On this episode of The IoT Unicorn podcast, learn from Lou Lutostanski, VP of IoT at Avnet, as he discusses the evolution of IoT including the need to partner on solutions, especially at scale, lessons learned from years in IoT, and the ways IoT and AI can be leveraged specifically within the healthcare industry, including with remote telemedicine.

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Pete Bernard:

Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft. And this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So, let's get started.

Pete Bernard:

This week we are talking with Lou Lutostanski, who's the vice president of IoT at Avnet. Lou’s been in the business a while and he’s going to be talking about his journey there and also reflect a little bit on the lessons learned that he sees over and over again. And how can we work together to help mitigate some of those things. We’ll also talk a little bit about how things like national emergencies like the pandemic accelerate existing trends.  This was recorded actually only about a few weeks into quarantine back in March so an interesting perspective there. So please enjoy my conversation with Lou.

Pete Bernard:

So Lou, thanks again for taking the time to join us here on the IoT Unicorn. I know that we've been working together for a few months now, I think we met last June at the NXP Connects event for the first time. And, maybe you can give us a little background as to what you're currently doing at Avnet and maybe we can chat a little bit about how you got there and what that journey looks like.

Lou Lutostanski:

Sure. Well Pete, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be on your podcast. It was last year at the NXP event that we met and we've been working together quite frequently here over the last few months. But I'm currently the VP of IoT at Avnet. We're traditionally come from a historical industrial distribution business and we realized that the next wave in technologies was all around IoT. So I'm doing that now. But to go way, way back, my formal education was in electrical engineering at Purdue University.

Pete Bernard:

I see that, yes. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile as we speak.

Lou Lutostanski:

Yeah. And I quickly discovered that my area of interest wasn't really in hardware and moles and electrons migrating across a PM junction, but more interest in software, all kinds of software. So there was a new technology in electronics when I went to school sweeping the land called microprocessors and I kind of fell in love with the 8080. So by the time I graduated college I had taken classes in computer system design, which is the equivalent of computer engineering before there was a name for it. I did a lot of embedded programming. I had written two pass assemblers for the PDP-11 processor in

C and wrote disk allocation systems for mainframe resource management. And I actually worked summers for my dad's company writing applications around accounts payable or accounts receivable, inventory management and work orders. So, I kind of loved all kinds of programming.

Pete Bernard:

Sure, sure. Cool. And yeah, it's interesting. I've had some guests on here, it's okay to refer to IoT as embedded systems because that's what we used to call it. But now it sounds a lot cooler. But it sounds like you had a lot of hands on experience with that through your career. So you ended up at Avnet, it says 2013, was that when you started at Avnet?

Lou Lutostanski:

Actually, I ended up at Avnet in earlier than that. 1987.

Pete Bernard:

Holy mackerel.

Lou Lutostanski:

Yeah. I came off a brief stint at IBM out of college went to work for my dad's company. He had a company that did industrial equipment and so I sold for him for a while before I moved back to Austin, Texas, where I had started with IBM. Love took me there, I married a girl from there, and got involved in the wonderful world of distribution. So, my first job was with Hallmark Electronics and I was a sales manager, or actually a system sales manager selling storage terminals, PCs, monitors, motors, and printers. And I did that job for about a year before I figured out all the action in industrial distribution was in the semiconductor world. So, I converted over to become one of the first field applications engineers in distribution for the Motorola line. And later on, I moved up to sales management in Dallas and moved back to Austin as branch manager. Around that time Avnet bought us. So that's where I became a member of the Avnet family, even though I started in '87, 1993 was when the acquisition happened.

Pete Bernard:

Wow, okay. You put your time in there. That's good.

Lou Lutostanski:

I did. And I floated through the ranks of VP area director until 2000 and that's when I went on my, what I'll refer to as a sabbatical. So I left for Motorola and after serving as a VP of global sales for both the HP account and later the Motorola account, I became the VP of sales and marketing for the Americas as we transitioned to Freescale. So my sabbatical there lasted 12 years and I returned to Avnet seven years ago running sales for the Americas.

Pete Bernard:

Wow. So you've been involved in sort of industrial, commercial, computer things kind of forever. You followed your, that's a kind of a red thread, they call it, through your career. That's pretty awesome. Well, it's good. It's good. It's good to have that, I think sometimes people take wildly different right and left turns to sort of find their passion and other folks just know, they have an internal compass that sort

of just kind of keeps pointing them in the right direction, which is pretty awesome too, but that's cool. Good stuff. I was down in Austin, let's see, I was visiting with NXP, I think I told you this story, and they took me to a place called Chuy's.

Lou Lutostanski:

Absolutely.

Pete Bernard:

That was delicious. And it had hubcaps on the ceiling, and it was kind of one of the local, I guess, awesome restaurants that you have in Austin. So that was pretty good.

Lou Lutostanski:

You got your chips and queso out of a back of a classic car's trunk, I imagine.

Pete Bernard:

That's right. Yes, exactly. Yes. And the Elvis chicken, I think it was what I had, but good stuff. All right, I'm getting hungry. It's around lunchtime, by the way, when we're recording this, I probably shouldn't talk about Chuy's restaurant. Anyway, so you've been in the business a while. You've seen the evolution, like I said, we used to call it embedded systems, now it's called IoT and stuff. Maybe you can share with us what have we all learned as an ecosystem, as a community around this space over the years. What are some of the lessons learned that you've seen sort of repeated over and over again?

Lou Lutostanski:

Yep. So it was a funny story. I was in the field selling for Avnet, running the sales organization in the Americas. And I started hearing about IoT and over time that's all everybody wanted to talk about. So I thought originally thought IoT was kind of a marketing hype thing. So, when they created the position here at Avnet, I lobbied for one of my marketing friends from Freescale to come over and join and unfortunately he didn't get the job, but a year later it was available again. And in that year I grew and understood it was really an incredible opportunity to transform businesses through the application of IoT. So, three years ago I joined this mission here at Avnet. And the lessons I learned in IoT were many. And I've kind of distilled them down to the 10 main issues.

Lou Lutostanski:

So it was funny the first time, I got this job around March, three years ago and I was a keynote speaker at a IoT World in Santa Clara a couple of months later. And my first thought was kind of being intimidated on what am I going to talk to all these people about? And when I got there, I realized IoT was really in its infancy and there were a whole lot of people there trying to figure out really what IoT was. Even though they've been working on it for a year or two or decades when it was called-

Pete Bernard:

For a decade or two, yeah exactly.

Lou Lutostanski:

But the first lesson that I learned is that nobody knew enough about IoT, but they were certain, whatever it was they contributed to, it was the most important, and was the most margin.

Lou Lutostanski:

I tell the story about the blind men and the elephant going through and feeling various parts of the elephant and all coming out and having a violent discussion over what exactly an elephant was. And it's the fact that no one saw the entire elephant holistically. None of them were wrong, but none of them saw the thing holistically. And I think that's where IoT was several years ago. I also learned very early on lesson number two, that from Microsoft, it took 10 to 20 companies to do an IoT implementation, which is why very few IoT implementations were happening. It's just a lot of work to try to get 10 people or five people to agree on anything, much less figure out how you're going to support a customer over long-term and where are the liabilities for service and warranties are going to lay after the original installation. So that was another thing I learned. I also learned that IoT is really about, it's a technology enabler for business transformation. And what I saw when I got here was that people were very focused on the implementation without even understanding why. So, I learned very long that that business case has to far precede the actual implementation because, there's no way you can succeed understanding technology but not understanding why.

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, totally. We see that a lot now and a big part of our process with customers is to start with the business leadership and talk about business outcomes and objectives and then let's get clear on what those are. And then the technology will follow. There's no shortage of tech, but if you don't have a North Star of a business outcome that you're shooting for, then you're probably just going to have a series of science experiments. Right?

Lou Lutostanski:

Exactly Pete, exactly. I think another thing I learned was that the true value of business transformation goes beyond just asset monitoring. And it must have a component of AI applied to the data that you're getting. And I think the initial reaction is, "Okay, I can monitor that machine and I don't have to have somebody stop by and check it." But that's really not what it's about. It's about taking information off the machine on a continuous basis and analyzing that and trying to predict things that are going to put you in front of the competition or things that are going to lower your costs or things that are going to please your customers, more than anything else. So much more than just simple machine monitoring, or asset monitoring.

Pete Bernard:

So, just kind of little sidebar, we're recording this podcast here in late March, and we're living in some extraordinary times as you know. And we've talked about that. I just saw a section on something last night on Rachel Maddow, is a company that had web connected thermometers and they were looking at their data, so you're talking about just kind of analyzing data, but they were looking at the trend data from their thermometers. Looking at it across the United States, and they believe that they're able to get a few weeks’ worth head start on where certain fevers and other higher temperatures are starting to occur. And I thought that was really an interesting way of thinking about, we think about sometimes

looking at data for preventing motor burnout and other kind of industrial things, but also the ability to predict certain trends based on kind of the analysis of that data could be pretty consequential, for sure.

Lou Lutostanski:

They say Pete, that there are billions of people that are confined to their homes right now. And the thing about IoT is if you scale it beyond a small sample of a thousand, if you really had sensors on billions of people, it's unrealistic to think you're going to send some poor guy a spreadsheet and try to ask him what the trends are globally. That's where AI comes into play and not being able to monitor individuals, but trends across geographies over time, and trying to predict where the next outbreaks are going to be and how long the outbreaks are going to last based on the temperature of all your subjects out there. So I think scaling IoT really requires AI to get the insights to the golden nuggets of what we're looking for.

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, definitely, yeah. They go hand in hand, the big data analysis and, IoT is there to provide a lot of that real time data across all kinds of geographies and transports and things. And then there's the action taken on the data that they really need the hyperscaler cloud and AI capabilities to do that. So, for sure.

Lou Lutostanski:

Exactly. I think another one of my learnings was I learned that customers will not live with 95% of the solution. If you give a customer 95% of the solution and you ask them to go figure out the other 5% it will never get done. So you've got to be able to walk the customer through and make it very, very easy, because this is very complex with all kinds of visible insight together. And there's very few people that understand all of it or even large pieces of it. So it's required to give a 100% of the solution to the customers.

Pete Bernard:

They say the last 10% of a project takes 90% of the effort, so-

Lou Lutostanski:

Exactly. And that's where all the value is added as well, right Pete?

Pete Bernard:

Sure, sure.

Lou Lutostanski:

Along a similar line, I've learned that there's no silver bullets for 100% repeatable solutions. They all require some modifications, and some are in hardware, some are in software, some are in AI, some are wireless infrastructure. And it goes back to what you just said. That last 10% is where all the hard work's done. But that's the thing that makes it fit specifically for the customer's application, for their own application. I think another thing that I learned is that without complete knowledge and capabilities of the IoT stack, including a robust security capability, an organization can never lead in IoT. They could participate but they couldn't lead. So I think that's very, very important. And I think few organizations possess that capability, which I think is another reason, if everybody had that capability, I think there'd be more IoT implementations out there.

Pete Bernard:

That's an interesting point. I was reading about McDonald's did an acquisition of a company in Israel and I think Walmart obviously has lots of technical capabilities. So, a lot of these bigger companies are building in-house technology capabilities. They're becoming software, and in some cases, hardware companies in addition to being restaurants or retailers or whatever. We talk also about Tesla being able to, the number of software engineers they have is really far and above any other automaker. So I think a lot of the technology companies, or companies I should say, that are really taking advantage of some of these C changes that are happening in digital transformation, are companies that are empowering themselves with more capabilities around technology. Whether those are in-house software capabilities or hardware capabilities. But like you said, you can't really take full advantage of the tech if you're a sort of a passive bystander.

Lou Lutostanski:

If you take somebody like Tesla, their software is core to their product. They are really a software product that has some metal wrapped around it. If you go to somebody like a McDonald's or other large corporations that have a lot of resources, their competitive advantage is their ability to predict what's going to happen. And doing that through IoT with a team that understands a lot of the pieces and bringing on other people to do parts of it, I think is good. But for the vast majority of the companies, in terms of numbers, they just don't have the resources to put all of it together or even understand most of it. And I think that's the big spot where IoT can shine in the future when it's allowed to scale.

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Lou Lutostanski:

At our company, I think one of our other lessons are, we learned that one company with all the capability to do end-to-end can never scale. The world is so vast, that just the resources within one organization, even if he can do it well for one, for five, for 10, when you talk about hundreds of thousands, it's not practical.

Pete Bernard:

Right, right. And that's a big challenge, right? We had someone on recently, talking about the heterogeneity of the ecosystem in IoT, relative to the PC. And this is a transformation that Microsoft's been going through, is how do we work with a broad range of commercial customers and a very broad ecosystem of Silicon partners, hardware manufacturers, system integrators. Like you said, it's kind of a team sport, I'd heard that before too. And in order to scale everyone needs to be able to glue pieces together essentially, or reuse platforms and other elements from different parts of the ecosystem to get to the outcomes they want to get to. So, I think it's part of it's are there the right platforms and tools out there and protocols, but also it's part education too. I think people just learning more about how they can make that connection to the cloud or add AI capabilities to their systems or get devices that they know will work with other devices. So it's a definitely a big problem to solve.

Lou Lutostanski:

Again, I learned that determining how to put together an infrastructure for people with hardware, IP, and services together, is the only hope of achieving scalability in the IoT market. So that's something that we spent a lot of time on.

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, we call it repeatable solutions. I think that's not a unique term. We try to help customers understand, there's a solutions out there for all kinds of business outcomes and being able to implement those without having to reinvent the wheel or pour sand in one end and the solution comes out the others kind of required because otherwise the ROI just gets blown up, and you can't start from scratch and invent everything from scratch and still get a good return on investment. So, I'm sure-

Lou Lutostanski:

It's really about two major things. One is scalability and one's time to market. Customers lose interest after a couple of years, right?

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, exactly.

Lou Lutostanski:

I do think speaking of the time to market and the losing interest, I think another big, big learning that I had is the action short term in IoT is going to be brownfield. So how do you take equipment that's been out there for a long time and retrofit it to get the information to the cloud and apply AI to provide immediate services to customers?

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, that's a big thing. We had talked about with Azure Sphere, the work we did with Starbucks and with you guys on outfitting those existing espresso machines. But I've also seen really interesting implementations where, by measuring things like current draw on motors, you can actually use that kind of dumb data and AI and anomaly detection algorithms on that current draw data to actually discern preventive maintenance and other things in the cloud, which is kind of fascinating. Real brownfield stuff where that device was not designed at all to be cloud connected but you're able to attach something to it to do some basic data monitoring and then use the cloud and some big data analytics to come to some conclusions.

Lou Lutostanski:

Exactly. By the way, Pete, those are the high level learnings I learn every day. I'm always smarter, two o'clock in the afternoon than I was at nine o'clock in the morning, every day.

