

What’s really interesting is to understand the real value that comes on top of this, when you now understand that everything across this horizontal space of IoT can now have layers of interactivity on top of it because we have a consistent language, because we have a consistent way of interacting with objects regardless of what those objects are. We’re able to now layer on usability, for example, putting on something that is voice-driven, using something like VOX as a service; adding the ability to tie in social network, not a problem because our APIs and these data objects are, by their very nature, very semantically friendly.

When we talk about the way people communicate today and the way that they want to engage, what the industry is offering is different than what [consumers] actually maybe want. In fact they’re suffering from something called app exhaustion. There was a study done not too long ago that shows, for the most part, users are not downloading new apps as much as expecting more from the apps that they have. We’re seeing it globally. If I’m talking to my friends I should also be able to talk to my house in the same way, at least to the manager of my house.

We do demonstrations now where we’re able to tie [Amazon] Alexa in and build sentences, nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs because of the way our object model is structured. We’re also able to do the same thing with social -- turn off the outside lights or share the camera. It starts to change the relationship between people and technology because you don’t have to go to your app every time.

That’s a direction that we’re really pushing, towards usability. It’s something that a billion people understand versus a proprietary app. It’s interesting because we’re talking to companies that have 800 million customers who pay them a monthly fee for their service yet they’re scared of the social networks because they say: ‘Customers never download our apps; they’ll download the social network apps’. We’re seeing that more and more with the different generations, the different customer base that’s out there.

It’s important that a true horizontal application has the ability to bridge across all of those sectors and do so seamlessly so you really don’t care, for all stakeholders. You don’t care as an end user if you’re turning on the lights or you’re picking your TV show or you’re saying lock down the network because John has been on the Xbox too long. Those should all be similar interactions.

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Instead of thinking about the technology that I’m interacting with, start thinking about it as employees and start to raise your expectations of what you would expect of employees when you communicate with them. I need to be able to trust my employee. I need to make sure my employee does the job I hired him to do reliably and they have to be able to work well with others.

+ ALSO: How to develop applications for the Internet of Things +

If you use that analogy, IoT in general is not as successful as you think it might be or should be and you see the problem. The problem is there’s a breakdown between the consumer and the people that make the technology because they speak a different language. The opportunity of a platform like ours is to actually reduce that usability gap.

Is this something that you ultimately see corporations will use as well to bring more order to their own IoT initiatives or to have more outreach to their own consumers?

Absolutely, because it does several things. The value of IoT is there are a lot of stakeholders that can benefit and the consumer is just one of those. The manufacturer of a device can get a better outlook of how that device is being used, provided the consumer shares that information. That’s valuable. The provider then can deploy solutions that used to take months of refresh, they can do it in a matter of hours. The provider that can actually offer brand new services without owning a truck, there’s a lot of value there.

You take that into the commercial space and look at use cases that may be in boardrooms, use cases that may be around where people work, live and sleep and you get a lot of different use cases that follow the same model. I want more convenience. I want to save energy whether the energy is direct energy, whether it’s production energy, whether that’s just sanity. With any of these things, technology can help. Given the right platform it has the opportunity to make those lives better and hand-in-hand with that is efficiency. The ability to know more is really what we’re talking about and to engage with something that is understandable and something that I can grasp is really important. When I want to talk to something I should be able to talk to something. If I want to gesture at something, if I want to send a message to something, I should be able to do that without having to open a proprietary app to make that possible.

What’s a good analogy for this product, for this set of capabilities? Is it an IoT operating system?

My analogies are probably a little bit more esoteric. I think about it as the UN. We have the ability to translate into and out of languages, into and out of complexities. Ultimately, there needs to be a common piece in between that. The best analogy for me in thinking through this as I’m talking here is a company. What you’re doing is you’re making your technology a company with all the requirements that you would put on a company to be successful. It has to be able to communicate, it has to have a good culture, it has to do what it’s supposed to do and do it efficiently. I think that the technology around you is a company that should work hand in hand with yours. I wouldn’t actually break it down to a technology, to a router, an OS or anything like that. I would actually keep it at a high level and say what we’re doing is allowing you to build a company of technology.

When you hear the conversations that take place about IoT these days, what do you think people are getting wrong?

For me, the first fail that has yet to be really understood is that the moniker ‘IoT’ is actually a challenge. When you call it Internet of Things, you’re setting up an unrealistic paradigm. You’re expecting that it will be business as usual for the Internet. The Internet was built on this idea that if I’m sitting in front of a screen and I type my information in, whoever is at the other end has the right to use and disburse [that] as needed. There was a subtle agreement that we made with ourselves that that’s OK.

But the slippery slope is now it’s 24/7 strapped to our body and it’s not the same equation. Some companies are plodding along thinking it’s Internet of Things when it’s actually the Internet of You and the things that you have, that you’re at the center of. I believe that the companies that are building business models expecting they’re going to be able to take everyone’s data and generate revenue without exchanging value are the ones that are going to be surprised at the end of the day.

Parliament and congress and governments around the world are starting to become aware of the implications and that there’s some danger in the information that’s being created. Ultimately, I think the protective nature of governments or other groups are really going to push to keep the ownership of the data. We saw it a little bit in the energy sector -- who owns the data from your meter?

Ultimately it was decided that the consumer actually owns that data. I think that we see the same thing here, we just haven’t come to grips with the fact that we can’t just take it. We just can’t take that data any time we want and turn it into new information and sell it. I think there are some fails in companies that decide they’re going to do that. And alongside of that, the companies that are deciding that are for the most part the same companies that are deciding that they’re going to be software companies and service companies when they actually are hardware companies. A couple have made that transition, but there are very few that can actually successfully make that transition. Most of them are going to fail.

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That comes to the final thing. There are companies, big ones out there, that are making decisions that affect us all and those decisions are pretty big. For example, this whole Revolv thing is a great example of something that can just rip the waters with regards to how consumers [view IoT], especially if somebody was to exploit it. This idea that a large corporation [Google] can take $299 that you spent two years ago and just make them invalid, make the device that you paid for a doorstop, not because they turned off the service but because they actually bricked your device without offering a refund, without offering interaction. Companies that do things like that are creating a challenge for the rest of us because the next time you have to buy a product you’re going to consider what has happened before you make that purchase.

Jim, who is your competition?

In different vertical markets, you see different competitors. We were on Home Depot store shelves with a company that made light bulbs, a very large manufacturer, 800,000 bulbs a year. In that case we’re competitors with companies like Ayla Networks or Arrayent, companies that work with a lot of good manufacturers and help them to get a better picture of their devices.

One of our clearest competitors has been taken out by Cisco and that was Jasper. We thought Jasper was the best, the most aligned to our model and our thinking. When we talk about the media core and the media aspect of IoT, companies that provide media products, over-the-top media products or set-top boxes to the end service providers. That would be a clear competitor like a Huawei or Arris or Actiontec.

In the case of connected home, there are some companies that we actually cooperate with. We’ve got a good relationship with iControl. Z-Wave, for example, we work with, but ultimately they power other companies as well. The key when we look at this is when you think about competitors, is that really the right question? I think the bigger question is: Who are your partners? When you’ve got as much noise across the landscape as you have in IoT, the big opportunity from a business perspective is partnering. Companies need to come together to offer different parts of the solution for a seamless experience for the stakeholders in the group.

The other thing is that there is a lot of concern emerging these days about security in IoT. How do you address that?   

Before Greenwave, Martin was in Cisco through the acquisition of his company called KiSS Technology, which was the first connected DVD player. The thinking from the very beginning was that this data that’s being generated is not data at all, it’s content. Content has a very well understood management and security nature to it because if it’s content that’s generated by a studio, it’s backed up by the FBI.

The Creative Commons act identifies content and how you share it and the laws and penalties around taking that information. Because of that, services or people or processes are allowed to or entitled to access the different layers, different pieces of data. We look at it the same way. We look at security as an entitlements management system.

Then there’s the standards stuff. There’s the architecture in the core, there’s the architecture in the home. A lot of people fail in architecture in the home as soon as they decide: ‘Well, let the consumer just connect in and see their camera’. No, that’s a fail. If you allow them to connect into the home that means you’re manipulating the firewall. You have all these IP addresses that get posted online by hacking sites and the whole failure came because you didn’t have cloud protection.  

You allowed somebody to go directly to the home. From the architecture security perspective, you make sure that you use proper processes. For example, cameras in the home are streamed up to a server and whenever you look at a camera stream you look at the server just like you would look at a Netflix piece of content. You don’t go directly into a person’s DVD collection to look at their DVD. You go up to Netflix and you get the Netflix shared document that’s in a safe and controlled space.

The third thing is, of course, using HTTPS and MD5 Hash and the right layers of security as necessary throughout the system. I think that these things, good principles, good practice, good architecture, create the security boundaries that actually several companies fail at.

What should people expect from Greenwave in the coming year?

You will hear more about our engagement with companies in North America. We’re growing -- by the end of the year we will probably be at about 300 employees. You’ll see more about usability and user interaction and I think that’s key. You’ll hear about more things that we’re doing with voice. You’ll see us start to use some gesture products. You’ll start to find a lot more natural interactions with technology and we’re going to build on that.