SanDisk CIO Ravi Naik doesn’t just oversee IT operations, he is also the head of real estate and facilities management. That provides him with a unique perspective on the evolving Internet of Things (IoT) and how it applies to the maker of flash memory — memory embedded in everything from the smallest mobile devices to hyperscale data centers.
Asked by the company’s CFO in 2011 to help manage building a new headquarters, he said, “By the time I was done I ended up owning global real estate." There are great synergies, he adds: “IT and real estate are the only functions that touch every single employee every day.” What the real estate and facilities operation lacked was the customer-centric focus that he’d built with the IT operation.
“We’ve completely changed the way we run our facilities; its very tightly integrated with IT,” Naik says. For example: “We built software that sits on iPads and other devices around campus to find where people are sitting, where conference rooms are located.”
Out with "old school" mindset
Naik recently oversaw development of a new SanDisk campus in India and focused on integrating technology during the design and building phases. “We moved from an old school engineering mindset where every engineering organization has its own lab, to having a lab core with two whole floors with no walls,” he says. That eliminates duplication of spending in separate labs, but it requires new capabilities for managing the resources.
“Engineers are now competing for those resources, so that’s where a lot of the IoT thinking comes in. We needed to track utilization of the ovens, how much electrical load we’re utilizing, so it meant building new software to manage devices, track capacity, track electricity utilization and more.”
Anticipation over IoT often focuses on the potential of connecting billions of mass market consumer devices. BI Intelligence, the research arm of Business Insider, projects that the consumer, enterprise and government markets will account for 23.3 billion connected devices by 2019, but “the enterprise market will account for around 40 percent of the total or 9.1 billion devices, making it the largest of the three IoT sectors.”
Moving IoT into the enterprise
“We are at the very early stage of this innovation coming into the enterprise,” says Naik. “We see quite a bit on the consumer side but see potential for this technology — and the thought process — moving into the enterprise.”
SanDisk has introduced flash storage designed for industrial IoT applications, such as manufacturing and utilities. It is testing a "lights out" manufacturing, packaging and distribution operation in Asia involving machine-to-machine communications and hundreds of devices.
But the company also explored using IoT in an internal human relations capacity, providing employees with Fitbit tracking devices and setting up a fitness challenge, measuring their biometrics before and after. “We were able to see how employees react to a community kind of event,” says Naik. “Employee health impacts the company’s insurance policy and financial results. It’s at a very early stage, but shows promising results.”
He advises his peers to “focus on the wide variety of IoT solutions that could be brought in to bring value to an enterprise.” But, he cautions, “the technology is still evolving and it will be some time before it fully matures.” The biggest challenge is for the organization to change its mindset of the way people work — engineers at the lab in India, for example, “wanted their walls and didn’t want to share their lab space earlier. This has now changed with the enhanced work environment and has resulted in improved collaboration.”
