As a Microsoft Most Valued Partner, Jared Rhodes (pictured), an independent consultant at QiMata Technologies LLC, spends a lot of his time looking for the right mobile, cloud and edge computing solutions for his clients, which include firms in the oil and gas industry, facility security and driverless cars. The common link among most of them is the need for speed, being able to gather and act on information as fast as possible.

“If you think about a lot of the computer processes we have, we really care that something just happened in an architecture,” Rhodes said. “The edge platforms really help us out when we need things now.”

Rhodes spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder and chief executive officer of Spark Labs Consulting LLC, at the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. They discussed how various clients are adapting to the availability of new technologies and the many computing choices now available in the enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

Gathering knowledge from pipelines

QiMata’s clients in the oil and gas industry installed many of today’s pipelines back in the 1980s, before the internet or omnipresent wireless connectivity became standards of the digital world. Edge computing allows oil and gas companies to process critical localized information using technology these firms didn’t have when pipelines were installed.

“Now they need that innovation, that knowledge coming off the pipeline all of the time,” Rhodes explained. “We can detect pressure changes throughout the pipeline to do preventative maintenance.”

As a technology industry consultant, Rhodes has seen enterprise computing options expand to the point where his role often becomes similar to that of a restaurant waiter presenting a customer with a menu of choices. Facial detection, speech recognition, unlimited data storage, or the distribution of multiple apps across mobile platforms are now all on the table.

“It’s really at a point to where when I talk to clients about what they want to do with their data, it becomes how much money they want to throw at it,” Rhodes said. “We can do pretty much anything.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevNet Create 2018 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for DevNet Create. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE