Ed Zander's 15 years at Sun Microsystems culminated in 1999 when he became the company's President. In 2004 Zander joined Motorola as that company's CEO and Chairman until he stepped down early in 2008. Now, a year later, Zander has surfaced as a board member at ZigBee-enabled wireless asset tracking start-up Awarepoint, which focuses on healthcare facilities. With his attention turned to wireless healthcare, Zander recently agreed to an interview with MobiHealthNews that covered his role at Awarepoint, whether wireless healthcare is at an inflection point, how economic concerns are fueling interest in wireless healthcare, and how Awarepoint may go about pursuing federal stimulus dollars for health IT.
MobiHealthNews: Since leaving Motorola last year, you joined the board of directors at Awarepoint, a ZigBee sensor-enabled asset tracking company focused on healthcare facilities. Could you describe how you landed at Awarepoint?
Ed Zander: Well, to be honest, when I left Moto I decided to stop with the operating roles and I took some time off. I was doing this also while I was at Sun Microsystems and also maintained my interest in start-ups while at Motorola -- especially start-ups in Silicon Valley. I always stayed on little boards, dabbled with the VC guys, invested in some funds and so on. When I left [Motorola] one of the things I wanted to do in addition to working with some larger companies [like Time Warner] was to get back into small companies again with entrepreneurs and innovators to see when the next big thing was happening. It just so happens, of course, that Motorola gave me the opportunity to explore mobile, and more importantly the mobile Internet, which is something I have been very interested in even back during my experience at Sun, where we did a lot of Internet activity and believed in the network. We believed back then that eventually broadband would be everywhere.
If you combine all that with the things that Awarepoint is doing with asset tracking, you can start to see that with location-based services, everything in the world will be tagged. The idea that you could improve your asset tracking and, therefore, improve the efficiency of the overall company will eventually happen for every company. We have talked about technologies like RFID for a number of years but interest in that has started and stopped again and again. Partly because of the technology. Some of it was costs and ROI. As we explore the new technologies, like Awarepoint's system, which uses ZigBee technology, we start to see the cost-benefit ratio that makes these tracking solutions very attractive. I love this area [of location-based services]. I think it is already affecting every human being on the planet. I think it will eventually affect every company on the planet.
As far as how I joined Awarepoint: I knew about the company through some mutual acquaintances and I had met Jason before. I was going down to San Diego for other things while I was still at Motorola and got to meet Jason and sit down for a drink or coffee and do some free consulting on scaling the company, growing the company or just being a CEO. I never really necessarily thought about joining the board but Jason is a persistent kind of guy and when the [venture capitalists] came in I looked at it again. I did my homework and decided that this is an area that really could make things more efficient for hospitals improve costs and improve patient safety. This was, of course, well before the country's recent focus on healthcare. I know right now the focus [at Awarepoint] is on healthcare, but it's a great technology and it could be applied to other industries that we can move across to eventually.
Every company seems to use its board in different ways -- could you define your role with the company and how you will serve as a board member?
Obviously, we are still in the very early stages, so many of the [board members] are focused on the money -- how it will be used. I really focus with Jason on how to grow and scale the company and how to become a really good CEO since I have seen the good and not so good days. The hardest thing about being a CEO is figuring out what you do everyday. How do you budget your time? I spend a lot of my time with him one-on-one and also as part of the board talking about scaling, organization, hiring and P&L plus the broader strategy of a vision beyond healthcare and other industries. I do a lot of my work with Jason and some of the other members of the team outside of the board meetings as well as in them.
In the press release Awarepoint distributed about your appointment to the company's board, you had stated that you believe this industry is at an inflection point. Two things: How do you define this industry? And why do you think it is at an inflection point?
That's a great question -- "inflection points" are always great words to use, but what I have seen in my past 30 or 40 year of working is that whether it's high-end work stations, mini-computers or the Internet there is a point in time where you know it's going to happen. Then you have a convergence of the cost, the technology, and the consumer benefit and all of that needs to hit at the right time. I remember back during my days even at Sun, we were at it for five or six years trying to prove the Internet, prove the network, prove software wasn't cost prohibitive and companies didn't want to hear it. I remember at Motorola talking about: Can these phones someday transmit the mobile Internet and produce the mobile Internet? It took a lot of time and consumers didn't want to pay for it, and now we are at an inflection point there with with all the interest we are seeing. Sometimes you happen to hit it and sometimes it just takes a while for those three things to come together. I could give you a hundred examples.
In this case with Awarepoint, I can say that I just met with a hospital executive here in Carmel and they have a lot of issues and challenges right now with costs, patient safety and tracking assets. [Hospitals] are all cutting budgets and trying to improve efficiencies, which is really a challenge. Think about all of the different things deployed inside of a hospital: the instruments, tests, beds and everything else. To really track these assets is not just an opportunity to cut costs, but the question is can you take it to the next level and make use of this technology to help you run your hospital better.
What trends are driving this industry now? What are the challenges?
What's driving healthcare's interest in wireless technologies right now? Economic issues. There is not a manager of a hospital or a CEO of a healthcare company today who isn't talking about the economy. I think patient safety, regulatory pressures and efficiency are driving it, too. I had this vision years ago, while I was at Motorola that everything would have an IP address -- it wasn't just people. It was every thing: Every lightbulb. Every car. Every thing would be tagged. With wireless broadband and in Awarepoint's case with ZigBee technology, it's starting to happen. It will take the next five years to happen -- it won't happen over night. Uptake of wireless Internet services for consumers didn't happen over night either. The technology is ready and proven, it's clear that the need is there and I think now it's up to us to demonstrate the ROI case to these companies.
So, really the key challenge is demonstrating the ROI of these products?
Well, it always is. It always has been in my 30 years: When I walked into a potential customer's office while working at Sun, the other company's CEO would say, "Great technology, but... big deal, what does it do for me?" It can't be just about cutting ten percent off the bottom-line. They wanted to know if we could make their people more efficient, if we could give them more data, or can it help us make better decisions. I always like to work with companies where, in this case it would be the hospital administrator or the CIO of the hospital, can say, "Wow, I can actually make better decisions. I can make my hospital run better. I can actually improve patient safety, and oh, by the way, I just cut ten percent off the bottom-line." If you can prove that, and it takes a lot of grunt work to get to that inflection point -- and I'm hoping that in the next couple years we have one. Just as we have seen in other industries, I do believe that wireless technologies in healthcare will be big.
When you compare it to those other verticals, do you agree with that widely held belief that healthcare seems to be behind the adoption curve for technologies?
It always is behind the curve, but I don't like the word "behind." The industry is naturally conservative. It's not an industry like financial services where every second counts for making money. It's more like education in that it's not necessarily about taking risks in order to make a lot of money. It's about people, too. Healthcare has a deliberate and conservative nature even though the industry uses some of the most advanced technology for medical equipment. How you make a hospital more productive, efficient and safe for the patients is not easy. A lot of the executives and CEOs of these hospitals are under a lot of pressure right now, especially because of all these cost structures that they have to go through.
Awarepoint and the industry that they are in is as exciting as heck. This is going to be a challenge going forward for us, but we need to show that if you deploy this technology, that within the year you will be seeing results. If you don't have that then, well, the technology is great--sounds great--but you really need to see those benefits.
Has the national healthcare conversation and the stimulus dollars around electronic health records helped Awarepoint? Do you think it will?
I have asked that same question at the board meetings so the company executives may be better positioned to answer that, but my suggestion to Jason is why aren't you more aggressive in pursuring those government dollars. I know IBM an HP and others have been. Well, we are one level below a lot of the healthcare IT world in that a lot of the data we generate feeds into those IT systems. We are a small company but I think we either need to go get some of that money or work on projects with some of the bigger companies to really demonstrate to the government and other companies that this technology should be included. It's a great time for a company like Awarepoint to leverage into some of this.
The big focus in tech right now is health IT and electronic medical records, which, by the way, I would love to have on a system in the cloud, protected and secured so doctors around the world could have access to that information. Paperwork [for current medical records] is just amazing. That's where a lot of the lobbying efforts have been. When I used to be on the Tech CEO Council, we used to go down to Washington D.C. with HP, IBM, Dell and Intel to lobby about all this.
In hospitals a lot of the information that Awarepoint generates, which is real-time tracking of everything in the hospital including whether patients are being taken care of properly. If you are a hospital executive you could track your cycles time. With this data everything that's going on in your hospital can effectively be tracked from a real-time dashboard. I don't think hospitals have good dashboards now. Years ago, all of us at the well-run Fortune-class companies went to these real-time dashboards. When I was at Sun or Motorola I could see at any hour of any day what business we were booking, how much we shipped, what the supply chain was looking like. That's why we have these big, efficient companies. If we can move that enabling technology for tracking assets and everything else that moves within a hospital, I think we could team with some of these [EMR] players and become a supplier for the next generation of their offerings.
Do you think that this consumer wireless health market is a big opportunity?
I do, I definitely do, but whether Awarepoint fits into that isn't clear yet. When I was at Motorola we were already checking out people's hearts, pulse and all kinds of things in other countries. We were making sure they were taking their medications and all sorts of things like that. I think the bigger thing is that if broadband is everywhere and is cost effective in the next three to five years, we can safely and accurately tag every asset or any object and do something useful with that information. There are companies working on that for every industry and even for consumer uses, but right now we are small so we will keep our focus on healthcare. I want us to own every hospital and make sure they all have Awarepoint's system.
