Roger Sands: 0:03

The wifi technology is great technology, but Tom boy, at any point in time, you can have that intermittent issue, it could be interference, it could be network design, channel planning, it can be interoperability. And so, these are very, very challenging and time consuming, as you mentioned in complex environments like manufacturing warehouses to solve those issues. So we said we built a system that does all that automatically

Tom Raftery: 0:30

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast. The number one podcast, focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host global vice-president at SAP Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today, I have my special guest Roger. Roger, thanks for coming on the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Roger Sands: 0:59

Tom, thank you very much for having me on your podcast. It's a pleasure to be here and articulate the value prop of what we're doing in the industry. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a high tech startup, Wyebot Technologies here in the Boston area. And I've been in the technology space, Tom for over 30 years working for a variety of high tech companies, fortune 500 companies, as well as a number of startups. And for the last 20 years I've been in enterprise moblity focused on wifi networks for corporations all over the globe, I was working for a wifi startup company here in the Boston area. Columbus networks. I was an executive co CEO building out next generation wifi technology. And we sold a company to HP and I ran HP's global wifi business for seven years. And it was during that journey, Tom, where I was working with CIOs and my team, we're working with all these companies deploying next generation wifi technology, where my co-founder and I realized that there's a big gap in the industry. And what we were seeing was enterprises were shifting to wifi as business critical networking. It was no longer nice to have, it was becoming a utility for a lot of verticals, including warehousing and manufacturing. But it's also very dynamic, meaning it has challenges, interoperability, performance issues. And so that's where we realized that we need to build a system that monitors and analyzes these dynamic networks and proactively identify performance related issues along with solutions to solving them. So my co-founder and I started Wyebot we've been doing extremely well growing at a very fast pace, but we're helping companies all over the globe deliver a system that moves from a manual reactive type of IT operations today to a proactive automated, right. We're leveraging AI technology and automation and so we've built up this business and it's doing very well.

Tom Raftery: 3:12

Interesting. Interesting. I know because I've got a wifi mesh network here at home that, from time to time, one of my kids will come to me and say, Dad is there's something wrong with the network? you know, I'm trying to play a game online with some friends and I'm having issues with the stream. And you know, for me, then I have to go to the router, check the connectivity of the router. Maybe it's as you say, it's a dynamic thing. So maybe it's a temporary, clash on some of the channels or something like that. I don't know. So I can imagine a manufacturing facility, like you say, or a warehouse, it must be a lot more complex to manage. And so, you're, , I can't imagine being the it manager there being constantly approached by employees saying the WiFi's gone down in this corner what's going on. So that's what you're helping with, right?

Roger Sands: 3:59

Absolutely Tom and yes, the good news is most folks can resonate with this type of business model, because at home, like you said, home, airports, hotels just traveling even on vacation. And it can get very frustrating, right. Even for all of us, if the wifi, cuz again, we think of it as utility now, like, lights and water and electricity. Right. If it's not reliable having intermittent issues, you're on a zoom call, you know, and, and it freezes up, that's very frustrating. Now, if you take that and move it to manufacturing, warehousing, right. Where you're delivering services and goods and inventory management is business critical and today's challenges around supply chain, right. And the constraints that we have, and so optimizing that whole business model end to end. Right. And having efficient, reliable data when you need it. And most of 'em, a lot of 'em are dependent on a business critical wifi environment, but you can't just go over to the, you know, the router, as you mentioned and reset the route or whatever. Right. You're talking warehouses and, you know, manufacturing facilities that have tens or hundreds of access points. Right. The word we like to use at Wyebot is dynamic, so everything can run fine for day, weeks, months. I mean, the wifi technology is great technology, but Tom boy, at any point in time, you can have that intermittent issue, it could be interference, it could be network design, channel planning, it can be interoperability. And so, these are very, very challenging and time consuming. As you mentioned in complex environments like manufacturing warehouses to solve those issues. So we said we built a system that does all that automatically.

Tom Raftery: 5:45

Okay. What are the typical kinds of issues you find in these manufacturing or warehousing facilities that cause problems with wifi?

Roger Sands: 5:55

It's incredible. Right? Because the list is it's a long one and it's a great question. You know, let me give you some of the more common scenarios right for your listening audience. So one is interference. Wifi is an unlicensed spectrum. Now there's benefits to that in the sense that it's pervasive, it's cost effective. So there's tremendous value in having something that's unlicensed and pervasive, but at the same time, There's all kinds of devices out there. They could be neighbors, right? Yes. Manufacturing, warehousing, they could be in an industrial technology park. You know, you could have residential neighbors. Tom is, all it takes is one of those neighbors to stream a video. Put some demand on the wifi network. And yes, if it's sharing the same airspace, the same spectrum as enterprise corporate network, you're gonna have interference, right? So interference in the wifi space and what we call the radio frequency, the RF space is very common, right? It could be neighbors, it could be personal devices like hotspots that someone turns on their smartphone, cuz users are getting comfortable and used to that. Right. Because when they travel around. They'll turn on a hotspot to have reliable connectivity. It could be items that are not even wifi related, especially in warehousing and manufacturing, where you could have motors, microwave ovens in the break rooms, Bluetooth headsets. So all these types of devices can cause what we call interference in the wifi spectrum and so how does IT, proactively get a handle on all this? Because again, if a microwave comes on, it may be only on for two minutes, right? Someone's heating up their lunch, right. At break, which is fine. Right. But that two minutes can cause a lot of disruption, depending on where it's located, the network design etc. So interference is one of the top ones. Interoperability, Tom is another one we'd like to talk about where there's a lot of wifi clients, right? It could be barcode scanners, tablets used, you know, for process control, robots. Yeah. Yeah. All these types of devices and. They all have different technology, different generations of technology, different software versions that run on the devices. And so what that creates is interoperability, where you have these type of devices and they don't always work seamlessly all the time with access points, controllers, or even their neighbors. Right. So there's a number of challenges, Tom, but interoperability, and interference, right? When we say interoperability, client, reliable client connectivity, roaming, those are some of the more challenging and common ones we see in manufacturing and warehousing.

Tom Raftery: 8:59

Left field question. If it's unlicensed spectrum, does that mean that there's a possibility to proactively go and interfere with somebody's network and sabotage it?

Roger Sands: 9:10

Yeah. So it's not, quote legal in the sense that causing disruption on anybody's business, whether it's sabotaged from wifi or some threat or attack, right. So ethical and legal, but it has happened. It's not common. Of course, thank God. But it has happened where yes, there's been scenarios where individuals have created interference, artificial interference or noise in an area which is disrupted in environment, right? So this is what's fundamental about wifi and it was a great topic you mentioned, cuz that would, we'd call that a security threat, right? A security challenge and in wifi, because it's dynamic, it's constantly changing. And so Tom, the IT organization can spend the time to prepare and plan and build out a very strong and powerful wifi network that's designed well channel planning is important, right? Heat maps, RF planning, but once it's on the operational side and the network's running all these other factors that you're starting to bring up, including security threats can come into play. And so that's where a system that's analyzing those environments 24 by seven, we call it wifi automation. Wifi automation, where we're leveraging automation, just like we're doing in manufacturing, warehousing, a lot of'em are moving to automated processes to streamline and make that more efficient. Wyebot's doing the same thing with IT? We're helping providing solutions to help IT be on top of those security challenges and the interference, etc.

Tom Raftery: 10:53

Okay. And the situation today is that maybe there's somebody or some device that's connected to the network and they suddenly find that they can't connect to the network. Like I say, it might be a dynamic issue, lasts a couple of minutes and then it's fixed again. It rights itself or not. How does Wyebot help in that situation?

Roger Sands: 11:15

Yeah. Excellent question. So, Tom, just to summarize our system, we have IoT sensors. Okay. So the IoT sensors they get deployed in a warehouse, in a manufacturing location. Okay. And so, because we have dedicated IoT sensors that are vendor agnostic, right. We're completely independent. Right. And so those are monitoring the entire wifi spectrum 24 by seven. And so they're able to look for, like you said, unauthorized devices on the network. They're able to look for interference like microwaves and neighbors, right? Interoperability issues between legacy clients, channel planning, changes and challenges. Right? So the good news is because we have these IoT sensors, they're able to dedicate their time on wifi automation, and that's all they're doing. And then they report it to a very intuitive dashboard with alarms and alerts. So now manufacturing IT, right, they can get a proactive alert to say an event has occurred, go right to the dashboard. We tell you what the event was, as well as a solution for solving it.

Tom Raftery: 12:32

Okay. Very good. Very good. And. Does the fact that now we've hit wifi version six, which has lower latency, which is higher tolerance, higher security, all these kind of things much better than every previous version of wifi. Does that mean that there's no longer any need for Wyebot?

Roger Sands: 12:55

That's another very good question. You know, and you would, you would hope so in the sense that not Wyebot, but for the industry, unfortunately that's not reality. And let me give you a couple of examples, why. Okay. Sure. Each time we transition to a new wifi standard, right? Wifi, five wifi six, Wifi, six is coming. Right. And then wifi seven is in the works. So sure. Each one of these progressions. Is gonna increase security. In most cases it's gonna increase performance. So it's a tremendous gain in the industry. We're maturing the technology. We're making it faster, more secure and, and enable more applications to run on higher density applications. But at the same time, anytime you transition from one technology to the next, it opens up all kinds of interoperability issues. Interpretation issues. Let me give you an example. The wifi standard, right is an IEEE document it's over 4,000 pages, long 4,000 pages. Right?

Tom Raftery: 14:35

It's like "War and Peace".

Roger Sands: 14:36

Yeah, exactly. So every time there's a new standard coming out again, yes. It's improving the technology. That's uh, that's great news, but at the same time, it creates more challenges because we have to do backwards compatibility. Each one of the vendors that are deploying the new technology, whether it's the client side or the AP side, they have to roll out this new technology. And it's new to the whole industry and trying to follow every nuance of the standard is challenging. And so it creates interoperability issues. It creates backwards compatibility issues. So, to answer your question, we actually see more challenges as the newer technology comes out because it's getting more and more complex from an implementation point of view. Does that make sense, Tom?.

Tom Raftery: 15:23

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. It does. It does. And then what about things like 5g? I mean, we're seeing the rollout of 5g, not just from cell towers, but also now you can have private 5g networks in places like manufacturing facilities and warehouses precisely often, precisely because of the issues with wifi. Are people going to switch to 5g completely and dump wifi, or are people going to have a hybrid environment or, and if they do dump wifi and go all in on 5g, does that mean Wyebot is again, no longer fit for purpose or required or any of these things?

Roger Sands: 16:04

Yeah. So we see a couple of things. One, there will be some manufacturing, uh, facilities and locations that just stay on wifi. Right. And the reason for that is like you mentioned, the private, you know, networks, um, there's a cost associated with that, so is an infrastructure cost and the potentially a licensing cost. And so there are larger companies, right? That'll leverage more of the private 5g, 4g, et cetera, as a number of technologies there. So we'll see a combination. We'll see some, just stay with wifi because of the expenditures, the costs associated with deploying that technology. And then we'll see others where combination of both. We don't see, I don't believe and if you look at the analysts out there, that's gonna be one over the other that becomes the norm. There's tremendous value in the wifi. As I mentioned earlier on this podcast, because it's pervasive because it's cost effective. Right? And so it's in all the technology and all the devices today. Whereas, you know, you know, cellular is not in all robots and IoT sensors and you know, it's not a pervasive technology from that point of view. And so the performance levels, right. Of a, a local area network, you can get higher performance, but there's some advantages on latency, right? With the new 5g. There's some excellent technology that's built in to reduce latency for, so for latency critical services within manufacturing, then 4g 5g, right. Could be very valuable. So to answer your question, no, we see a combination of both in manufacturing, warehousing indefinitely, and again, a lot of the customers will just continue to standardize on wifi because of their cost associated with it rolling the 4g 5g.

