Stan Schneider, CEO of Real-Time Innovations, is photographed at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Friday, March 24, 2017. RTI is part of the next wave of the internet that will connect machines and devices together into intelligent systems. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

SUNNYVALE — Real-Time Innovations aims to do more than jump into the emerging world of the internet of things. It has devised software that enables companies and other organizations to connect industrial, transportation, medical and energy devices so they can communicate with each other and operate more efficiently.

Sunnyvale-based RTI expects to grow its sales to more than $30 million in 2017 from more than $25 million in 2016.

This newspaper recently interviewed Stan Schneider, chief executive officer of Real-Time Innovations, to discuss RTI’s role in the internet of things.

Q: How does your company fit into the internet of things?

A: RTI is in the industrial side of the internet of things. The industrial side of IoT is a new infrastructure for how the planet runs. We provide software to assist with the improvement of IoT.

Q: What does your software do to support this infrastructure?

A: It allows speedier connections between systems that are out there. Our software adds intelligence to the system.

Q: What is RTI doing as a company, or you as an executive, to improve how things work in the internet of things?

A: We are very involved in a new consortium called Open Fog. We have jumped into the guidance leadership of the internet of things. We are looking at really making improvements in robotics, factory systems, avionics and more. We are the largest company selling a connectivity framework, a way to hook things together. It’s a very exciting world.

Q: What are some of the industry sectors in which you’re most active?

A: Autonomous cars, planes, trains. Renewable energy systems. We are very active in transportation, the medical space and hospital instruments. We are enabling connected medical devices. You go into a hospital, and you see a respirator, an incubator, EKG machine, and so forth. They are currently not connected with each other in a way that makes them work intelligently. Our software can be used by transportation systems to find all the cars within 200 yards of an intersection as a way of enabling autonomous driving.

Q: Are IoT technologies getting to a critical mass now?

A: All the analysts agree on only one thing about the future of the internet of things: The number, the value of this market, will eventually be in the trillions of dollars. We are not anywhere near that today. Some serious investments are going on. New projects are taking off. And most of them are being driven by some compelling needs.

Q: How do things look in the medical sector?

A: We are really working on getting medical devices and systems to talk to each other. After heart disease and cancer, medical errors are the third leading cause of death. We are trying to help medical professionals not make as many mistakes. It’s the same principle as computer systems being able to make vehicles safer.

Q: What sort of opportunities do you see in the energy field?

A: One of our big goals is to make green energy really more practical. Look at a solar panel. Solar panels on a house do produce electricity that can be put on the grid. But the utility really can’t use that electricity easily. Our software makes these electricity devices more intelligent. We believe we can make the electricity generated by residents through solar more predictable. It can’t just randomly be thrown on the grid.

Q: Which power companies are using your software for energy applications?

A: It is being tested by Duke Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, and others.

Q: What will be needed for your technology to really take off in the energy field?

A: Commercial deployment requires complete re-design of the nation’s power grid. This will create a lot of jobs and a huge economic boom.

Q: What is happening in autonomous vehicles? How would your software enable vehicles to operate better?

A: Vehicles in the future will free people from driving. It will purge deaths from highway accidents. About 35,000 people a year died in auto accidents in 2016. That number will go down dramatically. We can get rid of the entire auto insurance industry. Roadside motels will go away. These technologies will make real estate that is far away from cities more valuable. We can get rid of most of the parking structures and parking lots.

Q: What would be some practical example of how this would work, using your software?

A: It would be like an Uber or Lyft service. The car picks you up, drops you off, then goes and picks up someone else, or goes back home. Then when you or someone else needs it, the car comes back for you or the other person.

Q: How is the growth of the internet of things affecting your company?

A: We are hiring aggressively. Not just in Sunnyvale, but all over the world, we are hiring especially sales people and service engineers.

Q: What are your sales numbers?

A: More than $25 million last year, and we are anticipating more than $30 million in sales this year.

Q: How many employees do you have now?

A: Considerably over 100 now.

Q: What kind of venture funding have you obtained?

A: We are a Silicon Valley anomaly. We don’t have external capital, and we are not seeking external capital. We got a good capital infusion from the previous sale of a company.

Q: How can you make sure that your software doesn’t allow cars to get hacked?

A: RTI is very much a security company in addition to everything we do. Our systems will be very hard to hack. We have a security test bed being built outside of Chicago that is designed to specifically answer that question. The attention to security is orders upon orders of magnitude greater today than it was in recent years.

Q: Will IoT really be a game changer?

A: We are just scratching the surface. Because of the internet of things, the world will be unrecognizable 40 years from now.


Company: Real-Time Innovations.

Job: Chief Executive Officer.

Age: 59.

Birthplace: Ann Arbor, Mich., but raised in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Residence: Sunnyvale.

Education: University of Michigan, B.S. Applied Math and Physics; M.S. Computer Engineering. Stanford University, Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Family: Married for more than 30 years. Four children.


A Favorite Quote: “There is no mistake so great as that of being always right.” — Samuel Butler

Favorite Books: “Ender’s Game,” “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” “Selling the Wheel” and “All the Light We Cannot See.”

First Job: Washing dishes on the Friday and Saturday graveyard shift at The Golden Ladle.

Start to Engineering Career: Crashing cars at a University of Michigan laboratory.

Bill Gates connection: He was one of Gates’s early customers because he led a project building a BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) when MS-DOS, the original Microsoft operating system, was introduced in August 1981.

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