CRN's 2024 IoT Innovators: Connecting Things To Solve Real Problems
by Dylan Martin, CRN
When it comes to Paul Galeski's view of the opportunities he sees in the industrial IoT space, it doesn't start with the technology. Instead, it starts with the people and the processes within a manufacturer and where the business is running into products.
"That's an afterthought: which technology to use. What's the real essence of the operation, and where are the bottlenecks? Where are the challenges? Those are the things you address first and thoroughly in conjunction with your client," he told CRN last week.
Galeski is the new CEO of GrayMatter, a Warrendale, Pa.-based industrial IoT solution provider that is one of the companies named to CRN's IoT Innovators list this year, and he believes that pressing issues like an aging workforce within the manufacturing industry have created an opening for his company to hit those issues head on while helping customers take their operations to the next level.
It's about "trying to create the next generation of solutions business to where we really take this plant floor data and turn that into real-time industrial knowledge in the right place at the right time in the right hands, so that people can use that operationally, in context, in real time, to run their businesses better," he said.
Galeski's perspective—which is informed by his 30-plus-year career in industrial automation, including four years as an executive at Rockwell Automation—is representative of the grounded, optimistic approach taken by top solution provider leaders when it comes to pursuing a wide range of opportunities in the IoT space.
"We are really looking at driving a new paradigm in industrial automation solutions in IoT," said Galeski, who took over as GrayMatter's CEO earlier this year from co-founder Jim Gillespie, now serving in the new role as chief growth officer.
What follows are the 22 value-added resellers, systems integrators and managed services providers recognized in CRN's 2024 IoT Innovators.
With headquarters ranging from Chicago and Michigan to Arizona and Japan, these companies offer a wide range of IoT solutions for a variety of industries, whether those are meant to enable computer vision for detecting objects on railways, predictive maintenance capabilities for appliances in retail stores, or real-time monitoring and detection for cyberattacks against industrial assets.
World Wide Technology
Top Executive: Jim Kavanaugh, Co-Founder and CEO
World Wide Technology is helping businesses across various industries become more competitive and efficient through the development of integrated IoT solutions. The St. Louis, Mo.-based solution provider in July announced that it had signed a strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services to boost, among other things, the development of edge AI solutions that combine on-premises and cloud systems to enable use cases like computer vision, digital twins and inference, among other things.