Tom Raftery: 17:54

Okay. And will you chase down 5g and add that to your portfolio of network scanning as well? Or are you just going to stick with wifi alone?

Roger Sands: 18:05

That's a good question as well. And I, I don't want to get into too much confidentiality in terms of products and solutions and platforms that we're developing. But what I would say is our architecture, when we built Wyebot was we call it uh, it, it independent the technology, right? So we focus today, primarily on wifi, and wired, do a lot of wired capabilities because that's where the biggest pain point is. And we have tremendous need and we're growing very fast. But as we continue to expand the company, we do plan to expand wireless technologies. And doesn't necessarily mean just 4g, 5g is other technology used in manufacturing, warehouses and other verticals. So, we built a system, built an architecture, AI technology, edge computing that we can put in other technologies to feed the system. So stay tuned cuz as we move forward in the life cycle of Wyebot, there'll be new technologies coming to market.

Tom Raftery: 19:08

Fantastic. Great, great, great. Are there any good customer stories you can tell of, you know, customers that you had who had an issue and Wyebot managed to resolve it for them?

Roger Sands: 19:20

Yeah. I mean we have quite a few because of our installed base now is tremendous, right? We're the market leader when it comes to wifi automation and we do a lot in manufacturing, warehousing. But again, because we're vertical agnostic, as well as vendor agnostic, we are Tom in a lot of different verticals. Right. We do a lot in healthcare. We do a lot in education, et cetera. So, I'll give you an example of one where, what makes this market so interesting is the explosion of IoT devices, internet of things. And this is just a feedback for your audience, right? Within the manufacturing warehousing scenario. And I'm gonna get to my use case. There's gonna be an explosion of devices, So today it might be relatively contained, maybe some, again, barcode scanners for inventory, right. Or maybe some have robots or tablets, like I mentioned earlier. But going forward, there's so much value in what's coming into the industry for sensor technology, right. For monitoring inventory control automatically. There's a lot of devices coming in. So, one of the areas, including you mentioned, we were talking earlier about the heat wave you're having over there. The green initiative, right. So building automation, again, completely independent from. The day to day quote, manufacturing inventory, but the green initiative to save energy, right? If there's certain times of the day where the facility's not being used and you want to control lighting and heating, et cetera. And so we are working with a customer and they had thermostats, right. It was a green initiative. So they had thermostats that were controlled via wifi and for building automation. And the thermostat was losing connectivity to the network intermittently, you know, maybe every third week. Right. And you can imagine how painful this was because a, it was only once or twice a month. And of course IT is not there when this is happening, but once it lost connectivity, now you had, you didn't have control over that, temperature of that location. And so, this particular customer worked on this scenario for a couple of months, trying to find the issue, working with the infrastructure the AP vendor found out about Wyebot put our solution in right immediately when it happened the next time Wyebot was able to capture the information, provide the details, what was causing the interoperability issue and able to work and solve the problem quickly. So that's one that's got to do with green initiative. It's you know, independent, but just shows you the dynamic nature of what we're dealing with.

Tom Raftery: 22:00

Very good. Very good. And where to from here, I mean, obviously your ultimate aim is global domination, but between here and global domination, what are your plans?

Roger Sands: 22:11

So, we're intensely focused, everybody on my team is on helping IT organizations with these complex problems. Right? And so we leverage our automation, we leverage our AI. So we're gonna continue as a company to expand our AI technology, because that's really bringing tremendous value. We have patents in this space. And so building out the AI technology. We are heavily focused today in the US, but we've already expanded aggressively in Europe. So today we're North America with customers in Europe, but we're expanding quickly into Europe as we speak. So we have a couple of growth initiatives, right? One is European market. Two, continue to expand our vertical presence. I mentioned how we're very strong in manufacturing, warehousing, healthcare, and education. But there's a lot of other verticals, right? In terms of retail and hospitality that have a need for our solution. So as a company, we're expanding, we're building out, you know, the resources and the teams to support additional vertical focus as we move forward. So improving the technology to maintain leadership, we're launching wifi six E six E I know you mentioned wifi 6 but we like to be on the cutting edge. So we've got a wifi six E solution that we're launching this fall. So we have a solution in the six gigahertz space as well. So expanding the technology as well as expanding the solutions into the different verticals, in the US and Europe.

Tom Raftery: 23:49

Fantastic. Cool. Cool. Roger, we're coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, is there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had. Any aspect of this, we haven't touched on that. You think it's important for people to be aware of?

Roger Sands: 24:03

Yeah, Tom, a couple of items and I touched on it, but I wanna reiterate it again. IT organizations are planning for today in the future, right. They're mapping out strategies on how to keep their operations running efficiently. As we know there's a global supply chain challenge right now in terms of getting components and staffing, and there's a lot of challenges. And so having an efficient end to end process, A lot of the companies that relies on networking and wifi and wired and so what I will say is those networks, as I mentioned, are gonna get more complex. There's gonna be more digital technology, more devices, IoT, devices, and sensors coming into the environment. So I would strongly encourage IT organizations to have a plan around this. Think about how you can expand your capabilities with automation, whether it's with Wyebot or somebody else, Right. but how to build that out and have automation is a key component, just like they do on the manufacturing process side. Right. They're moving to more and more automation, same thing with IT, moving to automation, because as you mentioned, the technology's gonna keep expanding, six E brings a whole new wifi spectrum cellular, right? The technology is gonna keep expanding, which is gonna create more challenges. So from, solution point of view from an industry point of view that's an area to focus on. One quick valuable point for Wyebot for a moment is we offer free trials, no obligation, because we wanna help. We wanna show how a system like Wyebot can save time and money, right? ROI is very quick because once you have automation in place, you're gonna get proactive alerts. Like you mentioned, as soon as a robot loses connectivity and why it lost connectivity and how to solve it. We always provide solutions. So it's a game changer in terms of time and efficiencies for the rest organizations, Wyebot provides free trials. So we will send out a system, no obligation and they can run it live in their environment, see it in action and then make a business decision, whether it makes sense for them or not. If it doesn't. Just ship it back. Nope. And that's fine. But if they see the value and it makes sense, then they can make a decision on when and if to add it into their portfolio.

Tom Raftery: 26:28

Cool. Cool. I must get one of those and monitor our network. So our, our son's streaming is never interrupted.. Kidding. Super Roger. That's been really interesting if people want to know more about yourself, Roger Sands, or about Wyebot or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Roger Sands: 26:48

I would start with a website, just because we have links to the senior management team there, including myself, we have white papers and documents and use cases. We have an overview of the solution and right on the website is where they can just go in and sign up for free trial. Just. A quick form to fill out, just put the information in and someone will get back to them right away and set up a free trial. So it's www.wyebot.com, W Y E B OT wyebot.Com and that'll have the most information. My name is Roger Sands. You can reach me at R. Sands S SA NDS at wyebot.com. So if anybody wants to reach out directly to me, that's fine. Answer questions, or just jump on a call or have someone on my team, jump on a call. So either email our rsands@wyebot.com or just go to the website, we have a lot of content there to help for customers to understand what wifi automation is all about.

Tom Raftery: 27:46

Fantastic. Fantastic. Roger, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Roger Sands: 27:50

My pleasure. It was great to be involved in this and we'd love to help out some of your customers.

Tom Raftery: 27:56

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sap.com/digital supply chain, or, or simply drop me an email to Tom dot Raftery @sap.com. If you like the show, please, don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application at choice to get new episodes, as soon as they are published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.