Anoop Mohan: Leading the Next Generation of Intelligence with Disruptive Technologies

From consumer to industrial – every vertical is on the verge of being revolutionized by technology. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the center of this pivotal change. IoT is the exponential magnification that the internet is getting. IoT at its basic is about connecting physical objects and getting data to make a meaningful impact on various real-world problems. Just imagine – if you could get an alarm or notification about your heart needing immediate attention or even better an ambulance arriving in your footsteps before you know it's needed. Just imagine – the world's best surgeons can perform surgeries around the world virtually, without traveling and getting their services to every corner of the world. Just imagine – if a water leak from a pump in the middle of nowhere could be autonomously fixed to save 1000's gallons of water wastage in the middle of a drought. Just imagine the possibility if everything around you was connected, monitored and nothing was a BlackBox. That's the power of IoT and its sole mission is to make the world a better place by connecting the unconnected.

An Experienced Technology Leader with a focus on IoT

Anoop Mohan is a hands-on Technology & Product Executive with over 20 years of experience and has held various executive positions such as SVP of Product in Samsung SmartThings, VP of Product in Comcast, Director of Product in Cisco, and most recently, as the Managing Director in Rockwell Automation. Anoop is among the well-known executives in the IoT space. He is highly experienced in identifying product-market fit. Anoop is a result-oriented professional who has strategized, owned and built strong technology products with growing business applicability. He has developed products ground up, driving businesses from zero to 10's of millions, and has scaled products from 100's of millions to billions of dollars in revenue. Anoop was also a board member of the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) standard driving the next generation of seamlessness in IoT.

Anoop grew up in the ranks of engineering, developing software across all the layers of the stack from physical to application. He spent his first decade of working years in the mobile industry, enabling various mobile use cases. The last product Anoop worked on in this space was in Nvidia, partnering with Google and Motorola to build the first-ever Android tablet. For the last 10 years, he has been working on the Internet of Things (IoT) and has launched over four IoT platforms/solutions across Cisco, Samsung, Comcast, and Rockwell, addressing consumers to various industrial use cases.

Attributes that a Successful Leader Must Have

Anoop believes that as a leader, it is important to make sure we balance business with technology. It is easy to get carried away with building the next shiny toy, but making sure we start with a customer problem and have a business justification is critical. As a technology leader, it is important to appreciate various functions that need to come together to be successful as a company – Product Management, UX, Engineering, DevSecOps, QA, Operations, Customer Support, and Sales.

Anoop has five guiding principles as a leader that he tries to follow

1. Always be customer-focused, Solve a problem that is meaningful.

2. Lead with experience.

3. Never hesitate to fold your sleeves and get hands-on.

4. Set a vision but give flexibility to the team on how to get there.

5. Trust and empower your team.

Disruptive Technologies' Impact on Today's Innovation

Simple things such as being able to view his home when away and feel at home while traveling fascinated Anoop to IoT. But as he understood the technology and the components involved, the possibilities grew from solving first-world problems to third-world problems. Anoop has worked on every possible use case in IoT across Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart City, Manufacturing, Transportation, Fleet, O&G, etc. "There is a common thread across all of them – the technology components and technology challenges are very similar. The biggest difference in applying IoT across verticals is mainly in the value chain involved, the pace of adoption, and business model/willingness to pay," he adds.

Focus on the Product and not Technology

Anoop has always maintained that customers buy solutions and outcomes, not technology. He believes that IoT by itself is not a solution – it is a means to the end and that difference has to be well understood. Identifying the key problem statement where one can make an impact and applying technologies like IoT to deliver the outcome is the key.

Having said that, it is important for anyone working on applying IoT, to understand the nuances involved. IoT is a complex stack involving the end things/machine generating data, protocol adapters, edge gateway as an intermediary to the cloud, ability to manage and maintain connected thing and edge gateway remotely, being able to normalize data across 'thing' vendors, sharing data across multiple parties and finally being able to securely bring the data back to cloud where it can be visualized, analyzed and machine learning models trained to be applied back in the edge.

Tackling the Wave of Obstacles

According to Anoop, understanding and appreciating the nuanced stack in IoT is important because without it the user experience will be unusable and the whole project becomes a complex nightmare for customers to deal with. "Just imagine manufacturing or a public sector customer who has to work with 7-10 vendors across the edge to the cloud to put together the whole solution. The cost blows up, user experience takes a hit and in the process, most IoT projects stay back in the pilot/PoC stage. The need of the hour in IoT is simplicity while hiding the complexity. It's not easy but that's the challenge the industry and technologists like us have to solve," says Anoop.

Anoop believes the key trends in IoT are:

1. Simplicity – End-to-end IoT solution from edge to cloud packaged together for easy and simple consumption

2. Edge – It is a continuum of the cloud. A rule or analytics has to be autonomously decided to run in the cloud or edge based on the scenario. Edge infrastructure managed just like cloud infrastructure using the same or similar tools.

3. Data governance – Ability for end customers to share data granularly with their vendors and supply chain.

4. Data normalization/interoperability – Ability to autonomously normalize data across different vendors and have the devices interoperate with each other without any manual intervention.

5. IoT security – It's no secret that with more things connected, the surface area of attack A tight security architecture end-to-end from device to edge to cloud to the app where data is consumed is paramount.

Offering Essential Advice to Upcoming Tech Leaders

Anoop advises emerging tech leaders to know their customers in the complex value chain, start with a customer problem, pick an impactful problem, understand various functions in the company needed to pull together a successful product, and keep the solution simple irrespective of how complex the technology could be.