Christopher Rolland: You used to give a ton of LoRa metrics and I think that stopped since the combination of Sierra. You used to give LoRa-related revenue, revenue guidance operators, gateways, pipelines, ton of information. Is that ever going to come back?
Paul Pickle: So I don’t anticipate it coming back by itself. I think you know I’m happy to give you that LoRa is approximately $100 million business every year. We are going to be shifting the focus two more of an end-node — end connected node focus from and then also what pieces are necessary in order to enable that use and rollout of Private Networks. I think adoption of LoRa at the last mile of IoT edge, some people don’t like the label last mile, but let’s call it the fringe, it definitely has a value proposition there. It definitely makes sense. The totality of what has been called LoRa inclusive in that has been infrastructure. It’s been helium. It’s been a number of things, but at this point, I just don’t believe are viable and it’s not something that I want to tout.
So if you could give me a couple of quarters to better define what that LoRa rollout strategy is going to be or that wireless strategy is going to be, we’ll be happy to talk to it in future quarters.
Christopher Rolland: Thanks so much, Paul. Good luck, and really appreciate you taking the helm here.
Paul Pickle: Thank you, sir.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Cody Acree with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed with your question.
Cody Acree: Thanks, Paul and welcome. And Emeka thank you for all the help over the years. It has been very much appreciated. Paul, if you could just take a step back at what the Sierra Wireless acquisition? And can you just give us your high level view of the strategic fit of the companies as you see them today?
Paul Pickle: Yes, thank you, Cody. I’m smiling because you asked a difficult question to answer, but I’ll give it my best. So at this point, I will say the investment thesis for the acquisition still holds true today. If we look at it and we say, okay, we have a unique radio technology in LoRa and I would further refine that to say a sub-gigahertz, low power, low bandwidth, far-reaching protocol, where can that best be used and how do we create a platform or an ecosystem that makes it very easy to adopt and rollout. That is the operative question. And so if you look at what would be required in that implementation that ease of use implementation, you would obviously need LoRa chips on connected endpoints of which we do have and sell today.
You would need, configuration software, you would need device management system software, you would need traffic routing software that would sit on a gateway or router through some other backhaul cellular or otherwise. So from that standpoint, you can connect those dots. You would also need a cloud platform to enable that configuration. You need a Snap or Kubernetes on a router, a gateway sitting on the edge and then that would feed into a cloud and then you would — that would allow you to provide API hooks into customer software or provide individual insights for those connected devices on that edge. So all those components exist in the acquisition. Now, the question was — would naturally be is the acquisition necessary to fulfill that vision?
And the answer to that is no, you could go off and develop it on your own, but certainly helps to have all these pieces together. So now that we have those pieces, how do we best pull those pieces together for an ease of use play in IoT, and that is something that we are going to have to think really hard about. It’s not enough to have the individual pieces. It’s the orchestration or the coordination between those pieces and end market in order to make that a reality. So we are going to be spending some time on that vision, reimagine what it takes to get there. Independent of whether not we need assets — strategic assets or not, and we’ll work on an execution plan. So I’ve got a few ideas on that. We’ve got some of our bright minds working on that as well, and we’ll be rolling that out over the next couple of quarters.
Cody Acree: Do you think, Paul, that there is a strategic application fit with your customer base that is obvious that may have not been as with the initial acquisition?
Paul Pickle: I do, there is a — it really kind of comes down to use case. We say application, but I’d say, it comes down to use case. We have one particular customer. There’s two RFPs out there that are requesting the use of LoRa and they like the aspects of LoRa. It’s been a bit of a more complicated program in terms of installation and rollout that would include both cellular modules and routers and software. And so there is a strategic application or strategic fit with certain customer use cases, and I can give you one example. We’ve got a customer that was doing an installation for a field of tanks and they want to be able to monitor each tank rather than putting a cellular router at each tank connected to devices that are pulling in telemetry pressure, temperature capacity and the depth of whatever those fluids are, they would rather have one cellular router and that to have be connected to a bunch of sensors across the field, that would represent the field — the entire tank field.
And it would be a much a lower cost of installation, lower CapEx requirement, and it would make that installation fairly easy in terms of configuring devices that are pretty belaborous right now. So if you look at it, yes, it does fit really nicely with where the market wants to go, but there’s some pieces missing in terms of making it a reality and that’s what we have to focus on.
Cody Acree: Okay. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for the help.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.
Harsh Kumar: Yeah. Hey, Paul. The example you just described, actually fits perfectly for smart meters. And I was curious if you’ve received any interest from any kind of utility companies for a similar deployments, because I think it would simplify smart meter installations in small cities extremely well.
