Opening day is finally here. We are ready to get the 2023 Major League Baseball season underway tomorrow with the first pitch of the 2023 season. And I'm delighted to be here with you once again for the seventh season on the solo shot here on the FanDuel Podcast Network at numberfire.com breaking down the slate, talking pitchers, talking stacks and talking about how to win when filling out your FanDuel Alliance. We're here today to break that opening day and the main slate for tomorrow. So let's dive on in and get you ready for day number one. This is the solo shot right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and numberfire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for numberfire.com here to break down an 11 game of main slate on Thursday with lock set for 105 PM Eastern over on FanDuel.com. So again, if you listen to this on Thursday after 105 PM, there is a four game later slate that we'll lock later on today. So still some action you can get, check out those in the lobby over on FanDuel. Not discussing those here on the podcast for today, focusing just on the main slate because it is a doozy. Again, 11 games there, we're gonna break down. All you need to know about that slate in just one second but first a reminder with the solo shot now being back along with PGA, UFC and NBA podcasts all in the same place. Make sure you are subscribed to the numberfire daily fantasy podcast wherever you get your podcasts, the solo shot will be here every weekday from now until the end of the year. So all in the same place, just search for it. The numberfire daily fantasy podcast wherever you get your podcasts, hit subscribe. And if you like what you hear, leave us a five star review as well because it does help us out a bunch. Grand slams, no hitters and double plays are back and there is no better place to get in on the MLB action than FanDuel, America's number one sports book. 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Louisiana is 1-800-777-770-STOP in Maryland, mdgamblinghealth.org in New York, 1-800-778-HOPENWIRE or text OPENWIRE in West Virginia, 1-800-GAMBLER.net. If you wanna listen in for some betting insights on Major League Baseball, I'll be going through that in the Cover In The Spread podcast feed, which is again now daily, talking MLB for opening day later on today. So if you want betting stuff for Major League Baseball, I'll be having that myself over on the Cover In The Spread podcast feed as always. It is an 11 game slate here for this opening day slate over on FanDuel again. Lock is at 105 PM Eastern. And I think the key thing early on in the season from across Major League Baseball is going to be weather. We can talk rule changes, stuff like that. That matters, still invasives, et cetera. But this time of year, weather matters a lot because the gap between the coldest game on the slate and the warmest game is probably the biggest it'll be until October and stuff like that. So I wanna list out the games with temperatures under 50 degrees at first pitch for Thursday's slate. And the key thing to note here is offense is more prevalent in games with higher weather or with hotter weather, higher humidity, stuff like that. So the games I will list here, lower temperatures that advantages pitching and disadvantages hitting. The games to highlight there in terms of being cold are the Giants of the Yankees, the Braves at the Nationals, Orioles at Red Sox and the Brewers at the Cubs. So again, Giants Yankees, Braves Nationals, Orioles Red Sox, Brewers Cubs. I would downgrade batters there, upgrade pitchers because the ball does not fly as well when the temperatures are colder. In Kansas City, for the Twins and the Royals, winds are out to left field at 19 miles per hour. There is a chance of rain in San Diego for the Padres and Rockies. That game should play, but it is worth noting that there's rain because a lot of times we'll see clubs willing to postpone if weather is not ideal for their home opener. So keep an eye on that for sure and be aware of that as you're filling out lineups that is one of the later games on this slate. So that's the one risky spot in terms of weather, is San Diego for the Padres and the Rockies. Now we're gonna dive in to this slate here in just one second. But first, we wanna go through the overview of the show for people who may be new. A, welcome, glad to have you on board, but B, the way this works is I will go through each day. The top three pitchers I like on the slate over at Fandwall, typically it'll be two studs and a value play in case you want to spend down a pitcher. I am typically a strong proponent of spending up because they're higher salary for a reason and easier to predict, you get that good ceiling. Also with a good floor, I care less about the floor than about the upside, but I tend to spend if a pitcher will try to highlight value plays when possible, not as possible in opening day, given the gap between the studs and the rest can be pretty large.  I'll then go through three teams of stack. And for people who may be new to MLB DFS stacking is when you pair players together within the same offense. On Fandwall, you can have up to four batters from the same team within the same lineup. So you kind of want to do that at all times and you want to have four player stacks, maybe multiple four player stacks in the same lineup if you can because if Trey Turner gets an RBI, someone else from the Philly score and you want to get the points both for the RBI and the run scored, you get that, but also because there's no time clock in baseball, every time Trey Turner gets a base hit that ups the projected volume for everybody else within that lineup. So you want to stack, you want to stack aggressively. I know like two players as kind of a stack, but really when I say stack, I mean three to four players. And to me, I want to have this few one offs in a lineup as I can possibly get to make sure my lineup plays well together, it's cohesive and works that way. So two, four player stacks in a lineup, four player stack and three player stack and one off, stuff like that.  That's what a stack is for those of you who may be new. And finally, I'll go through things to walk to the end, other pictures that didn't discuss, maybe a team I'm lower on than what the market will be most likely, one offs, things like that towards the end all in the same show. So we're gonna do that each and every weekday here on the number fire daily fantasy podcast feed. You'll come out every morning, probably I'll try to have it up around 930, 945 in there, depends on the timing of covering the spread for that day. It'll be up on the number fire daily fantasy podcast feed and then later on up on the Fandal YouTube page. So if you prefer to watch it in video form, you can find that as well over on the Fandal YouTube page just search for Fandal on YouTube and it'll pop up the page there to get that if you want the video version of the show instead. I will be hosting most days, but we'll also have Austin Swain and Tom Beckio in the mix if you listened last year, you know their voices, you know their thoughts well, Tom of course, the host of our NBA show, The Daily ISO, Austin doing USC and doing a lot of solo shot for us as well. So check out Tom on Twitter at DFS underscore Tom, check out Austin on Twitter at a Swain three, if you want their insights on baseball and again they will be here throughout the year as well.  Pitching preview for opening day over on Fandal, Corbin Burns comes in with the highest salary on Fandal. He is $11,000. Garrett Cole is 10-9, Jacob DeGramme at 10-8. Max Scherzer is 10-7, Aaron Nola 10-6. Got Shane McClanhan against Detroit. He is 10-4, Sandiel Contra facing Scherzer at 10-2. Max Freed comes in at $9,800. Alec Minoa, 97. Blake Snell in the potential weather game is 95. Pablo Lopez making his twins debut at 92. Hunter Green is 91. Miles Nicholas, 91 as well. We have Marcus Strowman and Eduardo Rodriguez as the other guys at $8,000 are higher. Now this time of year, it's hard to find guys with huge projected pitch counts because they're getting ramped up, don't wanna go too hard right away and that's a thing to consider. We'll talk about Jacob DeGramme in things to watch because he is a big piece in this discussion, the pitch count discussion. But there are two guys I feel really good about and I like the spots they're in for this opening day slate. And I'm gonna rank them number one and number two. Those guys are Garrett Cole at 10-9 and Max Scherzer at 10-7. I'm gonna favor Max Scherzer at the top of my pool. Let's talk about him and we'll talk about Garrett Cole later on. Scherzer is facing the Marlins on the road. Their active roster last year had a 102 WRC plus against Wright and you can find that by going to FanGrass. There is an active roster button. Click that, it'll show you the guys who are on their active roster now what they did during the 2022 season because you wanna judge it based on that not based on what the team did last year. Lot of roster change over stuff like that. So you wanna make sure you have the active roster tab clicked when you're looking at team level stats. So 102 WRC plus in the Marlins you will notice that the WRC pluses will be above average for most teams because a lot of the lesser hitters have been filtered out, you got the good hitters healthy once again back in the pool. So a 102 WRC plus on this slate is actually a tiny bit below average which is a good thing for Max Scherzer.  And the park helps that too. Though it's actually a decent park this time of year with everywhere else being kind of cold. But with Scherzer, he had injuries last year but when he was healthy, we saw him pitch really well. We saw Scherzer make 15 starts after he came back off the IL.  