IoT Community: Welcome everyone to this inaugural IoT, Mastermind Podcast which is being hosted by the IoT Community.
For those of you who don’t know now nearly 8 years in operation. The IoT Community is the world’s largest, longest standing, and now last standing independent IoT Community of CXOs and IoT practitioners. That comprises over 45,000 individuals from around the world, and many corporate members that are really helping to overcome barriers to the adoption of IoT. And the way we’re doing that is, by cultivating world class thought leadership that is helping to advance the enterprise and industrial Internet of things.
We decided to build out this IoT mastermind series of interviews with leaders, movers, and shakers from across the IoT space. The idea is to really get to know the inner workings of what makes a mover and shaker from across the IoT ecosystem. We started these out back in person when we had our live IoT slam events, and so far, we’ve done dozens of such interviews, over the last few years. But as of 2023 we decided to evolve the IoT Mastermind brand into a more regular podcast and text format feature and that’s going to be published, at least in a bi-monthly capacity as part of our new IoT Gravity Newsletter and housed on the IoT practitioner content portal and socialized across our many social media feeds.
We are thrilled to have procured the expertise of Dr. Kirk Borne no less to moderate these special features, and to me, really, Kirk needs no introduction. At the heart of it he’s a Data Scientist and providing thought leadership, global speaking, content creation, mentoring, consulting in data science, ML, AI, and many other multiple disciplines. He’s given hundreds of talks worldwide and above and beyond anything else he’s also the two-time IoT Premier League winner; 2022 man of the year, and also the inaugural IoT champions league winner from last year.
So now that the housekeeping in terms of background is out of the way, let’s turn our attention to today’s discussion where we’re absolutely thrilled to have Eric Simone, who is the founder and CEO of ClearBlade joining us today.
Eric for me is one of the pioneers of edge. I call him the Godfather of Edge. He’s one of the first movers from way back when. Eric is also the chair of the Converged Edge Center of Excellence that the IoT Community operates. He has dozens of years of expertise deep, domain knowledge in the Industrial and Enterprise Edge and IoT space. We’re also proud that he sits on our IoT Community Advisory Board, and that his company ClearBlade is a long-time platinum corporate member. I think, with all that said, we’re all set. So let me go ahead and turn the stage and the floor over to you, Kirk, as you can go through this next segment with us.
Kirk Borne: Well, thank you very much, Kevin. Welcome world to the IoT Mastermind Podcast Series. I’m really excited to be here today with Eric. One thing Kevin didn’t mention in my background there is I am an Astrophysicist. I did a lot of work in gravitational astrophysics, so gravity is all about today’s topic. And one thing I love about gravity is, it’s the strongest force in the universe. It has completely the longest range of any force in the universe. It has no edge… but we’re going to talk about edge and gravity today. So, it’s all about convergence of diverse ideas is what brings us together today.
Eric Simone: It is great to be here Kirk.
Kirk Borne: Well, thanks so much, Eric. We’re going to just jump right in. I know that we we’ve discussed in advance some of the questions. I see some of your answers, and I think that we have some parallel lives that we could talk about somethings like, well, we’ll get into that. So, let’s just start. So, I have prepared questions, and I have one that Kevin and Eric haven’t seen yet from me. So, it’s going to be a surprise, and I understand that Eric is good at improv, so he’s going to be really good at answering a question that he hasn’t heard before we started. So here we go. We’re just going to start right at the very beginning.
Kirk Borne: So, Eric, I’m just going to ask you to tell us a little bit about your non-work-related background. So not get into the professional stuff yet. Just sort of like where you grew up where you live. What kind of things interested you in your early days?
Eric Simone: Sure, I grew up in Northern Chicago, Vernon Hills, Libertyville, Illinois. I’m actually back here now, believe it or not, after 38 plus years. And you know as a kid, I was interested in your normal 1980s kid things, or I think, normal nerdy kid things. I was a kid that played Dungeons and Dragons and the sort. So go back to Stranger Things I’m one of those kids also fell in love with computers at an early age. Look, you see one back there. It was my first apple, but also my high school Liberty High School was pretty unique in 1980 as a freshman they had a whole room, a computer science room with a deck PDP 11 for those of you that know what that is. And I remember vividly my Algebra class freshman year we had a segment where we had these, not punch cards, but cards that you would fill out with your number 2 pencil to do an algebraic equation, and then we walked over. We’re in a different building. We walked over to the main high school building and fed them into this machine, this deck PDP 11, and out came your Green Bar print out of the results. I was fascinated right, and access to that room, access to that capability kind of set me on my path. I knew very early what I wanted to do when I graduated high school, so that led me into new areas, and I joke about this- instead of buying a car with the money I made as a dishwasher and bus boy at the pizza place. I bought the Apple, so I didn’t have a lot of dates in high school, but those came later, so I gave up some social things to pursue my dream in computer science and attend Purdue University. That was the next step.
Kirk Borne: That’s pretty amazing. It like, I said, there’s an awful lot of things that that parallel my own high school experience, and I know you use the PDP 11, and I did a lot of coding on that PDP 11 and in college myself. And I think that that these kinds of experiences that young people have in school can really sort of set them on a path.
Eric Simone: Just an interesting side note, I get to go back to my high school where my kids go now and give a speech about my experiences to the class. And I just can’t wait for that next week.
Kirk Borne: That’s fantastic. Full circle, right? Giving back. That’s awesome. That inspiration that can come at that age is amazing. I mean my interest in astronomy started at 9 years old when I got an astronomy book full of pretty pictures. I didn’t understand it all, but I just said, I want to do this. Okay, so that’s great. That’s sort of how you got started there. Can you tell us some things before we get into all the wonderful professional things you do some things about yourself that are little known facts.
Eric Simone: A few years back in the early 2000s in Austin, Texas. I did a year of improvisational comedy. I did 3 different level classes, and then about 10 plus shows at a place called the Hideout on Congress in Austin, Texas for those of you listening from Austin you’ll know what it is, and I’ll tell you what- that experience of doing that one boy, how amazing it is to get on stage and just have to create out of nothing trying to make people laugh. But what you learn is to let go, and you learn to use what is handed to you and run with it. So, it really helps with business and leadership because you collaborate with the people around you, and you say yes instead of close your mind out to different thoughts, so I found it really helpful, really fascinating.
Eric Simone: In addition to that in the years between my 2 businesses I ran a women’s clothing store with my wife, called Girl Next Door for 10 years, and I actually got into the wholesale clothing business. Good way to light fire to a lot of money, so something you don’t know how to do, but you scratch some itches and in addition I produced a couple of short films, which with friends of mine, I found absolutely fascinating. One was a non-profit. I can go on and on about those experiences but let’s just say that the 4 years between the 2 things that I did, major things work wise, I tried a lot of different things to fill my brain with new experiences.
Kirk Borne: That’s awesome man. Well, I’ve applauded you for the improv there. I always wanted to do Stand-up not actually improv and I had it on my bucket list, and I was able to write that one off my bucket list about 3 years ago. maybe it was before Covid then 4 years ago. I was actually introducing my son in law to a start-up accelerator he was presenting his pitch for his start-up to a venture capitalist, and this event was in lower Manhattan, New York City nightclub, beautiful nightclub, in the Wall Street district. So, I got on and soon as I got on the stage, I said to people, well I always wanted to stand up in a New York City nightclub. So, it’s great thanks for giving me the stage. My wife and daughter slid under the chair saying he’s not going to do this is he?
Eric Simone: There’s nothing better than shocking people, right? I find comedians and musicians absolutely fascinating. To me those are my heroes. I look up to those folks and my son, who’s 17, is a pretty accomplished guitarist now and I just, you know I’m so happy to see him kind of grow in that way as well.
Kirk Borne: That’s awesome. Well, the one thing I love about that is that I had no fear. I had a lot of fear of public speaking when I was younger. I did my stand up. The routine was terrible hardly anybody laughed. But that’s okay. That’s totally okay with me because I just wanted to get that off my bucket list. And I did it. So okay, so it’s not about me. It’s about you today, so tell us about your professional background now leading up to current involvement. We’ll get into your current stuff in just a second sort of things that led up to your involvement with the Internet of things IoT edge, and those sorts of stuff leading up to that.
