Transcript 0:00 [on hold music] It is very dangerous to base your company's technology buying decisions on predictions alone. As business owners, we need to do our homework. We need to do our due diligence. 0:16 We need to do our research. And if a prediction is wrong, and often they are, predictions are often wrong, your company could be making a significantly bad buying decision based solely on that prediction. 0:31 [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. Hello, listeners, and welcome to today's edition of The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:48 I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. Today, I want to talk about something that got me thinking since the election. 0:56 I'm not talking about politics, but I do want to talk about how dangerous it is to base company decisions solely on analyst predictions. If nothing else, we all learned a lot from this year's election. 1:13 First, they can be way off and terribly wrong. Second, let me be clear, I'm not here to pick on the analysts, so that's first. 1:23 Second, many analysts do an amazing job, but this year's election's numbers were very wrong. They were terribly wrong. 1:33 It proves my point, no company should ever, and I mean ever, make a decision without doing some due diligence first. I've said this for years. No one ever holds analysts' feet to the fire. 1:46 And when they are wrong, companies have made big decisions based on grandiose predictions. But we need to do our homework first. And I will get into this here in just a minute. 1:58 But first, I have a great lineup of a couple of guests here. First on the show, I will be interviewing Janez Pufery, Chief Technologist for HPE Pointnext Services. 2:09 And then I'm going to wrap up the show with Brian Selcer of Lefta Systems. So let's get started. Back in December of twenty eighteen, everyone was predicting strong economic growth. 2:22 As one example, let me tell you, the construction industry was the strongest it had been in years. 2:29 Back then, I kept asking everyone I was interviewing one key question, "How long would we ride this current economic wave?" Everybody was so elated. 2:40 Based on what I was hearing and what people were saying, I was seeing the opposite. I knew from years of experience from being in the industry that this bubble was going to burst. 2:51 I could feel it coming and my interviews were giving me clues that it wasn't as rosy as everybody was saying. 3:00 By the time twenty twenty rolled around, some of the economists started to reveal the year might start to be somewhat slowing down in work. 3:10 Now, naturally, no one saw the global pandemic on the-- was coming or what was going to be causing the downturn. 3:18 But looking to the future, I will say unless the infrastructure bill had passed, I do believe we will see another downturn here in the United States. But my point here is this, I did do my research. 3:34 I did do my due diligence. I didn't base projections on making predictions alone. I talked to the people in the industry. I talked to those in the trenches. I talked to the contractors and the manufacturers. 3:49 I did my homework beyond just making predictions. And guess what? When I predicted the downturn, I called it correctly based on real data, based on real trends. 4:03 Whatever happened during the elections, the analysts, and I'm not sure who exactly they are to what and who make these predictions, and that can be downright dangerous and sad. And it was. 4:19 Look, these analysts got it wrong. They got it sorely wrong. And let me give you an example of another point that I want to make here. Big predictions that didn't pan out. 4:32 Now, I'm not sure how this all goes about and what you might be thinking, but now I'm sure those of you in the Internet of Things space know which ones I'm going to dig into when I talk about it in just a minute. 4:44 Back in April of twenty ten, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg declared that by twenty twenty there would be fifty billion devices connected to the web. 4:55 Now, I'm not just picking on Ericsson here, or I'm not picking on any one company, but I want to make my point. 5:02 But I have always thought when vendors make predictions, it makes them somewhat vulnerable because here's why. They have to live up to those predictions. What will their customers think if they're wrong? 5:16 Like the analysts who, who gets it wrong most of the time, the analysts get it wrong because nobody ever goes back to those predictions. And they sometimes interview just a few hundred companies. 5:29 I don't know how many companies. I don't know, and frankly, that's not my point. My point again is about predictions. But then again, who holds the anal- analysts responsible for making these very large predictions? 5:41 Think about analysts who make big money. They make a lot of money based on these predictions. They are kind of like the weather people. 5:50 They can get it fifty percent of the time right and fifty percent of the time wrong, but they still have their job. Sign me up. Okay, I digress. But my point is fifty billion devices. 6:02 This prediction is also often attributed to Cisco. Now, againThink about this. 6:09 In April twenty eleven, Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group published a report to the same effect, saying that there would be fifty billion devices connected to the internet by twenty twenty. Now, IDC agreed. 6:24 Many of the analysts made similar big predictions about how many devices will be connected by twenty twenty. 6:33 The reason I'm referencing that fifty billion devices number is because it was splashed on nearly every presentation I sat through in conferences roughly f- a decade ago, okay? 6:46 When I started in the M2M space, I called that prediction out, and I said, "What are we basing that on?" And I'll call it out again now. 6:55 Part of the problem here is adoptions rates for a new technology tend to surge, and after initial introduction period, everybody makes high predictions. 7:06 If you think about it, back in twenty ten or in twenty eleven, the Internet of Things was a burgeoning market, and it still is. It was experiencing significant growth at that time, and everybody was on the hype wagon. 7:21 But as with any technology, being able to maintain that type of growth is difficult because there's a lot of unknowns. Factors arise that stall the progress. Markets reach saturation points. 7:35 The understanding, new regulations arise. Standards change. New advances emerge. To give you some context just how large that prediction is, today there are roughly seven point eight billion people in the world. 7:52 Now, I know what you're thinking. To get to that fifty billion, everyone only needs to have six or seven connected devices. That's pretty easy, right? 8:03 And looking around my room right now, I have probably, I don't know, connected my watch, Alexa, everything to her. 8:11 Maybe you're now looking around your manufacturing plant or your construction job site, and you see dozens or hundreds of connected devices. Maybe. Maybe you're seeing it. That is possible. 8:27 But we have to remember, only roughly fifty-nine percent of the global population are active internet users today right now. We forget that where we are in the world. 8:40 While some have many connections, others have few or none at all. We live in our own little bubble, people. 8:50 Another problem here is this: particular prediction assumed that most devices would be connected by twenty twenty. And yes, as I always say, the opportunities are endless, and innovation is endless. 9:04 We could connect everything. But just because we can connect it doesn't mean it will happen or that we want to connect it. 9:13 Some businesses aren't ready to make that move, and maybe they're slow, and maybe the problem is they need to. Here's another way to look at it. It is twenty twenty, but guess what? We also have a pandemic. 9:26 Do we have fifty billion connected devices? Nope. In fact, both Ericsson and Cisco have backpedaled on their predictions since that time. 9:39 Ericsson is now predicting that by twenty fifty there will be twenty-four billion interconnected devices. 9:48 In Cisco's Annual Internet Report, it is predicting there will be twenty-nine point three billion networked devices by twenty twenty-three. 9:59 Part of the problem here stems from how we define things, but perhaps that is a different podcast for a different day. I don't want to digress either too far for today's episode. 10:13 I have given you one example today of how predictions can go way off, or maybe I've given you many things to think about. But this is true of any prediction: sensors, artificial intelligence, digital twin, the edge, 10:30 5G, what we're gonna do in the cloud. You name it. It applies to anything and everything. Okay, so my point is this, and it always is my opinion, and it's going to be my opinion for today. 10:46 It is very dangerous to base your company's technology buying decisions on predictions alone. As business owners, we need to do our homework. We need to do our due diligence. We need to do our research. 11:02 And if a prediction is wrong, and often they are, predictions are often wrong, your company could be making a significantly bad buying decision based solely on that prediction. 11:15 You might be left in some truly hot water, if not bankrupt. Don't let that happen to you because you know what? You could find yourself spending an awful lot of money and going nowhere. So here's the other thing. 11:28 Take all these predictions with a grain of salt. In fact, challenge them like I often do, and I know the analysts get very angry with me. I'm not here to pick on the analysts. 11:40 I'm here to make you think about what your next investment is. I'm not saying any of them are wrong about what their intent is. What I'm saying is ask the tough questions when presented with these predictions. 11:54 Talk to your customers. Read case studies about others in the industry that have done the same thing you are interested in doing. Collaborate with others because you know what? Listen to these podcasts that I'm doing. 12:08 Listen to my live show. Read articles. Just do your homework. If you base it on predictions, they're going to be wrong. Take the time. Technology is changing fast and exponentially. Don't get caught up in the hype. 12:24 It could result in a very successful technology deployment for sure. But guess what? 12:31 If you just base it on what you hear the growth is going to be, you're going to find out you're gonna be left in the cold, if not in trouble. 12:40 My goal here is to help you invest in technology because I believe in technology. I believe in sustainability. I believe in a circular economy. 12:50 But more importantly, for all of these things, don't base everything that you're doing just on predictions alone, and those are the things that we're here to help you with. 13:00 All right, listeners, I'm out of time for this segment. But remember, check out my website at connectedworld.com or The Peggy Smedley Show at thepeggysmedleyshow.com. 13:08 But most importantly, I want you to tweet at me at connectedwmag. All right. This is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. 13:16 Remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. We will be right back after this commercial break. [upbeat music]
