MR. BAHL: Yeah, look, so let me first start by just saying that some of the obstacles to your point over the
past ten years. So, you know, back in 2010, analysts were saying 20 billion devices by 2020, 25 billion devices by 2020, and then the first five years of the last decade was terribly disappointing, right? In fact, Cisco had a study
published around 2016 or 2017 just before I joined KORE that said that almost two thirds of all proof of concepts and prototypes in IoT are failing or stalling or not delivering in the business case, right?
And the reasons for all of that are everything from lack of expertise and resources, knowledge of IoT, to the complexity, as you just already talked about, of
the multiple protocols needed. Theres regulatory issues and compliance issues. Theres a fragmentation of the ecosystem. In fact, a consulting firm has done the study that said on average for an enterprise to launch just one IoT solution,
sort of an end-to-end IoT solution, you need up to 18 partners. I mean, its crazy, you know. Its really hard. If one of your industrial customers, a
manufacturer, wants to send out a product and sell that product in 20 markets, 40 markets, 50 markets, 50 countries over the world, they know firsthand how painful that is because they would have to deal with 80, 100, maybe more carriers because you
want to have two to three carriers per country. And by the way, thats two or three SIM cards in their assembly line.
Now, thats over a
hundred SKUs, right? I mean, its impossible to get those forecasts right, and mistakes happen, wrong SIMs get sent into the device or a connected product is going to the wrong country, the cost of that, the customer abrasion of that, it is
really, really interesting how, you know, this massive opportunity to provide connected products that all of us as consumers want is actually quite hard to deliver.
So uniquely what CORE does on the connectivity side, first of all, I already talked about, right? So we can connect you anywhere in those countries. Instead
of talking to a hundred carriers, getting a hundred bills, calling a hundred people for support, signing on to a hundred platforms every day, you sign on to one at KORE, and we manage all of that for you.
Now, whats even more exciting because this is the front end, this is the connectivity management side of the story. The back end, the SKUs, the
hundred SKUs, were solving that problem by being one of the leading global eSIM providers, right? Just like Apple is pushing eSIM on the consumer side, we are driving the innovation of eSIM to the GSMA standards where you can put just one
smart car into your connected product, it wakes up with a bootstrap anywhere in the world, and then we can download over the air. So its an in-field, you know, update process, right? So thats the
connectivity side of that equation.
And now of course theres solutions and analytics side of the story. So let me say specifically, look, I know,
as you said, there are other providers popping up around the manufacturing and IIoT space of course because some analysts believe, and we believe, that 40 percent or more of those connected 75 billion devices will be on factory floors and
industrial and certainly smart buildings, smart cities, smart apps as a part of that.
So the things we are focused on Lucian, is, look, were not
focused on the very large enterprises, right? Those guys can spend millions of dollars on Accenture or somebody coming in, and then of course expensive products and a suite of technology, but that next tier of manufacturers who are looking for a low
cost pragmatic way to really make Industry 4.0 happen for them, right? Thats where we are singularly focused, getting your PLCs and controllers talking to very low cost, highly effective devices that can be connected from an IoT wireless type
standpoint. Put your dashboards and your apps on any cloud you want, AWS, Azure, wherever youd like, pragmatic, low cost, bring you into the decade of or into the, you know, era of Industry 4.0, thats what were focused on.
MR. FOGOROS: Thank you for those insights, and we look forward to follow the progress. I want to kind of close with one piece of advice youd give a
startup that may want to go in this direction with IoT connectivity and drones, and how do you extract more value for the end users out there?