Eric Simone: I graduated Purdue in 1988 with a degree in computer science. And my first job was at IBM in a place called Rockville, Maryland. It was a massive project to rebuild the Nation’s air traffic control system Something very topical today, right? so I know probably a little too much about like what it used to be like, and maybe what it still is like. I was one of 600 new hires into this project, and I spent 2 years doing some really interesting things on IBM mainframes actually some risc 6,000 computers on rebuilding this stuff. Those 2 years taught me a lot, taught me a lot about corporate America taught me a lot about programming. Taught me a lot about myself. There were a lot of rules. I did things like wear shirts I wasn’t supposed to right. You are not supposed to wear coloured shirts and suspenders. Remember, it’s the late 80’s so don’t judge me on the suspenders. But also, I was myself at work, and that was frowned upon. I actually was taken aside and told you need to be more corporate and that just wasn’t in my DNA and actually told this person. I said, hey, look I’m going to be me and I’m going to focus on my output and I’m going to be professional. But I’m not going to change my personality to fit in your box. So, I think at an early age I kind of figured out that maybe it wasn’t for me. So, after 2 years on that project, I spent a year in Johns Hopkins Hospital. This time I was a programmer in a team of one. I got to build the patient identification system for Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and then I got to train people, probably close to my age today, on the success that I had that was a whole another experience.
Gosh! If you’re going to be this entrepreneurial, you probably should do it on your own – Eric Simone
And then, after a year of doing that, I decided I wanted to get into sales. So, I re-joined IBM in Chicago, back to my hometown, and spent 3 years as a tech sales engineer right and this is back in the days of windows and OS 2, we were battling. Little did we know that battle was over before it began. Windows had that market cornered. I can go on and on about what I think IBM should have done there, but it was a great experience. I was running around Chicago demoing client server software. I actually built product for IBM at the time that they went and built the practice on, and of all places Rochester, New York, and they made lots of money, and I got a promotion and a small raise, and again I started learning. Gosh! If you’re going to be this entrepreneurial, you probably should do it on your own so in 1994 I decided to go start a business to do services around these products. I left and landed in San Francisco in 1994. Which turned out to be a wonderful thing, what a place to land right. I remember I wrote a one-page manifesto on if anyone knows what a props is- it’s email for internal IBM. And send it to a couple of buddies of mine. In that one letter that one page letter, it said. I don’t want to look back 5 years from now and say I didn’t do it.
Moving to San Francisco, PC in the back, first generation Pentium and starting a business. Was just free right and to be in San Francisco from ‘94 to 2000, to build a company from one to 90 plus people and then to sell that to a company. That company was called Compete that I sold it to. Which is now a very big public system integrator based in St. Louis. That taught me a lot in my late twenties, early thirties about entrepreneurship and big business, and sitting on boards and all sorts of stuff. So again, that’s what brought me to Austin, and then took 4 years off. Did all those crazy things I talked about earlier, women’s clothing and the film and stuff.
Eric Simone: Then in 2007 exact friends of mine at IBM ironically asked me to do another one. And that’s when ClearBlade started its life out as we were doing big mainframe enterprise modernization projects. And I’ll stop there. We can get into the ‘aha moment’ and the shift later.
Kirk Borne: Yeah, exactly. I just want to say again about the parallel lives. I mean I think we may have had lunch together somewhere. I mean I was at Hopkins at least the University ‘85 to ’95. One of my daughters she actually works at Hopkins Hospital right now.
Eric Simone: So, you know the area Yeah?
Kirk Borne: Yeah, right outside Baltimore right now. And my wife’s from Rochester. So again, I think we must have had lunch in the same hall.
Eric Simone: Probably, we’d probably pass each other in a hallway somewhere.
Kirk Borne: I’m sure. Yeah, in another life anyway. It’s awesome to hear those stories of the places you’ve been in and the path that you were on. I really love that philosophy of 5 years from now I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t try this.
That’s a constant thing you’ll find in my history is risk taking and new experiences – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: That’s a constant thing you’ll find in my history is risk taking and new experiences for sure.
Kirk Borne: Yeah, I think even beyond risk taking you just sort of getting over a fear factor. Really sometimes it’s not even a risk so much as a fear factor that keeps us from taking those steps. But you’ve done those and that’s awesome.
So that actually sets us up already for my next question for you, which was that moving into the Internet of things as a specific direction for your new business. Oftentimes again, the business system just doesn’t start like one day you just wake up and say I’m going to start an IoT business there has to be sort of an in ‘aha moment’ what you realize this is like either the future of business or it’s going to be a significant component that are being built for business or whatever it was. What was that for you?
Eric Simone: So, you know, after being in business for 4 or 5 years, we built a decent size services firm around this IBM stuff. The world was changing right like, if you remember, back to 2009 2010 mobile is taking off obviously right. Cloud is taking off. So, you have these 2 massive shifts in what’s going on the market, and you can see it and you can feel it; having gone through that in the nineties with mainframe and client server it felt very similar right? And this actually ties into some edge computing stuff down the line. But I remember specifically we had shifted from this big mainframe stuff into more mobile development because it was the future, and we had a couple of big projects at some insurance companies. IBM purchased the company in the mobile space called Work Light, so we’d shift it over to that product. I put my very best people on a project. If you know the Liberty mutual commercials with the ostrich, they were building that out with that technology. So, I see it all the time now watching football and I know that ClearBlade had a hand in that in that app.
that started the discussion of him and I exploring this possibility of shifting everything to become a software company and after a few months of debate and research Aaron says I can build this – Eric Simone
Then we had another project at another insurance company in San Antonio, U.S.A. Using different technology company called Parse. So, for those of you that remember you know, back-end Api, there was a whole category called Mobile Back End as a service that kind of sprouted out in the 2011, 2012 and 2013. We use both and my team, who were ex IBM, but dedicated IBM folks, completely dislike this Work Light product, but they really liked what we were doing with Parse. Then the ‘aha moment’ came in April of 2013, when Parse sold to Facebook. So, Facebook buys Parse for pretty healthy multiple on their revenues. And I saw this news story and immediately called my CTO Aaron Alsbrook, who’s brilliant by the way, and we decided, okay, I’ll tell the real story. We didn’t decide right then and there but that started the discussion of him and I exploring this possibility of shifting everything to become a software company and after a few months of debate and research Aaron says I can build this and so we retooled the company right then and there and spent several months reconfiguring things as a software company and we never looked back.
Kirk Borne: That’s amazing. I think you know that necessity is the mother of invention, right? And there you were there at right place at that right time.
you needed to build something that was resilient, that could scale to millions of things and also understand legacy systems and connect and move data into those systems. – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: Well and also like when you looked at it Parse now that it was in Facebook’s hands was going to be just for social media, right? And we were looking at it from an enterprise viewpoint. Who is going to build something like this that understands big enterprise systems. So, you needed to build something that was resilient, that could scale to millions of things and also understand legacy systems and connect and move data into those systems. So that’s very much a part of our DNA today.
Kirk Borne: So that leads us right into your role as CEO at ClearBlade because if you’re talking about bringing data into something you’re really talking about data at the edge. You’re not talking about just collecting data like I remember my olden days and astronomy. I would go to a telescope on top of a mountain we would collect data, put it on magnetic tape and I fly back to my home institution and over the next period of weeks and months, you know, start analysing that.
You are talking about taking that data at the moment of data collection at that edge and do something with it. So, what excites you about that today in your role as CEO at ClearBlade?
Eric Simone: What excites me on the data side is we’re very much about freedom of movement of data. Not capturing data, not holding data, but moving it from whatever device, whatever system, into whatever database, whatever systems that are already in existence for the customer right and letting the customer have the freedom of movement of that data very much at our core.
Open everything right open Api. In this world I always say this ‘play nice with others’ so it’s if it’s something brand new, right? Some brand-new AI technology you’ve got to flow into that or if it’s something that’s been around for years if it’s COBOL from 1972. You’ve got to be able to bridge the gap between these decades of different worlds and create a very flexible piece of software that is useful to your customers and we we’ve worked very hard at that engineering over a decade to make sure that it’s flexible to make sure that it’s scalable and cost-effective and using the very latest in technology. So, we’re constantly updating that software.
My role as a leader as a CEO is to give brilliant people space to create right. – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: Back to my role like I’ve always thought this way. My role as a leader as a CEO is to give brilliant people space to create right. You go back to my history. It’s as a young person I did lots of things but I always ran into roadblocks and so I told my myself back then, if you ever get in a position of power and you work with people much smarter than yourself give them the space to create and stand back right, guide them. They’re going to present opportunities to you that are going to be way beyond your thinking. So, it’s really that team environment and it’s one of the reasons we’re so successful today. Look I’ve got engineers that started with this as interns that are still here 10 years later. That’s almost unheard of in Austin, Texas, over the last 10 years. It’s really hard to maintain that loyalty. That’s also what makes great software, in my opinion. Small, dedicated teams of very passionate individuals that are also brilliant.
Kirk Borne: That’s fantastic. Well, you were reading my mind about one of my secret questions, which is your leadership philosophy, and I think you just expressed that wonderfully. But you also sort of touched on the surface of my second secret question for you when you said you know what things should play nice together. And for me, IoT has to do with really this convergence of many different technologies. I mean at the edge, right? It’s not just a sensor and IoT sensor and it’s not just the analytics from the data. There’s analytics, there’s also automation that’s happening and there’s AI and its automation.
You can’t operate in that kind of environment unless the data is interacting with you and you with the data in real time. – Eric Simone
But also, this feeds into a different type of applications like you know, even things like virtual reality and augmented reality. People don’t realize that you can’t. You can’t operate in that kind of environment unless the data is interacting with you and you with the data in real time. If you touch something in a metaverse or a virtual reality experience, it has to respond to them. You’re in a sense, you’re generating data and using data. And so, data at the edge and specifically, IoT is all about convergence and a lot of technology is playing nice together. What kind of things do you see? You know, sort of in that converged space for all kinds? I mean you can talk about quantum computing if you want to. Whatever you think is really sort of cool about the convergence of new emerging technologies in this space where you’re working.
Eric Simone: It’s one of the things that makes IoT very complex to understand but also very fascinating is you’ve got all these different constituencies. You’ve got the data scientists in the AI; you’ve got the operational folks that are on the plant floor that are in the factories that are out in the field that have a very different view of the world. We can talk about the OT/IT convergence and the thing that we’ve always subscribed to at ClearBlade is we know what we’re great at and we’re great at software and we’re able to see patterns. Way back when Edge became a major theme of our software, because without going into too much gory detail we built software that was edge compatible in the cloud. So, we focused on building a very small efficient runtime in the cloud and then we were actually collaborating with a number of sensor and device companies. Silicon Labs is the one that comes to mind in Austin and together we are talking about what they were building from the device side up. What we were building from the cloud and in on prem system down. I remember Aaron being at a whiteboard circling a gateway and saying this is the edge. This is where we meet and we’re talking this is 2014 before anyone’s using the term edge. We actually came out and launched an edge product based on that convergence and based on let’s build this engine and so we let the sensor companies and the device companies continue to innovate. The gateway companies are going to continue to innovate, the AI companies in the Cloud and elsewhere are going to innovate. Let’s be a meaningful part of that ecosystem and make sure that we supply the software that these companies can use with these devices on these devices and feed these other systems. That’s always been in our mindset, and you know, to this day we’re doing things like a lot more AI stuff. We’re running Onyx, it’s an open AI runtime. We’ve embedded that in our tech.
But being that software provider. That’s all that we do. We are not hardware folks. We are not data scientists. we have some on staff, but we focus solely on how do you build better software runtime to enable this stuff from all different types of providers?
Kirk Borne: I think you just expressed a lot of what I feel when I joined the IoT community. It’s a lot of people doing different things but working together. Okay so you found your place in this team of people, the sensor people, the Cloud people, the software people, and you’re some of those.
Keep sticking to what you believe in and then the market will catch up. – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: One of the reasons we’re still here, you know. Trust me, I can go back you know many years where the predictions were dire. There’s 700 800 people like us and it’s really hard to define and now that’s starting to normalize out. I could talk later about what’s going on with Google and other things but having that software that’s ready for this time in this era is critical. And I’ve learned a lot about patience. I’ve learned a lot about perseverance and just one step at a time. Keep sticking to what you believe in and then the market will catch up. And I think we’re starting to see that now.