Pete Bernard:

I feel like I get dumber as the day goes on. I don't know. I'm more of a morning person. I feel like I'm totally on my game at like 10:30 and then by four o'clock I'm just kind of listening at that point. I don't know what's going on, but that's just me. But I get the sentiment. Yes, of course. It's a daily learning.

Actually speaking of that, one of the things that I was reading about yesterday was, and we had mentioned kind of the extraordinary times that we're in, and there's an author named Yuval Harari and he's written some excellent books. One of the interesting things he said was that in emergency situations emergencies basically fast-forward historical processes.

Pete Bernard:

I think before we started recording actually we were talking about Teams and we're on Teams right now and recording. We're all using Teams a lot now on a daily basis. You were talking about how quickly Avnet has now sort of learned to use Teams, because we're in a situation right now where we have to, and so things that maybe would have taken six months, a year, or years, because of an emergency situation, they're being fast forwarded and they're becoming daily habits now. Whether that's online learning or working remotely. So it'd be interesting to see when the dust settles on this whole thing, which hopefully will be soon, what other processes have been fast forwarded that were sort of already in the pipeline, especially in the technology space.

Lou Lutostanski:

I would say you're 100% right. And I would think the leader in that category would be remote telemedicine. You see all the time, every night on the news, that doctors don't want to go in and visit patients and patients don't want to go to places where sick people congregate. Telemedicine was already something that was in development and I'm sure it's being accelerated right now to meet the current needs of the global marketplace. So I'd be very surprised if those programs hadn't been accelerated and people buying those types of products and demanding those kind of solutions yesterday aren't really driving a demand for telemedicine.

Pete Bernard:

For sure. I think that's a big one. Online learning, remote learning, remote work, maybe even take out on restaurants might get a little better. Might become standard fare. Actually one of the interesting things I've been using more, and I don't venture out much, but when I do venture out, I have a Fitbit Versa 2 that I've been wearing and it has a cool little wallet on there. And so I have my Amex card programmed in there and I can pay for things just by sort of leaning my wrist toward the payment instruments so I don't have to give anyone a card or get the card back and all this other stuff. So contactless payments I think is another thing that people will start to just kind of by necessity just start using much more. And I think that'll be another big, big thing that kind of sticks around after a while. But it'll be interesting to see what habits are we building now that will stick with us for a long time to come. Hopefully-

Lou Lutostanski:

Not to make this a Fitbit commercial but I have my Versa 2 on as well. And I absolutely love it, for all the same reasons.

Pete Bernard:

#Versa 2, we should get a sponsorship on them. Well the other thing, I was going back to that thermometer, that web connected thermometer example was fascinating data and you can look it up. Thinking about sort of the measured self, right? And that is kind of a what Fitbit and a bunch of other

companies are doing. So I'm getting this data about myself, about my sleep patterns and my resting heart rate and whatever and all that stuff and people will be, I think, a little more self-aware about kind of listening to their health and understanding where they're at and if there's things that they can wear, other things they can do to sort of be more self-aware about their health and trends in their health. That might be another thing that sticks around after all this too, which would be good, I think. I think people need to be self-aware about their health.

Lou Lutostanski:

Absolutely.

Pete Bernard:

I think we have a lot of work to do, a lot of work ahead of us to, like you said, help people stitch things together to get these repeatable solutions out there to get time to market. But also I think just kind of keeping our ears open as to how the world's changing around us and how we can help make sure that is a productive for everybody and healthy for everybody. So lots of work to do. Like you said, you've been in the business for a while. I think we still got another few decades of work ahead of us.

Lou Lutostanski:

I think it's just getting started. I think we're in for a 30-year run on IoT and all the things it can do. It's funny, people ask me all the time "Is it hype?" And I'm so excited every day about the stuff that we work on and it's not hype, but I understand why people think it is because we've been talking about it forever and the conditions aren't right yet for it to scale. And I think people bringing together ecosystems on a limited number of platforms will add to that scalability. And I would imagine five years from now it's going to be commonplace and 10 years from now people will forget when you couldn't get information off of any device.

Pete Bernard:

Right. Yeah, exactly. I think it's sort of extraordinary these days when you can show a system like that in process and how it can drive some great business outcomes. I think, like you said, 10 years from now it will not be extraordinary. It will be sort of required to be competitive out there and to just be able to use that data and be able to just make assumptions that data will be flowing and you'll be able to take actions on it. It's exciting. It's exciting stuff. Any kind of closing thoughts or words of wisdom, things we should squeeze into this podcast?

Lou Lutostanski:

I just think we're on a mission to bring people together and take the best that they have, like Microsoft’s Azure IoT suite and build on that. Allow people easy building blocks and interfaces to be able to how these implementations come together with the predefined rules. And I think until somebody orchestrates an ecosystem around the platform or maybe a couple people do, as you've had with iOS and an Android in the B2C space, I just don't think you're going to have the scalability that's going to make all of us happy. We're trying to make a living in this industry. I think picking key partners is very, very crucial to making this all work.

Pete Bernard:

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, I definitely share your perspective on that one. Lou, thanks again for taking the time with us. Really appreciate it and stay safe.

Lou Lutostanski:

Will do Pete, thank you.

Pete Bernard:

All right, take care.

Lou Lutostanski:

Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Pete Bernard:

This is Pete Bernard. You've been listening to the IoT Unicorn. Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next pod.

In this episode of the IoT Unicorn Podcast, Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer & VP of Healthcare, Worldwide Commercial Business, from Microsoft, shares his experience navigating through today’s pandemic and the digital transformation of healthcare.

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00:00 Pete: Okay, well, we're here with Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft. David, really appreciate your time. We have a lot of things to talk about today, we're gonna try to squeeze it into the allotted time period, but thanks again for joining us.

00:14 Dr. David Rhew: Thanks, Pete, it's a real pleasure to be here.

00:16 Pete: Good, good. Yeah, and full transparency, something happened in the first conversation I had with David where it didn't record properly, so we're actually going through this one again. So it should be nice and well-practiced. So live and die by Teams, I guess. But anyway, David, so we, as I mentioned, chatted a couple times now, and you're actually fairly new to Microsoft. I think before we get into a lot of really interesting topics I think listeners wanna hear about around digital transformation of healthcare and what's going on with COVID-19 and Microsoft, maybe you can give us a little run-up to how did you end up here at Microsoft, and you've been here almost exactly a year now, so you can give us a little bit of background on yourself and your journey to Microsoft.

01:07 DR: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm a physician, I'm a healthcare researcher, and also a technologist. And really the combination of those three have evolved rather organically throughout my career. It's been remarkable how those three have converged to allow us to be able to start thinking about how healthcare can be used to improve health outcomes, or I should say how technology can be used to improve health outcomes, and really excited to be a part of that program here at Microsoft as we start launching technologies, predominantly cloud-based solutions with artificial intelligence to drive that.

01:45 DR: My story, I guess, begins when I was in college. I was thinking quite a bit about different types of ways that I could help people, and I guess my initial thought was helping people would probably be best served if I went to medical school, so did a curriculum, a pre-medical curriculum. And as part of that program, I think I gained a lot of the basic skills needed to be a doctor, but one of the things that I did also was I was curious about other types of activities and other types of skills. Technology was always a fascination. This was around... In the 1980s, and video games were pretty popular then. These are the arcade video games, not the ones that we typically use...

02:28 Pete: Yeah, the good ones.

02:29 DR: The classics, the Space Invaders, the Pac-Man, Mario, and I was fascinated by that. I just felt, what an incredible way for us to be able to start thinking about how we can not only spend our time, but also how we could use technology to create new experiences. And I started doing a lot of programming, in fact, I became a computer science major as well as a cellular and molecular biologist. And then I went to med school, and in med school there's not a whole lot of opportunity to use computers apart from a word processor, so I felt in many ways that that part of my career journey was put on hold. And it was on hold for a while because what I ended up doing is after I graduated from medical school, I went down a path of exploration in healthcare, specifically looking at ways that we could reduce variation and improve access to care and improve the overall quality of care. And it was done predominantly through what we referred to as guidelines. Turns out that if you were to go to a doctor in... Probably your local doctor, and you were to go to maybe survey the same type of... Ask another doctor across the country or even the globe how they would treat the same type of condition, you'll get a lot of different responses.

03:54 DR: And in fact, when they've done analyses, they've found that variation in care is pretty dramatic, even for things that have been proven to be beneficial. And what we learned in some of the investigations that I was a part of and others have been actively looking at is that a lot of that has to do with just the fact that we don't have mechanisms to remind clinicians to provide that right information at the right time. And I started building basically programs that would provide that right information at the right time. It was very manual. In many cases we had nurses and other clinicians run around the hospital, identifying patients, giving pieces of paper to doctors, saying, "Oh, by the way, your patient fulfils low-risk criteria, you could switch him from an IV antibiotic to an oral antibiotic and send them home," when traditionally, they might have stayed for another few days or maybe even longer. And we ran these programs, we found that it was highly effective. And not only did it reduce the length of stay and reduce total cost, but when we followed up with these patients, they actually did quite well and they were quite satisfied, so... The less time you can spend in a hospital's always good.

05:05 Pete: Yeah, for sure.

05:06 DR: People were having a good time just finding that, hey, you know what, this is something that provided value to just the patient, the health system. And that really got me thinking about how do I start scaling this, because you can't have a person run around the hospital with every piece of information. It really has to be automated. So working with some colleagues, we put together some software that ultimately became a company, and this company got acquired by Cerner, which is a large healthcare information technology company, and next thing I know, I'm in the middle of implementing EHRs across the country and even the globe. And so seeing patients half the time and working with technology was my life work for quite a bit of the early part of my career. And I learned a lot, I learned a lot about how technology is an enabler. It really helps us to be able to achieve some of the goals. But it was really predominantly focused on the inpatient and in-clinic experience. And so I started thinking about, what about outside of the hospital? Could we actually start engaging patients and family members in a more effective manner than simply just sending them a text reminder or giving them access to the patient portal?

06:30 DR: And so what we started thinking about as an industry was this whole category called digital health and connected care. And there were many consumer companies that were looking to get into the space, Apple would be a good one, but also Samsung. And I had an opportunity to talk to folks at Samsung, shared a bit about what I was interested, in terms of where I wanted to take technology, and they shared a similar vision, so it was kind of a great match, and they asked me to be their chief medical officer. For six years I was Chief Medical Officer at Samsung. And during those time periods of working at Cerner and the electronic health world and also working at Samsung I kinda got a chance to experience both ends of the spectrum in terms of what clinicians experience and what patients do. And that bridge was something that I was looking to find a way to make it more seamless, more ubiquitous, which really brought me to Microsoft because of the fact that with its enterprise cloud infrastructure ability for us to be able to have those communications, data communicating also now more freely within the electronic health records space into using HO7 fire standards into a common platform. We could do a lot more than what we were currently doing, and that really is the opportunity for all of us to start thinking about how technology can help us achieve some of the outcomes.

07:51 Pete: Yeah, it's fascinating. I think it's... You can imagine healthcare is one of the great data science challenges we have, there's such a massive amount of information and knowledge base, and like you were saying, the knowledge and the way people are treated and the treatment plans kind of vary, and having access to all of the knowledge collectively and having all the data analyzed. I'm a big Fitbit Versa fan myself, and the measure itself is a pretty key part of my regimen. And especially in people that are not doing too well being able to have all of that data accessible from edge devices and being able to basically get to the right outcomes and treatment plans is pretty, pretty critical stuff. You can't think of too many more purpose-driven business outcomes than that. So that's amazing. It must be... And you're... I know when I joined Microsoft, the first two years, people said it takes two years to find the bathroom at Microsoft, 'cause it... There's so much going on.

08:54 Pete: So you're a year into it, and of course, and we'll talk about the obvious elephant in the room here, you've been in the middle of helping us steer through this pandemic, probably halfway through your first year. So that must have been quite a challenge to sort of come on board and then sort of this all happened, right? Can you give us a little insight as to what was that like, how did that sort of ramp up for you?

09:22 DR: Yeah when I joined Microsoft, I guess there are two chapters or two parts to my time at Microsoft. The first six months were essentially spent working very closely with our partners, our clients, implementing the technologies, the cloud-based technologies to help them achieve some of their business goals, and then when COVID hit and it really started in... For us in January, I know December was probably one of the first times we started hearing about this in China, but we have colleagues, we have Microsoft folks that work in China, and we were very concerned about their health and what was going on. And then when it continued to spread throughout the country and then to other parts of South East Asia, we realized that this was something that was gonna require a pretty coordinated effort within Microsoft around this. Turns out that my background as a physician is in infectious disease. I was actually an AIDS physician during the time, during the AIDS epidemic, and I was seeing patients that were fairly young, healthy individuals that would deteriorate in a rather short time period, and then succumb to the illness. Today there are so many parallels, you're seeing this affect so many young, as well as older individuals, we're seeing a need for public health and also a need for us to be able to accelerate the time to research to vaccine and treatments.

11:00 DR: We never developed a vaccine for AIDS, but we did come up with a treatment that in many ways has allowed us to be able to better control that. And so with that as sort of a backdrop, I was asked to serve as the international coordinator for Microsoft's COVID-19 response, and that was an incredible opportunity to understand really all the different groups within Microsoft that touch the different countries that interface with the governments and the non-government agencies, and what we as a large technology company can do to lean in. That involves providing software cloud services, AI skills and resources, and in many ways, that was our first response to how we could address the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, or I should say when the infections started appearing in the States, particularly in the Kirkland area, near Seattle, that really hit home for many of us in the Microsoft family, because that's where our offices are, our main headquarters are. So yeah. You remember very well.

12:08 DR: And that, during that time, we were recognizing that we needed to do more than just simply provide our technologies, we needed to innovate, we needed to solve some of these problems. So in working with organizations like Providence Health System, we customized our chatbots and made them COVID-19 specific screening and triage tools. We tied it directly to portals that could allow for virtual care assessments, and then tied it into lab testing, we built out mechanisms to provide food services and other types of critical supplies to people that were quarantined at home. We started investigating how we could work through collaboratives to better enable exchange of data and promote the development of a variety of different types of solutions, or I should say ways for us to be able to procure critical supplies such as personal protective equipment.

13:05 DR: And so that process was an extraordinary time. We partnered with companies like GE Healthcare to create virtual ICUs to enable multiple patients to be managed by a single trained clinician. And we started spending a lot of time thinking about treatment. We were thinking about how AI and a variety of other tools can be used to help accelerate the pace of discovery both from a scientific R&D perspective as well as clinical trial recruitment. And so, this has been an incredible journey for us.

13:36 Pete: Yeah, I think, I was looking at the recent Inspire conference and some of the talks there going on and Satya was saying that we've sort of advanced... In two months, we sort of advanced about two years worth of innovation in the time of great crisis. Throughout history, it's sort of a potential real accelerant for a lot of historic inevitables, so we were on the certain trajectory. A separate topic, but online learning and other things, that was sort of a thing that was nascent to be experimented with, and then all of a sudden, it was sort of like, we're all gonna do it now at the same time.

14:14 DR: Yup.

14:14 Pete: Same with a lot of the, obviously, remote collaboration that we're doing. So I can imagine in the healthcare space, you had been working for a long time on the whole digital transformation of healthcare. And now because of the pandemic, we've had to really accelerate a lot of that stuff and really bring to bear a lot of the technologies we were kind of trying out and really sort of making them much more mainstream a lot more quickly. And I know before this particular chat, I was mentioning to you about where... We've been involved recently in how do we take some of the techniques we've done for retail in terms of supply chain management in a typical store, and how do we apply that to healthcare facilities so they can understand their supply of PPE and other things and how can we automate that using a lot of the edge AI as well as cloud capabilities that we would have in a typical grocery store.

15:09 Pete: And so, we're seeing all of this stuff just sort of happen, and obviously, because of the pandemic, there's obviously an underlying urgency that we need to cooperate and innovate as fast as possible. So that must be... I can imagine, I always ask people when they say like, "You come in the morning, you have a cup of coffee. And then what happens?" I can imagine in your job, you have a cup of coffee and then there's probably about 2000 emails in your inbox.

15:38 DR: A lot of times these emails are things that have a direct relevance to what we're seeing and living today. So for instance, much of what I've been focusing on recently have been things that just return to work and return to school. These are topics that we know are of high importance to many individuals, technology can play an important role. But in the setting of a pandemic, almost everything has to be done with health and public safety and mechanisms that will allow us to be able to suppress and/or make sure that the infection doesn't get out of control. So there's just an interesting... I guess, a collision course between how healthcare has now touched every single vertical, whether it's retail like you're describing, whether it's manufacturing.

16:28 Pete: Yeah, hospitality.

16:29 DR: And now education, hospitality. And it's been, I think, a learning experience for all of us 'cause we're now starting to realize that this pandemic isn't gonna go away simply by providing some of the existing technology. We're gonna have to sort of out-think it, build the strategies to get faster delivery of or the maturation of our R&D so we learn what works. A great example would be convalescent plasma. We knew that this work for other types of conditions, but to enable this to be something that we could use more widely, there are two factors, and it all boiled down to one, really. We need more convalescent plasma. We need more donors. More donors for the studies and more donors for the actual... I guess, the convalescent plasma that could potentially be delivered and transfused into patients. And that has gotten us refocused on what can technology do to help clinical trial recruitment or donor recruitment.

17:39 DR: It's funny, because I don't think that in the past, if I would have thought, what is it that will accelerate the research and the ability, that I would have landed on that being sort of one of the critical pieces, but it is. And that's one of the things that we're starting to recognize that sometimes, we're surprised in what is actually the critical piece.

18:00 Pete: Yeah. And one of the other interesting by-products, I think, of this, and I know when we sit down at dinner every night with my teenage kids, we talk about the news of the day and this is inevitably is a topic. And at least one of the things I think that's been, I guess, positive out of this is we're not only innovating like crazy to out-think this, as you said, but we're also becoming a lot more educated around data science. And people are now able to talk about numbers and analyze data and talk about our values and really be a lot more analytical in understanding data. And I think that's just good, that's just good for everything moving forward. And again, sort of accelerating that trend where now, everyone has to become pretty fluent in understanding statistics and data and be able to talk about it in a rational way, regardless of whether you're a high school student or a technology professional. So I think it'll be fascinating to see down the road how much of the accelerations stick, some of the new habits and practices and skills that we're building and things that we're doing together stick as more permanent. So yeah, it's fascinating.

19:18 DR: Yeah, absolutely.

19:19 Pete: I saw Bill Gates on CNN last night. It's always great to see Bill G., as we like to call him around here, talking about vaccines, hot topic, and I think it's going to be... It's gonna become kind of the next chapter of the story at some point as we get into that phase. And there's a couple of factors there, obviously, there is the development and the new techniques to develop vaccines that are being pioneered right now. Obviously then the logistics of manufacture and distribution, right? Which is gonna be interesting. And I think the last time we talked, when we didn't record, but it was fascinating, 'cause you were talking about the paradox of supply and demand with vaccines, right? Like how to make sure we make enough. Make sure there's enough demand to take the vaccine, but also make sure we have enough supply to get it out.

20:14 DR: Well, one of the strange things that we've realized is that, and it ties into what your earlier statement around how we're becoming far more educated, but at the same time, we're also recognizing that not everyone believes the facts. And because of that, education and our ability for us to engage people to help them understand their concerns and to be able to then create greater awareness programs, adoption programs is so critical. So with regards to vaccines, it's very possible that we may have folks that need it that will refuse it. And what we wanna do is we wanna get ahead of that, we know that there's certain groups that this would be of highest importance, these are age groups, demographics such as ethnicity, comorbidities, those are individuals for whom this should be in all likelihood, be prioritized first. Just given the fact that they're the ones who actually probably will need it the most to prevent the biggest... To have the biggest impact, which is death. At the same time they may be the ones least likely to respond to it.

21:24 DR: So we're kind of like in this... It's always a double-edged sword. We're kinda recognizing who needs it, but they may not want it, they may not respond to it, we may need to actually do a second booster, how do we actually do proper and fair allocation of this? Many of these things, hopefully, it'll be a problem that we can address soon because to have a vaccine would be so important, but again, with every step along the way, we're realizing that there's some challenges.

21:56 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I recall actually, when I was very young, we had the swine flu vaccines and we had to... I don't know how old I was, but I do remember going with my family and a big, big crowd, I don't know, it was big gymnasiums or something like that, and there was a huge long line. And we all lined up for our swine flu vaccines in the arm. And yeah, I mean, there's obviously a double-edged sword of the information distribution, which is fantastic, and everyone has the opportunity to be informed; at the same time with social media and other things, people have the opportunity to be misinformed, and so there's a lot of challenges out there. I'd heard some statistic, something like the seasonal flu vaccine only has about an uptake of about in the 40% range. Even though it's pretty well established that that is a really good way to prevent the flu and we've all had the flu. It's pretty nasty.

22:48 Pete: And for some people it can be deadly. So I think that'll be another thing is like how do we use technology to help people, like you said, kind of understand what's gonna be healthy for them and also help them feel comfortable taking that step forward to invest in their health, which ultimately is all of our healths, it's the kind of the fact that we all need to protect each other from this virus and getting people educated on that. So that'll be sort of the next wave and like you said, it can't come soon enough, I guess, as we see this thing unfolding.

23:25 DR: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's the one key lesson learned from this pandemic, is that this is not anything that one individual or one organization can solve, it's gonna require a coordinated community effort around this to both protect us as well as to get through it.

23:42 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Definitely. Well, we always say IoT is a team sport, but in the case of the COVID-19, it kinda takes it to a whole other level. Right?

23:51 DR: Right. Absolutely.

23:53 Pete: Fantastic. Well, David, I don't wanna take up too much of your time, like I said, this is the second time we've had this conversation. So but I really appreciate... Any kind of final thoughts or things that our listeners should be aware of in terms of what you're working on here at Microsoft or what they should be doing to help themselves?

24:12 DR: Well, one of the things that I'm most proud about is that Microsoft is taking a very... I'd say a very important position of their role and responsibility in the community and the world. We look at us as responsible corporate citizens, we have to do what we can lean in to help address the COVID-19 crisis. Innovate as quickly as possible through partnerships, but also address other issues that we face today. This could be everything from racial injustice, societal issues, such as... And also environmental issues. And what we have found is that these are all interconnected, where healthcare used to be about just simply a medical condition and treating it, what we realized that the most significant factors in many cases, have to do with what we'll refer to as social determinants of health. Your income, your education, where you live, the foods that you eat, and your ability to afford those foods. The people that you are socializing with or not socializing with, these are all... It's an interconnected world, and healthcare is becoming interconnected in so many different ways, so as we think holistically about how we improve one's health and well-being, it'll probably touch on things that we never even envisioned in the past.

25:39 Pete: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. You're right, it is a holistic approach that we need to take and we are much more connected probably than we ever imagined. So good. Good stuff. Well, David, again, thank you so much for your time, appreciate it. And I'll see you around.

25:55 DR: Thanks, Pete.

25:56 Pete: Okay, thanks.

On this episode of the IoT Unicorn Podcast, hear from Philip van de Mortel as he provides insight on what the future of IoT looks like within the Intel space as they continue to develop their journey with AI on the Edge.

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In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, we speak with Lilac Ilan and have an interesting conversation about her journey from the Federal Reserve to AT&T where she is the Assistant Vice President of IoT. We talk about how finding the right mix in a team helps diversify ideas and how that can make you successful in any environment but especially IoT. Then we delve into AT&T's work in the 5G space. We find out how combining the efficiency and power of 5G with AI and edge computing means lower cost, improved safety, and higher ROI through digital transformation.

Tune in and hear about all that, and more, on this latest episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast.

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In this second of our two-part interview with Jeff Torrance, VP of IoT at Qualcomm, we imagine what Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connectivity means for the future of the IoT space. Can you do more with less power? Can you use it to reduce your total cost of ownership because your devices can still perform, but while consuming less?  And how might you leverage these advancements for the next couple of decades in the space? Tune in and we'll answer those questions, and more, on this latest episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast.

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In this first part of our two-parter with Jeff Torrance, VP of IoT at Qualcomm, we learn that 5G and IoT go together like peanut butter and chocolate and take some time to talk about what it’s going to look like when they meet in the marketplace. This episode is loaded with learnings on how Qualcomm is gearing up to leverage and expand 5G from mobile phone tech to all types of adjacent IoT spaces. We also have an interesting discussion about how 5G will enable a much broader interface with the real world.

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Hot on the heels of the Project Bonsai announcement at Microsoft //build recently, I am joined by Autonomous Drone expert Guada Casuso from Microsoft. We explore her journey from Argentina to Japan to Seattle, the use of drone technology (including chicken teriyaki delivery), and how her team is positioned to develop AI to empower and enable autonomous systems.

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