John Bates (pictured) has worn many hats, from entrepreneur to professor to author. As a businessman, he built and sold software company PLAT.ONE  to SAP SE that specialized in communication between machines and Internet of Things devices. And as an author, he’s written about the enormous opportunity for people and enterprises in the IoT world in his 2015 book, “Thingalytics: Smart Big Data Analytics for the Internet of Things.”

“If there’s one message from [the book], it’s IoT is not so hard to get into, so get started,” said Bates, who is the chief executive officer of TestPlant Europe Ltd.

Bates appeared on the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during Nutanix.NEXT in Washington, D.C. They discussed the challenges facing big companies as they execute an IoT strategy and the potential loss of jobs through increased automation. (* Disclosure below.)

After writing his book and then selling his software company in 2016, Bates recently became the chief executive for TestPlant, a firm that uses software automation tools to evaluate apps. “We test applications using artificial intelligence through the eye of the user,” Bates said.

Even large enterprises struggle to build in IoT market

Bates pointed to General Electric Corp. as an example of a large enterprise that initially struggled to build Predix, an industrial internet platform and had to overcome challenges before customer adoption. “It took longer than they expected to build their Predix platform. They’ve learned that it’s much harder than they thought,” Bates said.

Despite GE’s experience, Bates told theCUBE that larger companies should capitalize on IoT technology. “I think the real winner in this will be the industrial and the enterprise IoT,” he stated.

He also predicted that some jobs will be replaced by robots and algorithms, using the example of how stock trading went from people waving paper in pits to high-volume computerized systems. “IoT giveth and IoT taketh away,” Bates concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE