Jan/Feb 19 - ChannelVision Magazine

The concept only became popu- lar thanks to today’s increased data volumes, advanced algorithms and improvements in computing power and storage. Back in the 1970s, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) completed street mapping projects using AI technologies, and DARPA produced intelligent personal assistants in 2003, long before Siri, Al- exa or Cortana were household names. If you just look at personal assis- tants, you can see where technology was available but not sold. It had to be productized in order to be sold. The company that did that best was prob- ably Amazon, taking Alexa a long way into both the business and household. VoIP was another technology that was invented early but lay around a lab until Vocaltec was founded as a VoIP company in 1989 by Alon Cohen. The technology was then turned into prod- ucts such as InternetPhone. There are a number of emerging technologies that garner great hype today. Technology by itself is nice, but until it is packaged as a product or ser- vice and marketed, it is just a cool toy. Most of the emerging technologies are umbrellas, such as IoT (the Internet of Things), which encompasses every- thing from embedded to connected cars to security, analytics, data storage and edge computing to network and de- vices. That explains why Bain puts the revenue for IoT in 2017 at $235 billion. Hearing keynote speakers talk about IoT over the years was painful as it is not a product. Smart lighting is a service. It evolved from intelligent light- ing control systems by adding inexpen- sive sensors and computing power. Connected cars are a product that is slowly being introduced on the road. However, the entire IoT system for connected cars to work efficiently has not been rolled out yet: sensors on roads, 4G/5G connectivity, real-time car telematics tracking, vehicle loca- tion tracking (GPS) and scheduling solutions, speed control and more. There are giants involved in this tech – Google, Uber, Hitachi, IBM, IEEE, HPE, Sierra and more – throwing re- sources at this technology to bring it to market. As a technology blockchain has quite a few use cases being tested, but no one sells “blockchain.” “While blockchain use cases are exciting to explore and research, it’s important to point out the gap between potential and tangibility of implementa- tion,” writes Flip Filipowski, Co-CEO of Fluree. In other words, the potential of blockchain technology is huge – and widely hyped – but systems powered by it (outside of cryptocurrency) have not been realized yet. Artificial Intelligence is another umbrella. It is everything from Siri and Alexa to IBM Watson and Kandy. It is chatbots and fraud detection. As Accenture explains, “AI is a constel- lation of technologies – from machine learning to natural language process- ing – that allows machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn.” It even involves Quantum Computing, since these systems need speed and com- pute power. This constellation is pow- ering drug discovery, the personaliza- tion of insurance and self-driving cars. The emerging technology needs more use cases. The current crop of emerging tech- nology is inter-dependent too. IoT, 5G, quantum computing, edge computing, AI, robotics, blockchain and virtual re- ality are all being used as components for new systems in Fintech, healthcare, smart cities and voting. It will take some time – like it did with VoIP – for a company to bring any of these technologies to market. While the technology is great, it is the application of that technology that produces the benefit. It is that application that is the product or service. Partners can buy sensors and light bulbs, but it is the monitoring and data of that smart lighting system that is the real benefit for the buyer. The lighting system is just one piece of a smart building deployment. HVAC, elevators, security and more go into the layers of systems to produce a “Smart Building” for the landlord. Keynote speakers at channel shows tell partners to develop their own IP (intellectual property), anything that they developed that is uniquely theirs. Most UCaaS providers think this means building a platform that resembles a business-in-a-box. For partners, the IP may be the selection and integration of things we see in a beneficial way for our clients. We can always layer on moni- toring, data collection and management. And wa-la a system is born! One you can market and sell! Hugh MacLeod says, “Business is the art of getting people where they need to be faster than they would without you.” o Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consulting agency. He is also author of five books and available to speak at your events. By Peter Radizeski When Emergent Matters T he term artificial intelligence originally was coined back in 1956, the executives at data analytics firm SAS remind us. Channel partners need services not technology channel management 42 Channel Vision | January - February, 2019