Q&A: Talking IoT with Telus

The coming year is poised bring about new developments and changes in the worlds of technology and telecommunications. While a number these twists and turns will seemingly come out of nowhere, at least one predictable trend is that the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) will grow as a market and a presence in people's lives. Telus Corp. recently launched what it calls Telus IoT Marketplace, offering several applications to help automate operations in diverse industries including transportation, retail and restaurants. While big telecom players BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc. have been battling it out in the media space — online streaming services are the latest big thing — Telus has been sitting out that fight, instead making forays into areas such as IoT and network connectivity in the health-care sector. Telus, no doubt, sees much opportunity in IoT, having commissioned a report by International Data Corp. released earlier this year that found, among other things, the IoT market in Canada will quadruple in value to $21 billion from 2013 to 2018. The Wire Report recently chatted by phone with Shawn Sanderson, appointed in September to the newly created position of vice-president of Internet of Things at Telus. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation: Telus seems to be making a big push into the Internet of Things market. Why is Telus putting so much emphasis on IoT? We've been looking at the strategic importance of the machine space for a number of years. During that time, we built a market-leading practice in the fleet space. The next step was: How do we take what we're doing in those types of spaces and really grow that. And you look at the studies that were put together by IDC, obviously there's a huge potential there. I think we felt that due to our structure and our organization, and how we focus on the customer and the goal of improving business and making consumers' lives better, it fit really well into, not only our strategy, but also the opportunity for growth. Is getting into IoT a way to differentiate Telus from the major telecom companies that are competing in the media business, an area Telus has so far avoided? It goes back to the size of the addressable market. The media industry, which is really interesting, has a fairly finite size in what you can do with the space. Even if you look at the total size of the growth and what's going on in the U.S. in mainstream media, digital media and then what's available in the Canadian marketplace, it's pretty limited. You can make some pretty big bets, but the growth in that industry is pretty fixed. Consumers aren't necessarily spending more; they're just spending in different places. With IoT, it's a completely new spend and it really is incremental. People and businesses aren't being asked to buy a brand-new solution. We're trying to take the concept of: What has already been invested; how do we make that better? And how do we incrementally add something that either improves that existing data or information, or incrementally bring more value by adding on to it? In the next couple of years, how significant a proportion of Telus' business is IoT expected to become? It's hard to provide a number on that. We don't break out some of those business units. I can tell you that we do believe these numbers and the expected growth rate of the adoption of IoT in Canada. And we do recognize that the $21 billion is not only business but also on the consumer side of IoT. And why it's important for us is that IoT is a visionary concept. There are a lot of pieces that come along with that — the connectivity, the solutions, the interconnectivity across various pieces. All of these things are quite natural to the Telus business and they actually all wrap around many of the things we do today with our customers. So IoT is not just simply a new business line for us and we'll go to market and create a new revenue stream. It's also the ability to better service our customers across all of the things that we do today. A lot of IoT seems to be about solutions offered to industries, like oil-and-gas or transportation fleets. Are there IoT products you have available right now or things coming up in the near future that will be offered specifically to consumers? Now that we've built quite a robust fleet business — not only from Telus' perspective, but worldwide there's a lot of fleet applications — a lot of companies are now looking at how to address the connected-car side, which is the consumer space. You see a lot of the OEMs in the car industry, they're putting in connected-car solutions. But when consumers are going to start having these in their hands is still probably three to four years out. One of the companies that we've worked closely with, that is exclusive to Telus in Canada, is Mojio , out of Vancouver here. What they started doing is building an ecosystem of applications, and also providing an app platform so that anybody else can build on top of what they've put into the car, and they've made it very open. You can start with a family-management applications and you can have a mileage-tracking thing if you were a person who had a business in a personal vehicle. You can have security offerings, usage-based insurance, and then we start adding things like streaming services from media companies. It seems businesses are being presented with this option of the Internet of Things to make their operations more efficient. Consumers aren't really being marketed to in that way. To some degree, that's related to our vision. Our vision isn't about giving the customer 100 more things to buy. It is about taking what they do today and making their lives easier from having access to things that they didn't have before. A lot of the investment does come out of the business side. It's not about consumers spending more money on more services. It is about businesses doing a better job and adding incremental services, but not necessarily saying: "OK. We've completely changed the world and here's five new things that you must have." The vision of IoT is there will be more and more things connected around you which will improve you life, but it's not necessary that you have to go out and make huge investments to become IoT connected. It's not like you walk into Best Buy and say, "I want to buy some IoT stuff." That's probably not what consumers are ever going to see in the IoT space. What are some of the IoT apps that are making a big impact now or are going to in the near future? We have an interesting partner called Blue Rover, and they designed things around sensors and they've got a data-collection platform and they got a reporting engine, and all of this has complete customization. They're providing leak-detection services for municipalities. They can leakages in pipes within the municipality and pinpoint the amount that's being leaked and where the location is that needs repair. That's an interesting application, but because of the way they've built it, that same application has the ability to be used by, for example, the local school division, and they'll be able to give access tags to students location and if they're not at school or if they're lost. And that could be used by the local SPCA for lost animals, or it could be used for other data-collection services. — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca

Q&A: Talking IoT with Telus

News | December 19, 2014

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Q&A: Talking IoT with Telus

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