Ep.158 The Next Big Thing in Tech: 5G, PCN, and Starlink Explained with Ron Ireland of EPIC iO
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.
Everybody welcome back. We’re here with another new chapter for you. Today we’ve got on Mr. Ron Ireland, president of the channel at EpiciO. Ron, welcome on man. Thank you very much Josh, good to be here. So, all right everybody for today’s topic, we’re talking about the next big thing in tech 5G, PCN, which we’re going to explain and Starlink. So a lot of good stuff. We got a lot of questions for Ron. Ready to jump in man?
Let’s do it.
All right, let’s start this out with just you, right? You’ve been in this space a while. You’ve worked at some amazing companies. You’ve been at EpiciO. You guys have been building some great things, such a phenomenal supplier for us. But before we get into Epic, let’s hear about Ron. How’d you get into this field? Weird, windy, crazy path. Did you set out to do this? Take us back, man. How’d it start?
Yeah, well, did any of us set out to do this, but you’re this far in. Yeah, I actually came into the tech world through finance.
I was, early on I was a CFO of a small community bank and wanted to find a job a little closer to home. My kids were starting school. It was important for me to be nearby. And there was an opening to the startup company back when we were selling long distance minutes and DIA circuits and there’s an opportunity to join that company as a CFO. And that’s really where I started in the channel and my 28th year now working for a channel led company. And that’s the tunnel started.
I love it. And you kind of you came in at that great time where it was, you know, kind of this I core and all the Vonage kind of picking all these things up. And it was probably, I don’t know, maybe 15 years ago when you and I maybe first sat down with somewhere in somewhere in the channel partners probably somewhere somewhere in that spot, right?
That’s right. Yeah. And so really coming out of that, the early days, you know, then it was the telecom channel, right? It wasn’t tech, it was just sort of that telecom. And as we moved to IP based communications, I joined a startup company that was a UC provider that eventually was acquired by Vonage and then it goes from there, right? Vonage has obviously developed a great business practice now after having acquired those few companies.
Love it. Love it. All right. Let’s get into Epic iO. So for, you know, probably got people listening to this that know who you are and people that have never heard of Epic iO. So tell us a little bit about who Epic iO is, kind of how you’ve come together, how you go to market and give us a little bit of a commercial. We’ll get into products here in a little bit, but maybe start us off high level, kind of how it’s come together.
Sure. Epic iO may be a new name to some, we’ve been really marketing ourselves under that name for three years. Four years ago, Epic iO acquired a couple different companies, one, Broad Sky Networks, which may be familiar to some. We were a 20 year old company doing primarily wireless connectivity, started early with satellite and then 3G, 4G, 5G, sort of followed that evolution.
And combined Broad Sky Networks with a company called IntelliSight. IntelliSight was an AI and IoT provider, also about 20 years old. And the combination of those two really gave us a full suite, right? So everything from your wireless connectivity through IoT devices to the AI layering on top of that with a software package called Deep Insights. And Epic iO was born as a new name encompassing those companies. And we’ve really just been going to market now, really primarily through the advisory channel and partners like to ours. So
how, how do you feel, I guess, if there’s somebody that looks similar to you, maybe some of the, some of the products, some of the things, how do you want partners to just at least at a starting point before we get into some of the product differentiation? How do you want them to think about how you guys stand out yourselves? We
really pride ourselves in, in our history and wireless connectivity. And we’ve sort of seen it all. And we take an engineering first approach to delivering any product that relies on wireless connectivity. And whether that’s, you know, the POTS replacement today, you think about that, you think there’s a lot of companies that are in that space, but not a lot of companies that have the experience we take. And we’re really proud of that.
And so we know that we can, can do those things and provide the kind of customer experience that your partners expect.
I love it. All right, so let’s, let’s talk about lessons learned here. So think mentor, think, think, think about what you’re doing. And then we’ll talk about how you’re doing that. And we’ll talk about how you’re doing that. So let’s, let’s talk about lessons learned here. So think mentor, think big mistake that you made and got in trouble for, I don’t care, whatever you want to pull from, for everybody listening in on the last, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. What’s, what’s your lesson learned?
Big lesson learned. I was lucky enough to have a great mentor early on in my career. And not everybody gets that. But I was fortunate. And he was a big,
he was just one of those servant leaders that really understood how to develop a team and how to develop individuals, how to encourage you to do your best set high expectations, but was one of those guys who was happiest when he, when his team was developing and advancing.
And so if he spent four years mentoring you and you moved on to a better opportunity, he couldn’t have been more happy. And I think that’s just been a great lesson from for from a leadership standpoint of developing the people around me, making sure I’m surrounding myself with the right people. And that’s just been a great key to success.
Awesome. Yeah. All right. It’s time to open up the, what do we have in the jacket today from a product perspective, right?
So you guys have a lot of good stuff, right? We’re talking about, as we get into this, we’re talking about 5G, we’re talking about Starlink, and then PCN. So maybe just walk us through what some of those products are. And then what else is there? Let’s, let’s start anywhere you want. Yeah,
well, 5G, you know, it’s been around now for a few years, but it’s finally at a point where I think it’s been productized to a point where it’s affordable for customers. The networks have been well built out. It’s not entirely ubiquitous yet, but they’ve been well built out. And so what we’re seeing is wireless connectivity becoming more part of the conversation for customers.
When they talk about network design, there is a place today for wireless where before with maybe 4G LTE, it was limited to failover or maybe kiosk connectivity for small retail shops. You’re backing up a point of sale. Now 5G has become robust enough and the equipment, the routers and the commercial grade equipment that can set a customer site and deliver and experience very close to fiber in a lot of cases. Now,
network managers are really looking at wireless and how do I incorporate that into my network design? Where do I take advantage of that? Where do I not need to take advantage of that? I think that’s the exciting thing about 5G is just that evolution of where it fits in the network stack. Certainly Starlink is a unique product. It’s one that’s popular. We see a lot of inquiries about Starlink just because they want that product and they think that it’s going to do something for them that nothing else can. We like it. We like Starlink. We didn’t release that product until we were ready to support it and we could deliver it in a way that differentiated Epic from a customer going directly to Starlink to get that product. And it’s great for those places where you need connectivity, we can’t get anything else. What we find is that in about half of those conversations, we can deliver exactly what the customer needs using SegWert.
Now,
that’s not the disadvantage at all Starlink is just to demystify it a little bit in that it’s a great solution. It’s not always the right solution for the most cost of it.
We’ll get into some other products in one second. I just want to go back to what you said of when you see people looking for that, what is it that they think it’s going to do that they don’t realize that cellular coupled with the right equipment or whatever can do? What’s the miss?
I think it’s really just the idea that, oh gosh, this can replace my cable circuit or something when that’s quite possible, maybe even as a lower cost with cellular. Now, that said, again, we love the Starlink product and there’s a great fit for it and we’re selling a lot of it, which is great for our partners, great for our customers.
And it will do that. It will do that. It’ll replace a primary circuit quite comfortably because of the amount of throughput and the speeds available.
I think my earlier comments about the evolution of 5G, I think maybe partners haven’t quite understood that the advances there and with the right piece of equipment, you can deliver near identical speeds, not quite, but very close.
And that may be more than adequate for what the customer needs, what they might need at that particular location.
And then what?
I was going to say, obviously more remote site, Starlink is absolutely precious.
For sure. When you talk about the equipment, I mean, help the partners understand. We get a lot of asks, you know, who does this equipment? Who does that equipment? What’s the equipment that you’re seeing success with pairing up some of these new cellular or Starlink? What do you have in success there?
Yeah. So the 5G enabled routers today are really robust and picking the right piece of equipment for what the customer needs at that location, again, goes to our engineering first approach. We’re not just taking the same piece of equipment and delivering it for all use cases.
And that’s really a key part of what we do in the sales process is really understanding your customer’s business. What do they need? How can we deliver the best possible solution at that location? Might be a combination of Starlink and it may be Starlink only, it might be cellular, it may be some other solution that the partner is selling.
And do you want people to think of it as, “Okay, I’m going to see a cradle point with this. I’m going to see a PEP link or a Meraki.” Is there any equipment that you guys like?
No, we like cradle point and PEP link. That’s primarily what we sell and support. But at the same time, unless it’s important to the customer, in other words, they’ve always been a cradle point shop and they really want to stick with that. Great. We’ll support it.
We try not to emphasize that so much as much as the feature set of the piece of equipment that we’re delivering and it’s an EpiciO solution.
All right. So we talked 5G, talked Starlink. Do you want to talk a little bit about Private Cellular and what you guys are doing there?
Yeah, Private Cellular is really exciting. Really exciting and I think it’s still relatively in this infancy, certainly in the partner community.
But the use cases we’re seeing more and more where customers who maybe were frustrated with a Wi-Fi deployment or a DAS kind of structure that’s been cost prohibitive and difficult to maintain.
Private Cellular Networks are really filling that gap and providing a new way for customers to connect, whether it’s a building, a warehouse or an outdoor environment where they want to have private connectivity separate from maybe the Public Cellular Network or from a Wi-Fi network.
Whether that’s for security reasons or for congestion reasons. Again, the use cases are really coming up more and more.
All right. As we think kind of beyond these three then, you guys got a lot of other cool stuff. Yeah. I mean, where do you want us to think about you? What else? What else is deep in the coat here?
Yeah. So really our AI and IoT solutions that are exciting because I think it’s things that partners haven’t seen before, didn’t know that they had available to them to sell.
It’s difficult, I think, for the partner community as we’ve found over the last couple of years when we talk about AI and IoT, it’s a little bit nebulous, it’s a big, broad topic, difficult to narrow that down to a product.
So what we’re trying to do is give very productized solution sets and it starts with our mobile surveillance unit as a great example.
The trailer, solar power, backup generator if you want it, maybe two, three cameras on top of it with AI layered over the top. So it’s really a software solution at the end of the day. And that AI is going to give you whether it’s vehicle counting, people counting, vehicle identification through license plate reading or make and model,
fire detection, smoke detection, all these things that AI can enable that goes beyond the typical video surveillance.
And then really being able to deliver that with Edge Compute and bringing all that information, just bringing back the information you need versus maybe 24-7 video streaming.
So there are some exciting things there. But I think that’s where it starts is that consumable kind of product that is physical security.
Yeah. I remember one of the first really partner summits we saw from you guys, right? And some of these seen as trailers and some of these wild, it’s not like anything we’ve seen before, right? So people aren’t conditioned to talk about, “Hey, I can do this.” So I like that it’s got a portable trailer component to it. You think jobs, you think worksites, you think wherever. But I suppose it’s fair to say that the power that you guys have with regard to the cameras and the IoT and the AI, it doesn’t have to be in a trailer by any means. It can be wherever. It can be fixed. It can be penetrated. I mean, anywhere, right? Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely. We can do that. And even better, again, because it’s really a software driven application, existing camera infrastructure is generally fine.
As long as that camera is new enough, then we can get a proper kind of stream off of it. We just layer that over our AI software. And you’ve got a single pane of glass to monitor and receive alerts on any of those existing camera infrastructure. And that’s the kind of cool part.
So, sounds like a lot of opportunities from a camera perspective. Anything specific? Any manufacturers or any requirements that as long as it does this, how do you want partners to think about that from a camera perspective? Yeah,
generally, if the missing camera can deliver an RTSP stream, it’s real time streaming protocol. If it can deliver that and we can take that, then we can run that through our AI models and make that camera a smart camera, if you will. Love it.
Cool. All right. Good stuff. All right. Before we shift gears into anything else, any other products that I forgot or missed that you want to make sure we call out or do we get them all?
Well, I mean, really, when you think about it, it’s on the wireless connectivity side, 5G, Starlink,
the private cellular network. Those are the key ones. And within that 5G, obviously, there is Failover, which is going to be kind of always needed.
And now, a really primary connectivity. And so we sort of break that down into those two categories. But yeah, I think you’ve covered it.
All right. So let’s think about this.
I guess maybe walk us through a win. You guys see a lot of different shapes, a lot of different sizes.
Think about a deal that was brought to you, what the customer problem was. Did it end up being something different? Or was it exactly what the customer said? And kind of what did the products end up looking like after?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, one, it actually came from a Dolores partner, a retail customer came to us originally just looking for Failover. They wanted to make sure that they had some backup to their primary internet retail stores. And this is a fairly large retailer. And so they estimated downtime on their primary internet cost them about $9,000 an hour. So there’s some incentive there to spend a little bit of money upfront to avoid that from happening. So what started out as really just a Failover conversation turned into, hey, wireless works pretty well. When we’ve had primary outages, we’ve had no hiccups at all because, again, a well-engineered solution. Failover actually did what it was supposed to do.
They called the business up at that time. They said, what if we used wireless when we’re opening a new store, we could open six, eight weeks earlier if we’re not waiting for Fiverr or cable-to-bease delivery. And so they began doing that. And they were able to accelerate their revenue model and their ROI models for opening new stores because of wireless.
And so we went in there with a very robust primary internet plan that just converted to Failover when their Fiverr was installed.
And then we have a number of those stores that just stayed on the wireless because it was adequate for what they needed and performed well. And there was no need for them to do anything other than put in a secondary wireless carrier for Failover. And so they now primary and failover both on wireless. And that has led to other conversations around IoT applications that we can deliver in retail space and then certainly their pots replacement kinds of conversations. But they saw a partner in Epic that can deliver that wireless connectivity in a way that really changed their business model. So that was a good one.
Yeah.
A second one real quick. Yeah, I don’t know. On the PCN side,
you know, an entertainment company. So they’ve got a venue. They were finding that as customers flooded the venue for an event, the public cellular networks would get congested. And so somebody trying to show a barcode to get into a parking lot that they had purchased previously, all of a sudden couldn’t get that barcode to come up and staff members because again, a public cellular congestion couldn’t communicate with one another.
And so a private cellular network really made a lot of sense, both from a security standpoint and from a
Just general communication standpoint with staff. So now all of their internal communications gets pulled away from the public network and onto their private network and they can do things like You know, concession sales, that point of sale machine is not relying on a cellular connectivity that would otherwise be congested.
It’s a really just changed again their business model by being able to deliver that private connectivity within that, you know, what ends up being a five acre site.
Big campus environment. Yeah, I love that. I don’t think I really don’t think a lot of people are thinking about it like this. You think of cellular is just taking me a 5D and a data connection and how much data can I run and bam, that’s it. I mean, you’re calling out nobody’s really nobody’s vocally advertising PCN as well as you guys are and I just think there’s so much nimbleness to this to your point. You put a little piece of equipment here with another piece of equipment and boom, we got a massive private network. So I love that example. Yeah.
Again, we’re seeing more and more use cases around that, whether it’s a manufacturing warehouse, they need to
for security reasons, not have everything going over Wi-Fi.
Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, in I don’t I don’t know that I’ve said AI yet and I think they might hold my paycheck if I don’t say AI. So let’s talk about AI a little bit. I mean, you have, but I haven’t said it. So you think about this, think about the productization of AI kind of where we’ve come, where we were a year versus where we are now, right? A year ago, my gosh, it’s scary what’s going to happen. And now we’re starting to see some of this kind of mainstream adoption. We’re starting to see productization really become comfortable.
There was a there was a big release, you know, obviously, Nvidia, big name here. And so you think, you know, GPUs for my, you know, my mining or for my graphics, for my gaming, you know, whatever, right? But that needs a computer that needs all these things with it. Well, what was interesting this year at CES is Nvidia comes out with this little tiny, tiny little appliance. And this little appliance has a monster set of GPUs on it. And I thought about that. And I thought about, okay, this, this GPU can do what the customer needs to train their LM or build their own LM or whatever, right, whatever they need it to do. Very flexible, very portable, has network port can be connected. I just thought somebody like you guys, if those things start to proliferate, can really say, yeah, you want edge, heavy edge compute to train and do whatever you have for your localized model that’s applicable to your business that maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it to an API in the cloud. You guys are a shoe in there. You know, you guys are going, I don’t care, right? Connect it right to us. We’ll give you the appliances. Isn’t that a great fit for you?
It is. GPU is still expensive. There’s a lot of times, again, looking at what the customer needs and what they’re trying to do, where that AI solution can actually be delivered, localized there with the CPU.
And the GPU is a great technology and cool. That’s a great device that will come compact deal. But still, from a cost standpoint, may may not be necessary just yet.
But yeah, we can do that. We can do it by delivering just a CPU at the edge.
And, you know, I think the other thing that we see with AI, and this isn’t necessarily customer facing, but from our standpoint as a supplier, we see the network providers using AI to better define and better define network performance. So today, when I’m looking at a multi location opportunity, and I want to deliver the optimal wireless experience at each of those locations, not one carrier is going to fit 100% of those locations. And that’s part of what we do. We aggregate those carriers and deliver a single solution.
Those AI models that the networks are are implementing on their networks gives us greater information on the network performance, not just uploads and download speeds, but really, how is the network performing at each of those locations. It gives us the opportunity to then deliver really an optimized experience in each location. And so AI for us, on the supplier side is advancing our technology and our ability to deliver the best customer experience that we can. In addition to, you know, enhancing the products that we can offer to your customers, to your partners and customers. I
like that. It’s just the key theme here. I hope that everybody’s heard is just flexibility and nimbleness that you guys have with whatever, however, somebody’s trying to use it. You guys don’t care, right? You’re so flexible to put the connectivity here, put the edge here, put the cameras here, you know, all of that good stuff. I just think, I think you can help with these with these partners with a lot of different shapes of at bats. I think it’s been the theme here. Yeah,
absolutely.
All right. Final, final couple thoughts here. One, I love probing questions. I love discovery questions. What if you want the partners to walk away with 123? I don’t know. Whatever your favorite questions are that help uncover really some of the core things that you all do at Epic. What’s your favorite? What’s your favorite couple questions for this?
I think
I think it’s really, again, going back to our experience in wireless connectivity is asking the questions around saleover. That’s a great place to start. It’s the low hanging fruit. It may not be the sexiest,
but it’s really where you can deliver a solution that matters to your customer.
Giving them a solution that ensures their uptime, ensures their business continuity is paramount. And so asking those questions when you’re designing a network for a customer, making sure that you’re looking at does wireless make sense in this design? And should I be including it? And a partner like Epic, we can certainly help you with that. I think that’s a great place to start. Love it.
Love it.
Okay. Final thought. So we got a lot of evolutions. We got a lot of development happening in tech. Let’s think about the future here. Maybe harder to probably look out more than 12, 24 months, but anything industry related company related that you want to talk about, or you’re looking forward to from an innovations perspective, just take that wherever you want.
Yeah. Yeah. I think we’ve touched on a little bit. Private cellular networks, I think is exciting.
It’s where I think more and more companies are going to move more and more companies are going to see the use case for taking advantage of private cellular. Again, from whether it’s for it from a security standpoint, a network congestion standpoint, or just an efficiency standpoint.
That I’m excited to see those use cases come around and share it in partner community so that you can begin to develop those questions and begin to understand the product well enough that you can go to your existing customer base and say, hey, rather than doing a tech refresh on your wifi network.
Have you talked about private cellular network and how it might enhance your business efficiencies and your operation? So that’s exciting to me. I think 5G is just going to continue to evolve those applications are going to get better and better. We’ve already seen the price points come down. I was looking, thinking about it the other day. We’re delivering 5G solutions today with very robust 5G enabled routers that have probably come down.
Really about the price point is half of where it was two years ago. So we’re already seeing that declining price point.
Partners and their customers should be taking advantage of this technology. It delivers a great solid product without maybe some of the fears that we’re going to be seeing.
That partners have had in the past about wireless connectivity just not being as reliable as it is today.
It’s good stuff. Good things to look forward to. I’m questioned out. Ron, I think we covered a ton. Great overview on Epic and kind of everything kind of where we’re at. I really appreciate you coming on, man.
Yeah, great, Josh. Appreciate being here. Thanks.
All right, everybody, that wraps us up for today. As always, don’t forget, wherever you’re coming to, coming to us from Apple Music, Spotify, go sign up, follow, and you’ll get these drops every Wednesday when they come out and you don’t want to miss them. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. Ron Ireland, president of Channel at Epic iO. This has been the next big thing in tech, 5G, PCN, and Starlink explained. Till next time. Next
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