Each month, Tony Uphoff, visionary CEO of Thomasnet.com, joins Cloud Wars Live for a recurring segment. “Uphoff on Industry” will explore the innovations, upheavals, and breakthroughs reshaping the the world of manufacturing and industrial markets. Join Tony and me as we discuss disruptive new trends in the digital-industrial world. These include how we design, source and manufacture products. And also the new ways in which industrial companies are getting up to speed on marketing, sales and customer experience.

Episode 10

In this episode: Tony says we have the benefit of having had a ringside seat at a lot of these market transitions. He says it always surprises you how long it takes for them to happen – and then the speed with which they ultimately happen. Tony says he thinks we’re at one of those stages right now, with industry 4.0 and digital transformation.

Tony says if you look at the valuations of a tech company, it’s much, much higher than a manufacturing company. Tesla is an outlier – sure, he says, they’re bending steel just like the others, but they’ve clearly fused tech at the center.

He says a sunflower moves based on the angle of the sun – and that’s what SunBot, a company that captures 90% of the sun’s rays does. It emulates nature, and it’s creating a whole new solar technology.

Tony goes on to say it was his chief technology officer who raised the idea that Thomas should develop a business unit called “Thomas Industrial Data,” to sell datasets into the buyside financial institutions. Tony says when he brought that up, he said, “please call me in a month.” But he was right, because the CTO was able to see that much quicker than anybody else in the company.

He says he lives in a glass house too, and he’s trying to understand what customer success really means. He says if you’re in the wrong hands, and you’re wildly overpromising on something, and you don’t know exactly what it is. But he says if you go to the other end of the spectrum it’s a license to upsell you after you’ve bought the core product or service.

Tony goes on to say that China assembled a 40,000 square-foot hospital in 10 days to assist people for the Coronavirus. They used prefabricated materials, and he is an awe of that.

Tony’s podcast is on all the major platforms as well as https://ThomasNet.com. You can also subscribe to Thomas’ daily email newsletter at at https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/.

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