George West conducted interviews of industry leaders. These were published in the WTRS Newsletter on a regular basis.
| Vasily Suvorov – CEO of Meshnetics 1. Can you tell us a bit about your personal background? My name is Vasiliy Suvorov and I am CEO of MeshNetics. I have been involved with technology since I was sixteen, when I started my software development career. The first software I created did the file translation between the ancient operating system called DR DOS and MS DOS at one Russian enterprise. They had a large park of DR DOS machines that they had been converting into IBM PCs, and they needed a special utility that would allow them to read the old floppy disks and automatically translate the encoding and file structure. It was my first commercial success. That was back in the Perestroyka days, which was an interesting period. I completed studies at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, where I majored in Computer Science and Mathematics. Parallel to my studies I started to work for a major telecom company where I was responsible for developing software, running the call center applications and integrating them with the paging and billing system. The company was very focused on being successful on the market and early in my career I learned to make sure that technology is used in the right places and that disparate systems and applications need to work together to support business goal on time and within the budget. One of the killer apps for us at the time, was alphanumeric paging (pretty much like sms text messages today) and on New Year’s Eve, a traditional time in Russia when family members and friends send message at midnight with New Year’s wishes – it is tough to deliver 100s of thousands of messages within 2-minute time frame. You quickly learn to build scalable and resilient architectures if you don’t want to spend all your time on the phone with angry customers. That early experience and follow-on years in complex systems development helped me to grow a very pragmatic attitude to technology and brought out the importance of team and project management, quality, and real value creation for customers. I certainly try to bring that understanding and experience to Meshnetics. I am a father of two toddlers, a boy and a girl. I try spending with them as much time as I can. I enjoy reading and outdoor activities, such as sailing and fishing. 2. Who is Meshnetics? MeshNetics has an interesting background. It grew out of a completely different effort. I joined the IBS (Information Business Systems), the largest IT holding in Russia, in 1999. I was hired because of my ability to be a very efficient project manager, combining management skills with the technical knowledge and understanding of customer requirements. Around that time, IBS was in the process of setting up a new company to challenge the Indian dominance in the lucrative IT outsourcing market. The customers that we were going after were companies like Boeing and IBM, renowned for their sophisticated processes and high standards of excellence. IBS faced the formidable challenges of putting together teams qualified to meet such clients’ rigid requirements and delivering quality solutions on time. We had to put processes in place, build the team, work closely with the customers, and learn to understand their needs. We have discovered that we created the engagement model when we really help clients to better understand the problem. This is crucial in creating any software. By asking the right questions, you can find out the actual reason why a customer is asking for a particular functionality and offer an even better solution than they hoped for. When you see the complete picture, you can translate it into a coherent software architecture. And that’s the second step to success; the first step being how your team is built. That was the engagement model we used as we built the company, called Luxoft, from the ground up. The model proved to be very successful over the years. Luxoft became the #1 company in Eastern Europe in IT outsourcing, enlisted clients like Deutsche Bank and Boeing, and presently competes with giants like Wipro and Infosys. Having established itself in IT outsourcing, IBS wanted to move to cutting edge technologies like application servers, XML and RFID. The idea was to leverage the successful client engagement model with expertise in emerging technologies, enabling it to be integrated with existing enterprise structure. That would help overcome the inherent limitations of the traditional IT outsourcing market. Because of my background, I was chosen to head the research team focusing on emerging technologies and try to develop market-ready products and applications based on these new technologies. One of the more promising technologies was wireless sensor networks, or ‘smart dust’ as it was known then. We saw a market potential there, and IBS was willing to make a substantial investment in this project. That’s how MeshNetics was born. It was originally called Luxoft Labs because of its origin as a research arm of Luxoft. But this name poorly reflected the market-oriented nature of the company. That’s why we came up with ‘MeshNetics’, which clearly communicates that the company is about ‘mesh networking’. We try to give memorable names to our products as well. For example, our ZigBee module, the smallest in the market, is called ‘ZigBit’. Originally it was assigned an alphanumerical part number, which customers had a hard time remembering, so that made us think of a catchier name. It helps differentiate our products and it’s all part of our philosophy of making things easier for our customers, whether it is dealing with our tech support or browsing our website. Talking about who MeshNetics is and what we do, I’d say that we are the last mile of extended internet. That’s what we do. That’s our mission. Today MeshNetics offers enabling technology to replace wires. What’s important is that this technology is based on the global standard called ZigBee. When we started there was no ZigBee, but the emerging standard called 802.15.4. From the early days we decided to adhere to open standards. Looking at how the markets develop, open standards emerge as winners. It makes it easier for a customer to adopt a new technology, since there’s less risk. We can build on a solid foundation working with our industry peers. When we joined ZigBee Alliance in 2004, there were 50 companies aboard, and now there are 200. We believe that we made right choice, as we see that the interest in ZigBee is growing. 3. What differentiates your products from the other ZigBee components being marketed today? When it comes to our product strategy and where we are going, as I said, MeshNetics is about the last mile of the extended internet. Essentially the extended internet is all about liberating data; it’s all about making the data available from hundreds of thousands, even millions of devices that perform daily functions invisible to people — such as metering and sensor devices taking measurements, industrial and access controls. This world of machines is still largely disconnected. There are closed-loop systems like SCADA. But so far, there has been virtually no standardized and economically feasible technology to connect these devices a) together and b) to the enterprise. ZigBee is all about mesh networking of low-power, low data rate devices forming self-organizing network where packets of information can be re-routed if needed. What’s also important is that it’s easy to connect these networks into existing IP networks, and thus bridges the established and emerging technologies. At MeshNetics, we wanted to offer an emerging technology that people can start using today, savings millions in investments and many hours of implementation effort. In MeshNetics, we created a team encompassing people from both worlds, which is very rare today. We have RF experts and hardware designers, as well as embedded programmers and people who understand the enterprise IT systems and web applications. These people, combining hundreds of years of experience across different fields, allow MeshNetics to make a unique value proposition to its customers. Today, most applications are about replacing the wires, but tomorrow it will be about plugging the field data into the enterprise system in order to improve business processes. We have two product lines that address these needs. The first is the ‘ZigBit’ 802.15.4/ZigBee module line, which offers what we call the ‘boot strap’ or ‘quick start’ hardware/software solution; and the ‘SensiLink’ gateway server or middleware for wireless data integration. It helps you connect the data into your existing enterprise IT system using existing interfaces, such as Web Services, OPC and others. That’s really the promise of MeshNetics and that’s where we are focused. If you look at today’s market, it is all about early adopters. There are hundreds of small to medium- sized companies that really make the market happen, creating all sorts of innovative applications. For example, in the last few months we processed over 400 customer requests. And I can tell you that these 400 requests translate into 300 distinct applications. That just gives you an idea of how fragmented the market is today. As the market matures, ZigBee as an open standard will be able to realize its full potential, connecting billions of devices every year. The education of the market is the key today, and ZigBee Alliance and its member companies are working together do a great job spreading the word and educating potential customers. Today we try to supply the products that are easy to integrate, comply with existing standards, and have built-in compatibility to upcoming standards. Today we see the demand for the relatively simple 802.15.4-based applications using star network topology, and we see the emergence of mesh networking applications. Although for the next year or year and a half, the majority of applications will be star type networks based on 15.4. We offer customers a lot of flexibility. They can develop 802.15.4 star network applications based on our module platform. If they want easy-to-use ZigBee networking, we have software stack called eZeeNet. We also have full-featured ZigBee stack called ZigBeeNet. You can think of a module as a ZigBee communication processor; a very sophisticated tiny wireless computer, with a number of various interfaces making it easier to connect this embedded computer into your products and devices. On top of that, we offer software interfaces and tools to connect to this computer. You can develop on it if you want to have a very small and agile embedded application, or simply use it as a communication co- processor by applying AT-commands. This way, you can be fully in control of the module without having to know C-language and all the bolts and nuts of how the architecture works. 4. Meshnetics appears to be accelerating its presence in the marketplace. Do you plan to continue the current pace of activity and how does this relate to your relationship with Atmel? As we are one of the few remaining independent suppliers of both ZigBee hardware and software, we place a lot of effort into our customer support. We have a dedicated team of field application engineers that help customers understand how to fit our modules into their applications, assist them with RF design, and guide them through hardware and software questions. We also have a dedicated Professional Services team for cases when customers have a more sophisticated project on hand and don’t have enough specialists to handle it. That’s where our experience in close customer engagement really helps. We’ve always been and remain a very customer-oriented company. We’ve been very fortunate to partner with one of the leading silicon companies, Atmel . As you know, Atmel is a major powerhouse in semiconductors with strong market positions in automotive, medical and other sectors. These guys ship million of chips, and they have accumulated great experience in silicon design. We now have a very close relationship with their team that designs the ZigBee chips. We certainly understand their roadmap and we are committed to one another; we hold regular meetings and reviews. With this relationship, we don’t need to get into all the intricacies of the IC design; instead, we can concentrate on what we do best, which is hardware and software systems. We see hardware and software as inseparable parts of a solution. Atmel offers us best-of-breed hardware with excellent sensitivity, translating into a better range. We also participate in the design of the next-generation chips. All this gives an intimate knowledge of Atmel hardware, which means we can offer best-of-breed software for the Atmel platform. To make things even easier for the embedded developers, we plan to make our MAC available as an open source code. That means that the developers can take advantage of the thousands of engineer-hours that we put into designing and debugging the MAC, and develop their own applications based on it. We hope that this will prove beneficial for customers and help enlarge the market for 802.15.4/ZigBee applications. Going back to our SensiLink product, it is more in the market introductory mode today. We are working with few lead customers that are exploring how they can connect the wireless data into existing systems like SCADA. That’s an exciting effort and we put a lot of creativity into it. For example, we are one of the few companies that built a mathematical model of the wireless sensor network that helps optimize the network configuration in a given setting, i.e. what types of devices you need to use, how many, in what locations, etc. The gateway server can expose the interfaces to the networks using familiar protocols, like Java, .NET, Visual Basic, OPC and more. That will help you focus on your core competency and free your IT team from trying to learn wireless mesh networking. We supply the modules for wireless connectivity and a gateway for IP connectivity. 5. Meshnetics’ chips are designed for the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Do you see demand for 868 MHz in Europe? We see that the overwhelming majority of customers need 2.4GHz, but having said that, what people may not realize is that despite being compatible the world over, it can be a crowded band with limited wall penetration. The solution here may be using the Ethernet backbone that would connect multiple networks in the building. It may also work for large networks. Imagine a large enterprise with a network containing thousands of nodes. While theoretically it is possible for the data to travel across such network, the energy losses and the increased latency would make this network inefficient. I think that 2.4GHz is the way to go, but that it should be complemented by broadband technologies when you need reliable large networks. 6. What types of sales channels are in place today for Meshnetics and how do you plan to develop them over time? MeshNetics receives a lot of valuable leads through its website, employing a number of online marketing tools, such as Google ads. We’ve also been an active participant in major industry trade shows related to wireless sensor technology. All this drives a good amount of customers to us. Our recent partnership with Atmel gave us another channel. Many customers want to use Atmel hardware, but they need modules, as opposed to chips, in order to speed up their development. We are also now talking to a few major distributors of electronic components that showed interest in distributing our modules. We realize that this is a channel that many customers prefer to use to get the needed components and tech support. We hope to be making some announcements soon about distribution channels in the US and Europe. We also have mid-term plans to increase our local presence in the United States and Europe. Right now we have a small rep office in Seattle, but we will be expanding it as our customer base is growing. As far as the geographical distribution of customers, it is mostly Europe and the United States. We primarily focus on more complex applications and we are not going after the home automation market or consumer products. We are going more after applications that have a lot of value added for the customers; applications that generate data. These applications will allow us to support customers in the future with our SensiLink middleware, when they will need connectivity with their existing IT systems. That’s really our focus today. 7. Based on your experience with customer requirements in this space, how do you think end users will adopt ZigBee technology? One thing about ZigBee today is that it’s a truly collaborative effort; when the competitor companies are working together to create the market by educating the customers. You can think of ZigBee as a universal framework that can be used for all kinds of applications from home automation all the way to industrial control. That covers a lot of different areas with very different requirements. You need to understand which parts of the framework allow you to get into which applications. The challenge within the Alliance is to make parts of the framework re- usable to meet the needs of new applications. And steps have already been taken to address this. One other thing you should remember that ZigBee is not just software, but also hardware. A chipset, module, or an end device that is using a chipset or a module and the stack is a system. In effect we have a network of distributed computers performing complex computations. The work is underway to simplify things for a developer. The latest ZigBee 2006 release does a good job in achieving that, and the upcoming releases will continue making ZigBee applications easier to use. As the hardware and software continue to improve, you will be getting better sensitivity, power consumption, more stable and secure stack supporting larger networks. All this will drive the market adoption. ZigBee simply needs a little time to build up success stories. Right now it is the only industry alliance-led effort in the market. 8. Is there anything else you would like to tell our readers as a final note? The new technologies not only help create a better product, they bring about an entire new business model. In these times, when the competition with low cost manufactures is intense, you need to think of how to offer customers an added value. That value lies in data and in business processes. This is what MeshNetics is focused on. We put a lot of efforts into it, and now we can help our partners harness the new technology and create new business models. West Technology Research Solutions, LLC © 2007 All Rights Reserved |