David Walsh – We Will Go Farther Together

A few months ago, I was asked to weigh in on how IoT developers are leveraging platforms to build their solutions faster, and how the new world of XaaS – everything as a service – now extends across the full stack.

In an article published on IoT Evolution World, I was quoted at the time saying this:

“We’ve seen dramatic growth of developer communities in the Real Time Communications (RTC) world over the last decade,” said David Walsh, co-founder of Kandy.io. “Empowering developers to build and commercialize innovations is the best way to drive adoption at scale, and we will continue to see these communities grow, especially in the world of connected things, and in the future of how people and machines interact with each other intuitively and contextually. It’s at the intersection of RTC and IoT where we’re seeing the most creativity and value being created in this new decade.”

In late July, several of the original crew from Kandy, all based in Tel Aviv, announced that their start-up company, monogoto, has partnered with another company, Cloud of Things, to bundle monogoto’s global cellular SIM network (which reaches over 170 countries) with Cloud of Things’ DeviceTone IoT platform.

I first met the monogoto crew back in 2014, when GENBAND (now Ribbon Communications) acquired a very cool messaging platform called “fring” which created the foundation for the development of the extremely popular Kandy Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) start-up within GENBAND, leveraging the hundreds of Real Time Communications (RTC) patents and capabilities already serving hundreds of the world’s largest Communications Service Providers (CSPs). Today, AT&T, for example, leverages the Kandy platform for their API marketplace.

Back in the day, we were already working on IoT solutions powered by Kandy and promoted them at Mobile World Congress in 2017 (when in-person events were still happening!) You see, WebRTC, the Google-established initiative that makes voice, video and messaging possible Over-the-Top (OTT) also has a capability to support machine communications.

I am extremely proud of the monogoto team for carrying on a vision for creating a global – cellular – federated – network. Hats off to Maor Efrati, Itamar Kunik and Asaf Sela for an epic feat, which is further validated by July’s announcement.

While I have known the new CEO of Cloud of Things, Avner Ziv, only a short time, it is fascinating to note that he also has had an interesting journey, dedicating thirty years of his life to working at the highest levels in the Israeli Defense Forces, specializing in technology and cybersecurity and managing hundreds of people. From there, Avner was recruited by the Central Bank of Israel, where he served as CIO and a member of the board, before recently leaving to lead Cloud of Things, an IoT platform provider which recently won a US patent for their CloudSwitch innovation.

Avner is an example of a hard-working dedicated and creative leader who finds new ways to make a difference everywhere he goes. Through a mutual friend we met, and I recommended Avner check out monogoto.

But today is only history – tomorrow is the future – and when mongoto has the ability to bring an IoT company like Cloud of Things a completely secure, global, SIM-based cellular network as the IOT continues to grow around the world – there is some magic in that.

While there are many lessons here, perhaps the most interesting lesson is that we never know where life will lead us, especially during uncertain times like these, but we do know that when we connect with talented, committed, simply good people, we will go farther together.

 

Feature Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay