Qualcomm Developer Network July Developer of the Month is Sivakumar Panneerselvam from Qubercomm with offices in Pleasonton CA, and Chennai, India. Siva is the Chief Architect at Qubercomm, and is well known in the industry for his understanding of solutions and systems from embedded hardware to cloud software.
Qubercomm was founded in 2015 and is focused on delivering superior products and services that allow enterprises to build IoT solutions that solve real-world problems in dynamic, high-interference environments. Their NMesh stack and associated product lines are based on the belief that the success of IoT is predicated on scalable, secure and heterogeneous networks. NMesh is a chipset agnostic stack that solves this problem by providing a scalable mesh network that allows for multi-homing of different vendor applications on the gateway.
Where do you get inspiration for your work?
Personally, I get inspiration from Bill Gates. As a kid growing up in India it was a privilege to see a computer and an honor to actually use one. The more I used MS-DOS, Windows, and Office, the more impressed I was with Bill Gates. Over time I came to realize his larger world view and philanthropic ventures which further increased my admiration for him. I am a proponent of the “no technology religion” school of thought that John Chambers espoused at Cisco.
Microsoft inspired an entire generation of teenagers to become engineers and to experiment with technology. In countries like India many parents have a “don’t touch it, you may break it” philosophy when children are handed electronics. Windows and its tools allowed parents to think that software can’t be broken and so the freedom to experiment was suddenly increased.
Do you have any interesting facts about your company?
For the first two years we were a company of only male engineers and suddenly 2 out of every 3 hires made were female employees and now 1/3rd of our company is all female without any conscious decision to do so. That has certainly changed our culture for the better to bring different perspectives and a level of balance to our organization.
What Qualcomm technologies are you using?
To name a few, our NMesh IoT Gateways are multi-radio gateways that use Qualcomm QCA4024. For high-end whole-home devices we pair it with Qualcomm IPQ4019 and lower-end IoT gateways are paired with Qualcomm QCA4531. Our whole home mesh routers offer standards based 11s mesh, proprietary features like load balancing across devices, balancing client load across bands, dynamic channel selection algorithms for optimal channel selection. We also have a Smart Home Control Panel built on a tablet with a Qualcomm APQ8009 and QCA4024 to give one of a kind control panel that allows for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee radios for whole home control.
How did Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. IoT platforms and chipsets assist in your development?
They help deliver stability and predictability of performance. This allows start-ups like ours to focus on our own products instead of chipset field issues, and customer support which relieves a significant burden off of our shoulders. In product development, Qualcomm reference designs are an easy way to experiment in creating new solutions, and once built out it is easy to transfer that to FFA designs.
Where do you see the IoT industry in 10 years?
10 years from now the next generation will not be talking about wireless and IoT as a novelty because they will have become ubiquitous. I expect that the adoption of wireless sensors, solutions, and systems will accelerate over the next 5 years until we get to the point where only mission critical systems still have wired technologies for redundancy.
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Qualcomm QCA4024 and QCA4531 are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
