About Andrew Rogers

Andrew leads technical strategy and architecture development for ACE IoT Solutions. Andrew also leads the development of technical and research strategy at The Enterprise Center, a non-profit focused on developing the innovation ecosystem in Chattanooga, TN. When not bringing his extensive professional experience in Industrial Control Systems, Critical Infrastructure Controls, and Network Engineering to his professional endeavors, he can most commonly be found with a camera in his hand. A deep passion for photography takes him off the beaten path the world over, and serves as a convenient excuse for a variety of other means for enjoying nature, including hiking, biking, and most board sports. Andrew loves sharing his travels and photography, and keeps an instagram account updated with his most recent adventures.

Links Referenced
LinkedIn

Twitter @acedrew

ACE IoT Solutions

Personal site

Transcript

Mike:  This is the Real World DevOps podcast, and I'm your host Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps. From the creators of your favorite tools to the organizers of amazing conferences, from authors of great books to fantastic public speakers. I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

Mike:  This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools, and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products, and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraf for metrics collection from systems, Chronograf for visualization, and Capacitor for real-time streaming. All of these are available as open-source and as a hosted SaaS solution. You can check all of it out at influxdata.com. My thanks to InfluxData for helping make this podcast possible.

Mike:  Hi folks, I'm Mike Julian, your host for Real World DevOps podcast, and my guest this week is a friend of mine. Andrew Rogers, he's an expert in industrial control systems and co-founder of ACE IoT solutions where he helps companies with improving visibility in their operations and energy systems. Welcome to the show.

Andrew:  Thanks.

Mike:  Now you live in one of my favorite cities ever, which is Chattanooga, Tennessee. I can hear the Chattanooga fans in the background just, "Yeah, this is awesome." So one of the coolest things that I think there is in Chattanooga, aside from just the gorgeous weather and great food, is the low cost municipal internet.

Andrew:  Yeah, it's pretty fantastic. Um it's certainly part of the reason why I moved to Chattanooga in the first place. Uh and I think that it's had that effect on a lot of people over the years. So um we have, sort of, an out-sized technical community here based on the fact that it's easy to support a remote workforce when you have gigabit or 10 gigabit Internet available ubiquitously across the community.

Mike:  That was one of the things I never expected because there are actually some pretty significant companies based out of Chattanooga entirely as a result of this, highly available, municipal Internet like companies might know of Bellhops which is based there.

Andrew:   Yeah. So that project or that company started, based on another company in Chattanooga exiting and the founders starting a fund and looking for startups across the southeast that could benefit from the available broadband here. And you know it's a pretty big company now, well over 100 folks in their technical workforce, and they continue to you know grow and support the community. It's certainly been a really interesting success story for Chattanooga.

Mike:  You worked for a while as, I think, a technologist in residence for one of the startup incubators in the area.

Andrew:  So yeah, Chattanooga has a lot of really unique resources. You talked about one of those, the fiber broadband available over a 600 square mile area. And one of the other things that I think, is actually due to the fiber but also just due to the type of community Chattanooga is, and the effort and interest in working collaboratively, is a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on entrepreneurship, and helping startups both at a scale of coming up and building a high growth startup, but also mom-and-pop shops, and helping them grow and build sustainable businesses or get to the next step in their business plan. They did, as part of when the fiber was first launched in 2009, a group of folks in the community came together to say, "Hey, how do we get the most out of this? This is an awesome asset. We know that the future of our economy is going to be based on growing businesses in the area. How can we use this new asset to support that, not just in luring a big company into town, and sort of the traditional economic development scenario, but growing companies locally."

Andrew:  And so one of the things they decided to try to do is launch a startup accelerator. It wasn't a venture funded accelerator, it was funded by this nonprofit. And it was focused on finding the companies around the country who had ideas that were only viable when ubiquitous broadband was available. Now, that brought a lot of really interesting folks to Chattanooga. And you know we did it about four years, I think. GIGTANK still exists today. It's changed a little bit, happens every summer. But yeah, one of the challenges with GIGTANK was that, you bring in a company, and you get a group of really great mentors from the business community here in Chattanooga. You surround them with professional services companies who are eager to support growing a business in Chattanooga. Then you tell them that you know you're trying to build a high growth startup, and your total addressable market is you know a million people in the US that actually have access to this high speed connectivity.

Andrew:  So what tended to happen, unfortunately, is the businesses were viable, but the reliance on the broadband wasn't. And now finally, in 2019, this was back... I was involved heavily in 2012, 2013, 2014. 2019, we're sitting here, and you see fiber deployments happening around the country. Talk of 5G is running thick right now, and so those businesses actually a lot more have a lot more viability. But what did happen was, the businesses came for the fiber and kind of stuck around for Chattanooga. So we ended up accruing and amazing tech talent pool, really interesting entrepreneurs uh who have gone on to focus on you know other things. We even took a little stint at additive manufacturing because we saw that, sort of, digital manufacturing gave you the same opportunity that, sort of, was the basis for deploying the fiber in the first place, which was making a smart grid that was truly smart, and making the trade of moving photons instead of electron to achieve the same sorts of quality of life improvements, et cetera, that rural electrification had in the early 20th century.

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