And in those 15 starts, he had a 2.84 skill interactive ERA with a 31% strikeout rate. He paired them with a low walk rate, hard hit rate is pretty decent. And again, the one issue was a lot of fly balls but the Marlins is not a team that supplies a lot of those. So Scherzer pitched well down the stretch and this spring, phenomenal stuff for Scherzer. 17 and 2 thirds innings, 25 strikeouts, two walks. I'm gonna put less weight on that due to the World Baseball Classic by looting the player pool a bit. But it does help that in that sample, Scherzer was good. Never a bad thing to be a good pitcher. The biggest thing for me that makes Mac Scherzer a stud on this slate is pitch count because Scherzer went 100 pitches in his final spring training outing.  I have him projected at 100 this year, nobody else above 90, for this slate, nobody else above 95, I want that. 100 pitches for Scherzer leads to a 7.8 projected strikeouts for me, it's a very good number. I will take it and that makes Mac Scherzer my number one starter on this opening day slate. I will put Garrett Cole seconds, the weather is definitely a thing in his favor. Only 42 degrees of Yankee stadium for first pitch and we want that for pitching and it's especially good for Garrett Cole because he did let up a lot of hard contact last year. The most relevant sample for me on Cole is his final 13 starts where he trimmed back on his cutter usage and in that time, this did still get a decent number of strikeouts, a 33% strikeout rate in that time but he also let up a 40% hard hit rates and a 43% fly ball rate. That's a big part of why his ZRA was 4.09, a lot of too many home runs. Now that's an issue because suppressing hard contact is a skill that we want for our pitchers but it's less of an issue when it's this cold out. So that's a good thing for Cole. The strikeout upside should be there. He's facing the Giants at home. The Giants have a 23% strikeout rate on their current active roster against Reidy's last year. And I think the pitch count for Cole should be there too. He went 84 pitches on Mark 24th. So I've got him projected for 93. That might be a bit conservative because we could see a 15 pitch jump in there but even at 93 pitches, I have Cole projected for 7.3 strikeouts. So when you add that to the weather helping his floor, I like that quite a bit. Now you could make a case for Jacob DeGrom, despite the low pitch count, we'll talk about later on. Could make a case for Aaron Ola. He could make a case for Corbyn Burns, a lot of guys on this slate. But when you consider pitch count, consider matchup, consider weather. I think my two favorite guys for today are Max Scherzer and Jacob and Garrett Cole. They will be my top two pitchers on this opening day slate. Now, as mentioned, I will typically try to slot in a value play here. A guy at $9,000 or lower who I think has upside and can't compete with those top end studs. Tough to do for opening day with how many good studs there are. So I don't want to spend down for the sake of spending down. I want to spend down if there is a guy down there with bankable upside I can feel good about. I think the lowest I can go and feel good about that player having a ceiling to keep pace with Cole, Scherzer, DeGrom, Nola, Burns. I think the lowest I can go is Hunter Green at $9,100. And I am fine considering him if you want to spend down a bit. And you know why this is the case. You're gonna get strikeouts with Hunter Green. Those were there all season for Green, but he was struggling big time with hard contact. He had a stretch where he cut back on the foreseeing fastballs because they were contributing to that hard contact and it helped a bit. But then he made a second adjustment in late June where he decided to go back to that foreseeing fastball and try to rejack up the strikeouts. And he made 11 starts after going back to the foreseeing fastball. And he was really good in that time. 3.05 skill interactive ERA that accounts for some of the issues with hard contact or with the batted balls. It undersells hard contact. So it does not fully encapsulate the issues for Green. Skill interactive ERA has its flaws. That is definitely the big one. Put the results were there. They were good. 3.56 ERA, actual ERA in that time too. 32% strikeout rate.  We saw Green have 10 strikeouts against this Pirates lineup in a second to last start. So he's fun. He's got upside and it's a great matchup. The Pirates active roster, 25% strikeout rate last year which ranks highest on the main slate. So there are a lot of things that push us here for Hunter Green. So the question is, why is he not higher? Why am I not lea... One, why not take the savings and use Green instead of Cole instead of Scherzer? It's mostly due to pitch count. Green never went longer than five innings during the spring. Did everyone minor league start in there? So I don't know what his pitch count was in the second to last start, but it's an unknown. 58 pitches for Green is final tune up. We see a lot of teams scale back for their guys in the final start of the spring to keep them fresh. That could be the case here. Because of the unknowns, I have Green projected for 85 pitches just because I don't really know what he's gonna do. The strikeout projection at 85 pitches, that was 6.7, which is not bad for $9,100. And that's why I'm okay using here at 91, but that's also why I'm not higher. If he were projected for 95 pitches, if I knew for certainty what his pitch counts were, I'd probably feel better about him, but I still like him a lot. I will be here, but if you're giving me one lineup or two lineups, I am going to Cole, going to Scherzer because they feel a lot better about their pitch counts. They feel a lot better about their upside. They feel better about them having difference making range of outcomes on this slate. So that's the pitching discussion for today to give a talk about Jacob de Grom in Things to Watch. Let's go now to the stacking section though and talk about offenses I'm pinpointing for today. And I think that weather should play a massive factor here. Matter of pitching, but less so there because I've focused on strikeouts. Those don't change as much based on weather, but for hitting, it matters for every single plate appearance. And if you look at the implied team totals, you can find these over on Number of Fire, go to the heat map, if you look at the top implied team totals on this slate, two of the top three are in games with temperatures in the low 40s. That's a pretty big red flag to me. And we'll still talk about one of them. We'll talk about the Braves later all, we'll talk about the Red Sox and Things to Watch, but I want the top two stacks for me to come from better weather for hitting. That's why I like the twins as my top stack against that Grand Quay for Thursday. It is 68 degrees in Kansas City. As mentioned, the wind is blowing out too. Those are good things in terms of weather, much better than what you get in Boston or in DC. Grand Quay struggled during the spring that might not matter because he likes to tinker, likes to kind of mess around with his pitching coaches, stuff like that. It could be related to that, but last year for Grand Quay during the regular season when he was not tinkering, not dicking around, it was not perfect either. He made 13 starts toward the end of the year through more forcing fastballs and fewer sliders and the strikeout rate in that time, 13%, led up a 38.5% hard hit rate. The hard hit rates I'm using here for pitchers is the percentage of balls in play with an exit velocity above 95 miles per hour. So not the fan grass hard hit rates, it is the one from Baseball as well, which you can't find on fan grass as well, but in the stack cast tab instead of the batted ball tab. But 38.5% hard hit rate about league average roughly.  Now it didn't hurt Grand Quay that much because his ERA in that time was 2.50, but he had a lot of good luck with home runs. He left just a 5.1% Homer to fly ball ratio and it's pretty tough to sustain that in even if we, you know, see some flukeiness with the balls and, you know, jacking around with that. The twins offense is fine. Again, their WRC plus is 102. As mentioned, that's a bit below average for this slate. They're not on a massive power team, but they have individuals we can feel good about. The whole team might not be great against righties, but there are guys who are. Byron Buxton has a reasonable salary of $3,500. You get stolen base juice, you get power. I love that at 35. Buxton, not a lot of volume this spring because he's nursing that hip injury. You know, it'll be DHing on Thursday, but 35 likely too low for him. Carlos Correa 3000, Jose Miranda 28, not a ton of power from against righties, but, you know, still enough. I think he got better as he went along. Max Kepler is 25. So you can stack the twins while spending of a pitcher and not suppressing your upside within the individual batters. And I love that. You can still get to Byron Buxton. They're focal points while using a Scherzer or a Cole. I want that whenever I can get it. So I do like the twins a lot. I do want to talk Trevor Larnack here for a second. I would expect him to start against righties. And in the spring, really good spring for Larnack. He wasn't a lot to make the team, but kind of forced his way there. He had a 400 ISO against righties in the spring, a 13% strikeout rate for looking at spring numbers. ISO and strikeout rates are the two numbers that stabilize most quickly. So that's the only ones I'll be looking at here, but 400 ISO, 13% strikeout rates. Larnack showed good power last year when he was up, but he just struck out too much. Seems like he's healthy right now. His salary is $2,200. I don't think we'll see many people be on Larnack here, but I would like to be. I think he's a pretty good player. So Trevor Larnack, a key piece of the twin stacks if you want to be a bit different. The other good weather situation, or I should say lack of weather, is not an elite matchup. And it's a lack of weather because it's a dome. That's a Tampa Bay raise. I like them a lot, despite the lack of an elite matchup here for a couple of reasons. The first one is they're facing in Rodriguez.  And the rays project to crush left-handed pitching. Their active roster had a 120 WRC plus against lefties last year. They had a very low strikeout rates. That's series number one. They crush lefties. Rodriguez is a lefty. Reason two is I think the rays are going to steal a lot of bases. They had the fifth most stolen bases this spring, 34. And they were caught just six times. And I want that aggressiveness because we could see a lot of teams running a lot this year. That's going to skew things for DFS where speed is a bigger factor in the equation. And that's especially true in March and April when power is not as focal because the weather's bad. So if you're looking at the percentage of fandal points scored by stolen bases, that's going to be higher this time of year always, but it's going to be higher this year in general as well. So I do want teams that will run. The twins won't. That's one downside for them. The rays I think will run quite a bit even against the lefty, which we'll talk about here in a second. I want that aggressiveness with the rates. It gives me two sources of upside via the power against lefties and via the stolen bases. As I said, the matchup here is not elite. Rodriguez last year, after he came back started mixing and a sinker down the stretch and he got some good bad at bald data as a result. But still in that time, the 4.25 skill interactive ERA, his ERA was 4.61. So it's not like he was a shutdown kind of guy, especially when you have to grade in a curve with this being opening day. So it's a fine matchup. The, but the rays are great against lefties, likely to swipe bags. They were in a dome, which is good this time of year. So I love all that. It's enough for me to be on the rays as my number two stack on the main slate. I would downgrade them a bit if Wonder Franco can't play. It sounds like he'll be good to go, maybe with that quad injury.  He's an important player. It would impact his willingness to run two, which stinks. But I think we can be here regardless. Randy Orozarena is one of the top guys on the slates, whether in a stack with the rays or as a one-off. He had a 242 ISO against lefties. He stole eight bases against lefties. You don't see a ton of guys who will swipe bags against lefties, but Orozarena definitely did last year. So again, new rules this year, bigger bags. I think that benefits guys who run. Orozarena will and he has powered a boot against lefties. So I think Orozarena is one of my focal points at batter on this slate. I do think you can slot the braids in the third for stacking. Temperature in DC is 46 degrees. If that were higher, if it were 56 degrees, maybe the braids be first for me, but it's not. And I think we can feel good putting them third, even if that does wind up meaning that we are lower on them than the field. I think I'm okay making that trade off because weather should matter a lot. And it does for me. They're facing Patrick Corbin. Corbin struggled last year, made a lot of tweaks, never really fixed everything. The final tweak for Corbin was basically ditching his foreseam fastball, which was good, a good move, but still didn't cure his issues. It was a nine-storm sample for Corbin with fewer foreseamers. His skill interactive ERA was 4.80. He had a 14% strikeout rates. Hard hit rates stayed high at 45%. And he led up a lot of balls in play. The braids, smack lefties. Very good team against lefties. A 182 ISO on the active roster against lefties. That's the highest on the main sites against the opposing pitchers, handedness. So it's kind of the perfect convergence outside of the weather. It's a high power team against a guy who has struggled with hard contact and doesn't get strikeouts. Again, we could wind up lower on them than the market by putting them third in terms of stacking, but I'm fine with that process given the weather here. I just can't go a whole lot lower than that, all things considered. So twins one, raise two, brace three, despite the bad weather for them. I do think that if you're gonna stack the braids though, you'll want to be a bit different than what the consensus does. And I think my favor of doing that is by using both catchers, assuming they're both in the lineup and Sean Murphy and Travis Darneau. Both those guys, really good against lefties. A 231 ISO last year for Darneau. 235 for Murphy. They both have low strikeout rates as well. The downside here is if you use Murphy and Darneau together, you cannot use Matt Olson because all three of those guys are catchers slash first base eligible. So you can't use all three together. That's definitely a pretty big bummer because you do wanna get Olson in there whenever you can. But I think it's a good trade-off and it allows you to be different without being dumb. We always want that in daily fantasy. So there are plenty of routes to be different, but I think that what I would say is give a thought. How can I stack the braves while being different without being dumb? To me, this is my favorite route having both Murphy and Darneau in there because people don't like using catchers. They both are first base eligible, which means if you use both, you're filling up your utility slot. You can't use Matt Olson. There are downsides, but I think that's a good thing. So that's my route. I would just give a thought. Ask yourself, how can I stack this team being different without being dumb? And those to me, I prefer routes for doing so. Things to watch for the main slate. One guy we did not discuss in the pitching section was Jacob DeGrom, and I kind of talked about this before, but it's all due to pitch counts. DeGrom, 54 pitches on March 25th. He was at 34 on March 20th because of that early spring injury. I had DeGrom projected for 75 pitches. I think that might be a tiny bit high, but that still gives him a strikeout project of 8.2, which is bananas on that pitch count. I'm not sure how deep he will go. That's enough for me to go with Scherzer and Cole over DeGrom. I think his odds of getting a quality start here, which is a big bonus on FanDuel, pretty low. So I'd like to be here, just hard to do so, when I don't project him for a lot of pitches. You can go there, because you got a high strikeout projection, but those are the reasons I'd hire on him here against the Phillies. Similar to the Braves, the Red Sox have a high implied total in poor weather. Bason Kyle Gibson here, Gibson, was actually pretty decent down the stretch last year. The Red Sox offense is more fine than great, I would say, and just 40 degrees. So I'm fine being lower on the Red Sox in consensus. I think they make sense.  Given the weather, given Gibson, given the overall offensive quality, I think it makes sense to be a bit lower on the Red Sox than the market on this slate. Finally, if you wanna spot with high-hard contact rates and good weather, you can check out San Diego. Again, check out the weather there to make sure that game will play, but the Padres facing Edamon Marquez, he gets round balls and he benefits from being outside of Coors Field, but lets him pull out of balls and play. Decent number of those are well-struck, so that makes the Padres okay. Rocky's facing Blake's now. He does get strikeouts, but we also know what happens when he doesn't get strikeouts. Fly balls and hard contact can be there. It's 55 degrees, not perfect weather, but I would not be super shocked if either side gets some runs here. So I think that game is viable. I do think you could justify stacking the Pirates against Hunter Green if you want to too, give him the amount of hard contact and fly balls he allows. I think that's okay.  Finally, final thing we do on the solo shot each day is I will give out a couple of home run calls.  They're not based on the betting odds of Fandull Sportsbook. They could be terrible odds. I'm just gonna go with a guy I think is fun to hit a dinger and a guy who I think is boring. Basically, who's the chuckiest option I can go with for today? Just two home run calls. These are purely for fun and for nothing else. Boring one, Randy Arosa-Rena. I mentioned he does well against lefties. He's playing indoors. Lot of power against lefties, Rodriguez. Not a guy we need to be super, super fearful of. I like Arosa-Rena. He's fun to watch. Watching the WPC was always a delight. So we'll go Randy Arosa-Rena as the boring one. But the fun one, I'm gonna go Larnac. Talked about him before at the Twins. Trevor Larnac. Good power last year against righties. Good power this spring. Lower strikeout rate. I think he'll be in there. I think people will gravitate towards Buxton, Correa, probably Joey Gallo. I mean, I get it. He does steal some bags, but, you know, we'll see. So I think I wanna go Larnac. It's a way to be different without being done with in the twin stack. More power friend than Miranda against righties. So home run calls for opening day. Randy Arosa-Rena and Trevor Larnac. That is all that we have here for today on The Solo Shop. But as mentioned, we are back every weekday, breaking down that day's main slate for Daily Fantasy Baseball. The next podcast will be on Friday morning, breaking down the Friday slate. So make sure you're subscribed to the Number Fire Daily Fantasy Podcast feed to get these podcasts as they go live each and every weekday. If you've got any questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S, especially this time of year. If there is lingo I'm using, you don't understand. Feel free to ask because I'd like to know that. And I don't want to confuse you. So there were things I said you wanted more info on, general process questions. Feel free to hit me up again at Jim Sonnis on Twitter. We'll talk to you all once again Friday. Good luck to you for opening day. Enjoy the baseball. We'll talk to you once again soon. This has been The Solo Shot right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network.


Telecom Exchange CEO roundtables, both for our guests joining us here at Telecom Exchange NYC, as well as our viewers who are joining us on Periscope, as well as on JSA TV. We'd also like to thank our Wi-Fi sponsor, Kelly Dry. Our first panel is on the arrival of Internet of Things, 5G connected devices, data volume, and business opportunities. The panel is moderated by my friend, Ronald Gruya. He's a perfect fit for this panel as the director of emerging telecoms at Frost and Sullivan. Ron covers topics such as 4 and 5G, SDN, NFV, IOT, as well as others. He's a regular speaker at telecom conferences. You may have seen him at Mobile World Congress and IT Expo, to name a few. He's also a contributor for Forbes, as well as written for the street.com, Silicon Angel, CIO Review, Information Week, and others. Ron, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Jamie. And I wanted to thank JSA for the opportunity to be here, it's a pleasure. So, we have a distinguished group of panelists here. So, Frank Ray from Microsoft, Moby and Ken from AT&T, and Tom Ghillie from Amenta Partners. I'm gonna try to make this session a fun one. We have quite a range of topics. So, without further ado, let's, how about if we just start by, we'll start with Frank and go around until Tom. Just make a quick introduction of yourselves. Just say, what's your company's currently addressing or engaged in Internet of Things or 5G? The Microsoft Cloud and Infrastructure Operations Division within Microsoft. We work closely with our Azure division, with our IoT suite within Azure, as well as all the storage opportunities and big data analytics. Moby and Ken, I work for a small company called AT&T. We're a headquarter out of Dallas. I run products and strategy for our IoT platforms and solutions and looking forward to having an interesting discussion here. My name's Tom Ghillie. I'm with Momenta Partners. Just joined recently. I lead the Ventures and M&A activities within Momenta Partners. We have about 20 companies in our portfolio for investments and a large number of companies in advisory services. Prior to Momenta, I founded a company called Wadio, which was an application marketplace for connected device platforms. And I recently sold that company to Interdigital. Great. Okay, so we're sort of at an interesting point in the telecom industry because we have these huge amounts of data. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Cisco VNI forecast, show of hands. Or, you know, Erxon also puts out a similar report.  Of course, one of the top ones. Then, you know, when we start also looking at 5G, which is, you know, it's interesting too, because we're sort of, we're not even done with a 4G cycle yet. And for the first time in wireless history, we see carriers like AT&T, to name a few, that are engaging trials even before the specs get turned out. So how would this huge amount of data affect our natural infrastructure in a way, you know, we do business and we communicate? So maybe Tom, I'll start with you and then go around. That's a big question. It is pretty exciting. There are a lot of things that are happening. One of the first things I like to say when I start talking about this subject is the idea of connected devices, transmitting data over the network has been around for decades. We've been doing this and collecting the data and making use of it in operational centers within the organization. And it's been going over various networks. What we're seeing today, though, is the increase of choice over the networks for this data. That's number one. So we have the carriers, of course, but we also, we have satellite, Orbcom. I don't know if you follow Orbcom. It was trading at about $2, not too long ago. Now it's trading up near $10. Just at a successful launch of 12 Leos, low-Earth orbital satellites with SpaceX. It's a pretty interesting company. And then we have the conversation on low-power radio with SIGFox and SEMtec, Laura, and there's others in the play. Those are the two I'm watching. SEMtec stock is also improving on the back of what it is that they're putting into the market. A couple of other things that we're going to talk about that are indicators of big change in the data across the networks, such as the enterprise side of the organization, the business people within the organization, recognizing that the operational data that they've been collecting for decades is useful. We'll talk about that more about the volume of data. So it's a pretty exciting time. Yeah, so I think just to add on to what Tom said, that the amount of data is increasing, but interestingly, the rate at which the data is getting generated is also increasing. So a second derivative, if you will, is sort of increasing. So we are going to generate more data in a year probably than it's ever been created before. So now the question really is, what is good data? What is bad data? What is useful data and what's not useful data? But regardless of whether it's good data or not, it has implications for companies that are carrying data or managing data or processing data or storing data. Because even if it's bad data, it needs to go through some network, needs to go through fiber, needs to go through cellular, even if it's bad data, it probably needs to be stored somewhere because somebody is going to analyze it later. So it has implications on the network, significant implications on the network. And that's why standards like 5G are evolving. Some of the low power standards, whether it's SigFox or it's Cat1 or CatM or narrowband IoT, they would collect small amounts of data but from a very, very large number of devices. So I think data will continue to increase. And I think it's important for companies like myself as well as Microsoft to help provide the infrastructure to manage that data in the future. And I think we are up for the challenge. Great, Frank. I'm not terribly concerned with the amount of data. And definitely, Mobine is correct in the creation of the data. I think that we as an industry, be it technology companies or investment companies, telecommunications operators, we're going to find a way to manage that data, to carry that data, to transmit that data. I think the key that we're going to have to figure out is when you have somebody collecting data from a farm of cattle, there's 5,000 cattle and they're in the middle of nowhere and they're crossing and sending that data to another company or headquarters in a completely different geographic region. And you're talking about crossing geos, crossing carriers, crossing networks, how are we managing this exchange of this data, whatever volume that it is. So I think the amount of data, how it's being created, how it's being transmitted is really going to stress some of the existing business models that are out there in managing traffic in today's telecommunications world. Great, OK. So I think this is a great segue for the next question, which is how are we storing and accessing all this data? And also, what are we going to do with it? I know we're sort of just starting to see progress being done in machine learning and such. I know Ray Kurzweil, one of my favorite futurists, said that we're close to that singularity. I don't know how many of you are familiar with that concept where in machine learning, the machine actually becomes smarter and smarter until it actually could be smarter than us. And it was funny because I was just talking to some folks that have solutions in that space and they all talk about a kill switch where we don't let the machines kind of take over, just in case, right? But anyway, so maybe we'll start with Mubin, how are we storing and accessing all this data and then we'll go to Tham and then Frank. Yeah, so I think before we get to the storing of the data, I think the important thing that we see from data creation point of view is that the biggest benefits are actually going to come from real time usage of the data. So if you were, take Frank's example of a cattle, if you were collecting that data in a localized way before and now you have access to it in real time, take that on a fleet of trucks, take that on any asset that you are connecting. That real time data access allows you to make certain decisions faster, bring more efficiency to your operations, maybe even change the way you do business. Maybe I will rent out a tractor as opposed to leasing it to the farmer, I'll lease it by usage or I'll lease it by how much that tractor worked on a day. So I think more than the storage, I think storage is an easier problem. I think transmission is a relatively easier problem. I think the important problem you mentioned, machine learning, it's all about how you use that data in the fastest way possible so you can make faster decisions and make your operations better than they were before. Right. So kind of like analytics on the fly, so to speak. That's right, stream analytics or whatever you wanna call them. I think that's going to be the key in IoT on how you use that data. Right, right, okay. Tom? I see a few trends in the industry as it relates to data. We hear about data all the time. I'm at my family dinner table, my son works at Uber, he's a developer for the back end. The amount of data that they're producing is astronomical, they make that data open so that third parties can gain access to it. They have so much data that they have to move to different vendors to be able to deal with the growth of data. I can't be specific, but it's pretty impressive. My wife works in the office of the CTO at Microsoft now. She came out of healthcare. She did a very large project at one of the large healthcare facilities here in New York City. And a lot of data is locked up in data silos. And so the big transition in data is to unlock that data from the silos and then make that available to other parties, third parties, for research. So there's a pent up opportunity to gain access to the data. One of my companies has talked about stress of data on the system. They generate over a petabyte of data a month, over 200 data centers across the United States, Canada, Latin America, UK. This is IoT data. It's a pretty impressive amount of data that they're producing and then generating results out of that data. And as Movin said, the dealing with it in real time is important. Having to process that data as a batch is okay, but a lot of insight can be gained from looking at the data now. What we see is in the industry is a lot of open source projects enabling companies, certainly the companies that I'm investing in, they come to market much more rapidly. Other companies like Cloudera, Mapper, Hortonworks that are creating no SQL back in data stores. We certainly have Amazon and Microsoft offering quite a bit of services and data storage and real time analytics and stream processing. So I think the open source is an interesting trend. It's been a trend for the last decade, but it's in the recent years, it's being recognized in the VCs and the investment community and those large companies, even Microsoft has changed its tune on open source in the last few years, thankfully. It has adopted and braced it sincerely. I think it's really important for Microsoft. I think we see the stock change in Microsoft in the back of many things and that's one of the changes that I see. Another thing I see with, for instance, AT&T, they're opening up APIs so that third parties and early stage companies can gain access to the services of a large operator. AT&T, M2X is something that I know that several of my companies are playing around with as being an interesting service for main T&T, a brison with thingspace. And there's other operators that are making major investments and making APIs available for data processing, data storage. And I think that's another important trend early. I'm not sure what the success is yet, but it's a good sign. Great, excellent. Okay, Frank. Well, I mean, I don't have too much to argue about what both gentlemen here have said. It's certainly definitely right. I mean, we have a couple of products to manage storage of data and analytics as well. I think one of the challenges that we're gonna have is we still, there's still so many devices and sensors that need to be installed out there. I think that the business is gonna be stressed a little bit in how we collect that data, what the costs of that data is. You know, we talk about 50 billion devices. And if you look at some of the traffic and network costs that some companies have been suggesting anywhere between $500 a year, I mean, it's an astronomical number. I'm not sure exactly who's going to be paying for all of that. So I think that needs to be addressed in order to really get to a number of 50 billion and then collecting all of that data, storing that data, analyzing it, I definitely think that's a technological problem that we're going to be able to solve. One of the challenges that we're gonna see is a lot of these sensors that are out there, it's gonna take a lot of time to gather all of that data and to be able to find any trends out of that data. One or two sensors monitoring traffic doesn't really do you any good. You're gonna need thousands and thousands of sensors in a city and they're gonna have to run over a longer period of time to be able to see what the trends are so you can then automate your systems for traffic flows and within a given city. So I think we're gonna see some challenges that really don't have very much to do with technology. They're just kind of tried and through issues of managing time and managing people and managing resources to be able to make the most out of that data and there's only so many technical solutions for that. Great, great. Yeah, this is certainly a very interesting topic and I was just thinking back to the comment that Tom made about the open source and I remember back in 1993 I installed the Slackware Linux and I was having trouble because when I ran the FDisk to do the partition on my hard drive, physical and logical address did not match. So because this was Slackware Linux and at that time Linus Torvalds was still a student at the Hosinki University of Technology. I sent him a quick email. I said, hey, this is not working. Can you help me? He says, I know what the bug is because you have one of those big hard drives over one gig and that 700 MAG barrier and he says I'm gonna recompile and send you the binaries. So this is the power of open source as early as 1992, 1993. I framed that email. I still haven't told you that. Anyway, so when we talk about data and all this, we keep thinking faster throughputs and we think of 5G and a lot of people, when they look at 5G, they say, wow, it's just another evolutionary step in the wireless industry and perhaps that's one way of thinking about it but maybe there's an opportunity here for that to also not just be evolutionary but revolutionary, right? To maybe an opportunity to introduce new business models and what I mean by that is two-sided business models think of maybe Girls Night Out in a pub, right? The pub gives out the drinks free to the ladies so hopefully more gentlemen will show up, right? The telcos unfortunately have been so-so in this space. I guess Toll Free Service is one of these two-sided business models where you not only think about your downstream customers but also upstream, right? And you're offering free long distance for free, right? I mean, there's other examples, entity DoCoMo with iMode, but anyway, is there an opportunity maybe for 5G to introduce this new business models and what's your take on that? And maybe I'll start with you, Frank, and then move to Morbine and Tom. Yeah, so I think there's definitely gonna need to be some new business models by the telco providers to think about how they manage all these billions of devices. When you're talking about this level of sensors and devices, you start to reach this critical mass where you, again, you need to push the price down of the data to even make it more valuable. The value of the data does not scale at the same level as the number of devices. At some point you start installing so many devices where the data coming from that device does not provide the same amount of value as when you only have the first set of devices in an operational setting, for example. So you have to keep the cost of that very low and at some point you hit a critical mass in which it costs you actually too much money to bill for that traffic or to bill for that service and then you're actually gonna get for it or what somebody would be willing to pay for that. So I think the providers are gonna have to take a look at, and I know some of them are doing them today, just having a one-time setup fee, not charging for any of that traffic. I mean the individual traffic itself is going to be very small. It's in the aggregate that you start looking at. Lots of data. So I think they're definitely gonna have to take a look at the way that they're charging for this. How are they setting it up? How are they billing for it? And maybe not always been the most advanced in changing their business models or changing their billing and provisioning systems in the past. So I think this is, we're definitely gonna have to take a look at how that gets managed. Again, billions of sensors, you need to be able to turn them on, they need to auto-connect, they need to start sending data, and it needs to go and it needs to be bi-directional. And so it's gonna be, it's gonna definitely be different than just having your washing machine tell you whether or not it needs a maintenance or not, right? So. Yeah, the cost of megabyte of transmission continues to go down, just like cost of silicon continues to go down. So that, you know, from a consumer and an enterprise point of view, that's a good thing. 5G obviously, the more efficient technology transfer a lot of data. But I think in the IoT world, it's, I think, I don't know if Frank or Tom, somebody mentioned that, you know, we need all kinds of networks. The IoT solutions are not going to be just 5G or just satellite. There's going to be many, many architectures that will be put into place, whether it's localized mesh networks in an unlicensed band, or it is a hybrid of Wi-Fi in cellular or other architectures from a data collection point of view. And each architecture will have its costs and use cases that will target and hopefully those targets meet the needs and the ROIs of those use cases. So I think that there is room for solution architectures in the home, on the street level in smart cities.  I think it's China Telecom or somebody deployed an insane amount of connected cameras in a few cities. So that's a tremendous amount of data flowing through the network. But at the same time, you cannot expect that those costs will be negligible, right? So use cases will define the costs and the pricing and the architecture. So I think over time, companies represented here and others are going to come up with ways to meet the needs. I think we're gonna get to, whether you believe 50 billion or 20 billion or 15 billion, it's a large B number over the next 10 years. And so there'll be many architectures to support those billions of devices that are coming. Excellent, thank you. 5G, it's an interesting horizon, something that's happening in the future. So there's some unknown what it means to what it is that we're going to be doing. I think Mubin, when he was talking about multi-transports and protocols, I do see that. And I think operators and those that are handling the transports are going to need to recognize that, and they already are. And so that their customers are not burdened with having to figure it out. In fact, that's a part of the 5G horizon. It's not just 5G, the technology, but what the operators and those that are providing the transport services need to do to create less burdened to the customer base, because it is a burden. I was talking to Core and Stream Technologies, a couple of companies that do device management connectivity, and their biggest concern is the operators, recognizing that it's important to manage the connectivity, manage the devices for the customer. I think that's probably true. I think the operators need to reduce that burden. And 5G could be that horizon where operators are saying, okay, I'm going to be a full service shop and move up the food chain and offer more value than just transport. Which also means the applications. One of the nice things about 5G is the promise of more bandwidth. Certainly that means more customers, but if there's an opportunity to put more data across that network, it opens up new opportunities and markets that are nascent because of the lack of bandwidth. I think IPTV or security cameras is a really good example. However, I don't think it'll be security cameras as they're being deployed today, where it's raw data coming across that network. Security cameras are going to be much more intelligent, pushing the intelligence to the edge, fog computing as Cisco calls it. It's the idea of being more intelligent at the edge, reducing the bandwidth and the back halt to the central service. But you still need that bandwidth. There's a lot of value in the analytics that would occur at the edge. And the faster I can get that back, the more useful it's going to be. IPTV is an example of security, certainly, but that's raw. There's so much information about human behavior that could be useful to the enterprise. Now this sounds a little big brother-ish, I suppose, but it's happening now. There's one small company that's growing dramatically, putting park benches into cities. They know now how to sell park benches into a city. The cities are paying for these park benches. It's crazy. The park benches are self-sustaining, intelligent park benches that track human behavior on the park bench. They know who's on the bench, when they're on that bench, and they can pass that information not only into the city, the municipality, but then into organizations that can market services directly to the individual. That's an interesting indication. Now that company is going to expand. I can't be specific, but they've been so successful at getting the park benches into the municipalities. I can see some great growth in other non-intelligent devices that you see as you're walking down the street. Think about it. Every one of those devices had some intelligence. How are you going to deal with that bandwidth? I think 5G is on that horizon promise of cost and availability and operator awareness of offering more services to the industry. I think there's two interesting points that you made there. I'd like to hear Mobeen's thoughts on that. First is moving up the chain. Maybe you had some challenges in the telecommunications industry in the past in doing that. So I'd like to get your insight on that. And then the second one was moving the intelligence to the edge, but also the amount of data that you talked about that's being created. How and where is that being stored? How is that dichotomy being addressed? I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, so I think up the stack is an interesting question for the telcos. And we've been successful in some areas. We've not been successful in other areas. Specifically in IoT, we actually have made a conscious decision to move up the stack and actually working with Microsoft on a lot of these things with your Azure IoT team where we are collecting and organizing the data and then also helping make some real-time decisions even before that gets to the infrastructure pieces in Microsoft. So allowing the users or the enterprises to code rules and logic so that less data gets transmitted or decision is taken at the edge to what Tom was saying. So I think those are good trends. They will continue. And I think it'll allow better solutions to be put in place. What was your second question? About moving the intelligence to the edge and how do you store it? That's really a very, very interesting. In terms of the dichotomy of data, not all data needs to be stored at all times, right? So if the value of a pressure is X and if it continues to be X in a time series way, I don't need to collect that. It's only when X deviates by 3% and that's when it becomes interesting. So I think there are all these kinds of rules that you don't have to collect raw data but you just collect the deltas, for example. And so I think edge computing and edge analytics allows us to do those kinds of things and also reduce the overall cost of the solution, which is good for everybody. Actually, this is already happening. HPE just introduced the edge line IoT appliance which is introducing that concept of moving the intelligence to the edge and they're using Vertica analytics and also partnering with GE. I think they have the solution with FlowServe. They do those pumps in the oil and gas industry and that's a huge pain point for them. How can we shorten the outage? Likesysco's, by the way, also doing this and they're partnering with IBM, Dr. Watts and putting that intelligence on the routers. Anyway, let's move on to the next one. ABI research and others like Cisco have done a lot of forecasting. They talk about 1.6 data bytes of data to be captured by 2020 and they're talking about 2025 IoT applications will have a total economic impact of about 11.1 trillion dollars. So what's the current investment climate for IoT services and where do you see this heading in the years to come? So Tom, since you're your momenta partners, VC is heavily invested in IoT startups. We'll start with you and then go to Frank and we'll be. All right, a couple of responses to that question. One, I see organizations waking up that had been sleeping through this marketing hype around IoT and the amount of data. Two very different industries. On one side, the enterprise software companies. We start to see it with Salesforce, SAP, Oracle starting to talk about IoT and that's great. There's three that I would watch that are really powerful in the integration of enterprise software services. That's Informatica, MuleSoft and Bumi. Bumi was acquired by Dell. Dell has now made a major investment in integrating the services from hardware to software and moving into the enterprise systems. You have MuleSoft and Informatica. Of those two, Informatica is interesting. They were public, they were brought private by a large private equity firm. So we don't know what the revenue is but we know what it was and it's high. They're in just about every Fortune 1000, let's say Fortune 100 company for enterprise application integration. The large integrators, Cognizant, Tata, Capgemini, use Informatica for organize the enterprise systems. They're waking up and they're recognizing that there's a lot of value that's locked up in the connected device data on the operational side of the organization. So we'll see in the next three years these organizations driving, almost I'm calling it a data pull from the operational side of the organization to make it available to the business decision makers, the CMO, the CEO, those that are making the product decisions or the investment decisions in the organization. I think that's a big opportunity. Now, a completely different shift. Another industry, electronic suppliers. They're the ones that are selling the chips, the devices into the markets. Billions and billions of dollars. These companies are Avnet. Future Electronics, Aero, Digikey. They're hired and staffed IoT leaders. They're trying to put together an end-to-end solution for their customer base, which is frustrated because they buy the device, the gateway. So let's say they buy a multi-tech or a cradle point gateway. What next? So they're looking to anyone to help them solve that problem. And for the electronics supply industry to say, okay, well maybe we'll give it a shot as a real industry indicator for the trend in the industry and where investments are going to be made. Two investments, I think you're seeing more acquisitions. So there's now investments in companies that will exit. For instance, I just sold my company. There's been a large number of exits on the back of some notable comparables and valuation on those companies. So more companies are looking to present themselves for sale. So I think you'll just continue to see that over the next three years, which is exciting for me. I like to see that sort of activity in the market. It shows vitality and growth, right? Yeah. Tom and I had a quick chat before via email. So it was definitely, I like getting his insight on what's going on. I think there's the way that we've been handling IoT, I think we're just really on the cusp of what's actually happening. I think when you start talking about the industrial internet of things, that's really where things are going to start to explode. But it's no longer going to be just inserting SIM cards into devices or sensors and putting them out there. I mean, again, we have to really change the entire supply chain to get to the type of volumes that people are talking about. And only at that point will we really start to see a lot of the value coming out. And I know some of the companies that Tom has mentioned are trying to address that. There's one I think is very interesting. I'm Microsoft, I don't like to drop names, but I think there's one that's very interesting that's trying to turn into a global utility. Tom mentioned its name before. And I think that that's being able to have this type of cross-border communication, cross-border interconnection, and sharing all of this data, again, whether it's a zeta byte, a terabit, or whatever the total number is, that data is only as valuable as how you can use it. And you have to get it from A to Z to get it to somebody who's going to be able to analyze it and take a look at it. However that analyzation happens, whether it's done by a machine and spits out a report, it needs to be put into practice in some way, shape, or form. So I think it's the exchange of this data and getting it into the hands of machines and individuals that can then put it into practice. Whether it's sending the data from a plane that's in flight that's going to schedule its next maintenance because it's finding out a delta in the engine. So it's en route to its next destination and automatically scheduling the maintenance and having that data then get to the right place and get to the mechanic that's waiting for that plane. This is a tremendous amount of exchange of information from A to Z and all these different endpoints. And I think that we're really just at the cusp of how we manage that, both in the IoT space but also within the telecommunication space. From an investment point of view, I mean, AT&T, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, we're all suppliers. We're all coming from a supply site. So we look at the world with somewhat of a rose-colored glasses and because we expect this demand to come in. And so we are making investments, huge investments. But I think what's interesting to note is that on the demand side, companies are making investments. That means is when I go and talk to customers, there's a customer I talked to recently, they make pumps that go on fracking and rig sites. Now they are making investments, building a team inside that's going to be an IoT expertise team so that they can implement IoT solutions within their own products. Same thing on, just spoke with the CEO of a elevator company out in Europe. And they are looking to instrument elevators for many reasons. So some of them we're working on together. And these companies are making internal investments because they want to be the consumers of IoT, not the suppliers, but they want to be the consumers of IoT. So I think that trend is increasing significantly, which is good for everybody who's in that business. Excellent, okay. So when we talk about this massive data consumption, we can start to look at this as one big global network pushing beyond satellites and cell towers, but working together to offer maybe a more robust, interconnected infrastructure. So what are the key ingredients to deliver this vision in terms of partnership, connectivity and security? Maybe Mobin, as a service provider, we start and then we will go with Tom and Frank.  I mean, it's getting better. So for example, we have a global SIM product that you can pop into any asset and you can track that asset worldwide. And we build that product on the back of a lot of maybe 500 roaming agreements we have across the world with all the different service providers. But there are regulations that are different across the world, whether it's privacy regulations, data transfer regulations. There are regulations about storage of data and privacy. There are regulations around, there's technology hindrances around which bands in which countries. So for example, if we roll out the new CATM solution here in a certain band, and that's not the same across the world, how does a global manufacturer take advantage of that? They're not gonna get the cost curves that you really want them to. So I think there are a lot of challenges in global from simple things like multi-currency billing. A customer in Europe wants a billion euro and a customer in Mexico wants a billion US dollars, for example. So there is a lot of challenges in having a more streamlined operational system from a solutioning point of view. So I think we'll have to knock out those challenges one by one, but there are challenges. I don't wanna say that 5G or some of these investments are going to pave the, or IoT is going to pave the way and everything will be utopia. It's just, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of challenges ahead on to be a global solution provider. All right, thank you. I think it's really important we talked about how important it is for the customer base to be able to solve that problem of data across boundaries. A lot of Fortune 100 are in every country of the world. It's important to be able to solve that. I use 5G not so much as a technology, but it's a horizon. I think by the 2020 timeframe, we need to have really good answers to this issue of being able to move data and have access to data across international boundaries. There are some earlier stage companies that are addressing that. They're probably gonna turn into acquisition targets for the larger players as they prove out their technology set and covering the different transports, you know, low power, radio, satellite, cellular, and aggregating data, dealing with the currency issues and the tariffs and the radio technology differences between different parts of the world, which is, as Mobeen said, it's a big challenge, but it needs to be solved. The market pull, the customer base is willing to pay for it. So when I see that, I expect it will be, but it's not today. We do have a horizon on the beginning of the solution. Great, Frank. Yeah, I mean, if you figure out how to have a global ubiquitous network, please call me because I have some positions that are open, but yeah, you know, part of my job is to figure out where all the toll booths are in the telecommunications industry. No offense, Mobeen. But as I said before, the interconnection, the exchange of this data, that's really going to drive that. I think kind of the idea of having a global ubiquitous network, moving all of that around, still somewhat of a panacea perhaps, but I still have faith that we'll figure something out, but as Mobeen mentioned, we at Microsoft, we have data residency and data sovereignty issues that we need to resolve, so we have different types of deployments for our cloud, hybrid deployments for our cloud, and these look different from one geography to the next. We announced not too long ago a deployment that we did in Germany that has, and I lived in Germany for 13 years, so extremely strict data privacy laws that are very different than just their neighbors right across the border. So trying to manage all of that and then having this seamless transition of your data across regulatory environments, government environment, security environments, currency environments, I think we're still a ways off before we can just simply say, I'm going to pick this and it's going to look the same and it's all going to flow and my bill is going to look the same and I'm going to be able to fully automate that. So I think we need to get there. I mean, we're trying to do that at Microsoft. We are working with the folks at AT&T to try to accomplish that. Maybe I'm just a little bit, because I'm trying to figure out those problems. I can see where the challenges are. I think we still have a ways to go, but certainly it's good to set goals for yourself. Great. If I may add one more. Even without the global, let's take global aside for a second. I think there is data sharing issues that need to be solved in the industry. So even within an ecosystem, think about a heavy equipment manufacturers, caterpillars, deers of the world. They sell through dealers who probably lease it through some bank and then a farmer buys the equipment. Each of, there's data being produced in that machine that there's parts of that data that only the OEM, the manufacturer needs and is not willing to share with anybody else. Then there's parts of the data that the dealer needs so that they can monitor the machine. Then the farmer needs certain pieces of data and then maybe the guy who's leasing the equipment needs certain amount of data and are you using them within specs? Are you within warranty and so on and so forth. We haven't really figured out how easily to solve. I know what IO tried to do some of that in your company, but those are not just global, but those are issues around how do you share data based on permissions and the right rules and learning about the data. So there are a lot of data sharing issues that I think we need to overcome to get to a really good solution out there. I'll just add, I'm sorry. No, I was just gonna say, I think that's a good example also of what's actually happening behind the scenes in the telco space. A lot of people think that you buy a service from Carrier X and it's their network all over the place, but it's not, they're buying network from this person, who's buying network from that person. It's definitely a very challenging space to work in. Sorry, Tom didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, thank you. You heard three different answers, or at least I heard three different responses to the question. My first response was about the transport and their operability of transport, and then I'm gonna be talking about the interoperability between the carrier services and then Frank and Microsoft, the interoperability of data and the different data laws across the world. So those are pretty big challenges. I think that's an interesting response at how difficult that challenge is. I just have to figure it out, each one of those to be able to create something that is unified. Something Frank said, there's not going to be a ubiquitous standard that cuts across all of this to solve the problem. One of the things I learned with Wadio was that you need to have a solution that can deal with the multi-standards, the multi-laws, all of the things that are occurring and changing. There's nothing that's static, it's always changing. So the systems that are being deployed and in place are the ones that can adapt to those standards and transports and change in laws around the data. I've learned that's to be very important. There's not going to be one standard that solves all problems. Excellent, all right. So I know we're a little bit out of time. It was just one last question. But before that, just a couple of minor observations. I know one of the gentlemen, I think, was you, Tom, you mentioned a 50 billion connected devices figure. I think that came from Erickson as a forecast and they have since changed it. They revised it downwards and then some people started saying, oh, well, well, I thought it was 50 billion by 2020, right? And I think in the end, what they ended up doing is they still stuck with the 50 billion but they just moved the timeline, I think. So that number seems to have stuck in a lot of people's minds. So it's amazing how much mileage they got out of that. So maybe I know we have a panelist for the next session already lined up here. So if you could please just keep your answer short to a couple of minutes each. What are the opportunities that IoT will offer us and are there any final predictions as to where you see where you see us heading in that direction in the next few years? I will just mention a quick thing about IoT opportunities earlier this year I was at Mobile World Congress and I saw Fujitsu, they had like a, almost like a fit band on a cow, as a connective cow, I was like, whoa, what are they doing with this? They're measuring actually how much a cow actually walks around. And I said, how is this useful to the farmers? Apparently, when cows are in heat, they actually walk twice the average amount that they do on a normal day. So that immediately triggers an alarm to the farmer. So the farmer knows, okay, because that's not a productive time for the cow. Those are milk giving cows, they take them off and they say, okay, you do your thing and, you know, and it's interesting how this is actually already being used by farmers in Japan. But let's start maybe with you, Frank, and then go to Movin and then with Tom. Okay, I'll try to keep it short. So I think it's going to provide us with an incredible amount of analytics to drive a lot of operational efficiencies across multiple industries. It's going to stress the way that telecommunications providers or I say network operators function from a billing, provisioning, and customer service perspective. It's gonna create a lot of new entities to be able to manage the way that data is shared back and forth across the different industries. And we're gonna get a lot of cool names for things that are connected like connected cows, it's everything will be connected. Yeah, I'd say that this is the IoT solutions is more like the next wave of productivity revolution. So it's going to touch every industry. Every industry is gonna change at their own pace, but it's going to change. And, you know, over the next few years, we will see many of the business models and many of the players maybe even in the industry change depending on how they adopt and use. So I think we're very bullish on this. You're gonna see a lot of M&A activity. You're gonna see larger companies buying smaller companies that demonstrated success. That's gonna occur and continue to occur over the next few years. We've already said that the large amount of data that's happening. The devices that are coming on the network are both greenfield, those new devices, the connected cows, so to speak. Interestingly, cows are already connected. A lot of the cows are already instrumented. What will happen, though, is that data that's been locked in the operational side of the organization is gonna be pulled into the business side of the organization. I see that as a big change in how we're talking about IoT, moving from just operational awareness into business decisions and analytics on that operational data on the business side of the organization. Fantastic, well, thank you so much. It's been an honor and a pleasure to have such a distinguished group of folks here. And again, I wanted to thank GSA and Jamie for the opportunity. And I hope you got some good mileage out of this session. Thank you. Thank you.


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Welcome back to the ITU headquarters here in Geneva which is of course hosting the AI for good global summit This is of course day two a lot of speeches taking place And I'm joined by guests who just gave one none other than Brian Whitton who's senior director of semantic research labs You may not know them, but they're actually the biggest cyber security Platform on the web anywhere. Is that a fair thing to say? Yes. We're the world leader in cyber security So what brings you somewhere like here fishing for business or? Oh, no, no not at all So the summit here artificial intelligence for good We think is great to be highlighting how artificial intelligence is being used to help people in lots of ways So we've been using artificial intelligence since 2004 to protect hundreds of millions of people around the world We use it in our managed security services. We use it in our endpoint security product We've even been doing research sort of pushing the limits on what artificial intelligence can do in general So give me examples of how it helps people what you do sure So we currently process two trillion security events per month on the back end And unfortunately, I don't know of any company that has a budget to hire two trillion security experts So you've got to codify the the expert knowledge into virtual analysts Artificial intelligence to really scale across all of that data And since you are leaders in your field, why would you be here because you also have your AI experience? Well, we think it's important for people as they start formulating policy Around artificial intelligence to factor in both risks and concerns and the real merits of some of these very very powerful technologies There's a lot of talk about having to regulate and you're on the defense side as well the civil side Do you agree with that? You know, I'm an engineer. So I try to stay out of the regulatory discussions I think there are a lot of instruments that could be used To ensure that AI is used only for good and not for ill But at the same time, there are a lot of attackers out there that are going to use AI regardless of what the rules are And so we need to Be able to stay ahead of them in the arms race You know keeping our AI better than their AI and do you manage that? I lead the long-term research for that. It's very fun to also work with the team that is while I'm doing the long-term research It's focused on, you know, year-long and longer research efforts work at the same time I have good friends that are in the 24 by 7 365 Finding fighting and catching bad guys division of the company called star our security technology and response team So at the end of these three days, what would you like to come out of this? What would like Dennis to come away from this from what you've said? So I've I've really enjoyed connecting with others that are using artificial intelligence in powerful ways Including some of the work that's going around on the internet of things Where AI can both be used for good where we're using AI to to help make it IOT safer But at the same time a lot of privacy concerns around how IOT is is unfolding at the moment and that's been raised a lot. So how would you was? What would be your wish list? So I I think I've met a lot of colleagues, and I think we look forward to to collaborating in in the years ahead On on research to help a better protect people's privacy not just their security And that's off to one of the big concerns of everyone right now, right? Exactly. Okay, Brian Whitton senior director Semitic you get the right Semitic exactly. Okay. Thanks much for your time. Thank you so much