Kirk Borne: I think some of those statements you’re making come from sort of learned experiences and I always say the experience comes from… how does that go? Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. So, you’ve faced challenges and overcome them and you’re expressing some of these things You’re saying as a consequence of those learnings.
Kirk Borne: Tell me what some of the things that are still out there today that are challenges to really bringing success to all these different things?
Eric Simone: There’s conventional wisdom, right? of people that follow the same patterns and it’s always been the clouds are leading on some of this IoT stuff. But what’s been happening over the last decade is many companies are building what they call an IoT platform. I despise the word platform. It describes absolutely nothing, but it’s built with the same parts, and having been involved in this for a very long time and seeing those parts those parts work well if you’re doing very simplistic IoT type activity. But they become very unwieldy at scale, so they’re expensive. There’s too many moving parts and piecing together simplistic cloud services creates too many vulnerabilities from a security perspective, I can go on and on.
IoT is actually very simple when you’re connecting one thing over one protocol or just a dozen things or even a few 1000 things or a few 10,000 things. You start getting up into the hundreds of thousands and millions it’s absolutely ridiculously hard.
This takes dedicated engineering. But the conventional wisdom is, I can easily piece this together with these simplistic cloud services. I have a very unpopular view on some things, but I’m going to state them. You saw massive news last year when Google announced deprecation of their IoT core. In my opinion, I’m already seeing it, very smart move by Google. Google is dedicated to cloud infrastructure, AI and data science just like to be honest Microsoft and Amazon. Now again I’m not saying that that they don’t have some good components here. But the fundamental architecture is wrong. The very best engineers in the world can’t make these systems perform at scale efficiently. I think you’re going to see one of the other Major Cloud vendors get out of the game and when I say get out of the game, it doesn’t mean they’re out of IoT. It just means they’re going to swap out their service to other companies like ClearBlade. Maybe us as well. But there are software companies that do this well, that can live in that ecosystem and provide better capability for those services at scale.
And again, we’re just starting to see this. The part that holds us back is lots of bespoke systems being built by very smart people system integrators that work initially, but then require millions of dollars to maintain and scale. And it’s what’s held the industry back from reaching some of the lofty projections 50 billion devices or more. We have to have a better way, and that’s starting to reveal itself over the last couple of years.
Kirk Borne: It’s almost like the minimal viable product here. Instead of building the thing that has all the bells and whistles, all the services, all the features, all the capabilities that thing is just a Rube Goldberg device.
Eric Simone: You nailed it.
Kirk Borne: You Band-aid too many things together It just can’t be stable.
The thing that’s always going to be true is if you’re dedicated to one thing, you’re going to stay loyal to that one thing. – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: You know it’s simple. If there’s too many moving parts, no matter what system or what transaction. You know financial transaction, business etc. The thing that’s always going to be true is if you’re dedicated to one thing, you’re going to stay loyal to that one thing. The clouds they do lots of stuff. So, to cut one piece of their business out you know what it’s not profitable and you know we’re not putting much engineering into it. It’s easy for them but for ClearBlade it’s all we do right. The other analogy I use, which helps solidify this for some folks is, would you build your own database today from the ground up? No. You would pick some open-source software, or some commercial software and you would use that database for the features it has. To me, this idea of an IoT core of an IoT foundation should be the same thing. There should be multiple software vendors that supply this, and you can choose the right one for your solution and then build around that core.
Kirk Borne: Well, that’s a lot of what the IoT community is about promoting that clear vision for the community. Each of us to contribute our best component to that system that we’re building and not try to build one massive platform.
Eric Simone: You got it right.
Kirk Borne: Tell me how you’re involved with the IoT Community. I know that ClearBlade is a corporate member here. There’s some passion on your part not just to be an individual but a corporate member as well. Tell us how you are involved in the IoT Community?
Eric Simone: Oh gosh so we’re a platinum member. I met Kevin Grant back in 2018, I believe, and we were part of another community that we struggled in because it was so consumer-focused, and you know I get up there and talk about class one rail or aerospace and customers that we are working with and they’re talking about doorbells and locks. Not that that stuff isn’t interesting, but the worlds were different.
I’ve learned so much from others in different domains and then I’m fortunate to be the chair of the Converged Edge Center of Excellence. – Eric Simone
So, I was looking for a community that was broader and I got introduced by a former employee of mine at that first company Compete. I’ll name her, Denise Hatsadakas. And again, it’s good to have people that you’ve worked with that are loyal and good friends. she’s like, “look you need to meet my friend Kevin, I’m part of this IoT Community and come out to Raleigh and come to one of our events.” It started there and boy was it eye opening to just be interacting with folks that understood big business. And we’re looking at this thing more holistically right. Such a great community of folks. I’ve learned so much from others in different domains and then I’m fortunate to be the chair of the Converged Edge Center of Excellence. We talk a lot about edge computing. I’ve got a lot of folks that are really smart in that space and it’s just a fun community to be a part of and all share the growth of this industry together.
Kirk Borne: Fantastic. Well, that converge edge certainly ties right back into our earlier conversation about the convergence of multiple technologies. Right at this point of data collection I think that’s brilliant really. We’re getting close to the end here and I wanted to just ask you a couple more questions one of which is do you have any specific sort of recommendations to people resources, training courses, blogs, books, anything of that sort that you can recommend to our listeners today.
we’ve got hundreds of customers that have come to ClearBlade that are either in a paying tier or in a free tier just wiring up devices from all around the world – Eric Simone
Eric Simone: Google ClearBlade Teachable and we’ve got a bunch of free courses that we’ve created. In general, it’s a course for anyone that wants to learn IoT because what we do at ClearBlade is not proprietary. It’s JavaScript, which is the largest use language right now in the universe. So that’s our scripting language and it really teaches you the ins and outs of connecting devices of edge computing of all sorts of different aspects of IoT. I’ve talked about the cloud approach but there’s nothing wrong though with learning from AWS or Microsoft and what they’re doing because the fundamentals are correct. I think it’s more of the architecture that we can debate but they have great resources, great things to try. We at ClearBlade, offer free service so you could go to Google and sign up for ClearBlade, use the teachable to create your own IoT systems and pay nothing. That’s one of the beauties of us moving into the Google world and replacing their IoT core. Now we’ve got hundreds of customers that have come to ClearBlade that are either in a paying tier or in a free tier just wiring up devices from all around the world. It’s a great way to start.
Kirk Borne: Okay if people didn’t get that, it’s the free IoT course.
Websites, ClearBlade teachable.com and go to Google search ClearBlade and you can use them for free as well. And if you’re not searching Google, there’s this thing called Chat Gpt that we’ll leave that discussion for another day.
Eric Simone: Other technologies that are coming to focus there is not just only one. The intersection of AI and IoT is happening as we speak.
Kirk Borne: Fantastic. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation just to wrap it up. I want to ask you just one more thing which is just to offer a word of wisdom or of advice, a favourite quote or something for the listeners today. Just to close this out here, so I’ll give you the final word here.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. Meaning don’t get too enamoured with your own success. Stay humble, stay vigilant, remember who you are, and you’ll be better off and be a nicer person.
Eric Simone: So, there’s a few I’m going to go with; the Ferris Bueller from my hometown here. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it. And I think that goes back to a lot of experiencing life and doing new things. Kirk, I think you subscribe to the same mentality. Then the other one is something my dad always said to me when I was a kid, that keeps me grounded. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. Meaning don’t get too enamoured with your own success. Stay humble, stay vigilant, remember who you are, and you’ll be better off and be a nicer person. That humility, I think, is something that’s lost on some folks with some of the folks in the news today. There are more people that are like this that do amazing things that you’ve never heard of. And that’s why it’s teams that build the great companies not individuals.
Kirk Borne: That’s fantastic. Well, I said I’d give you the last word about it, but I’ll just echo what you say in a different language. I always remind people that I’m proud of my humility. So, thank you Eric for this wonderful conversation. Congratulations on all your successes and ClearBlade success. I’ll be seeing you around the IoT community.
Eric Simone: Thanks Kirk. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks Kevin and IoT Community it’s been wonderful.
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