Welcome everybody to our latest podcast series, Reimagining Mobility. I'm here with Thomson Varghese. He's a technical account manager for AVL in the US on the test system side in California. So Thomson, tell me a little bit how you've worked in engineering and now you're working in, let's call it sales business development. Tell me a little bit what made you go from engineering to sales? What do you like on both little bit about your career? So is my first job out of school.
So I went to school at Michigan Tech up in the U.P. and once I graduated there, I got an opportunity to start at AVL as an applications engineer. So I was really excited because as my grad school program at Tech, I had to set up a so. So that's a really good transition into AVL. So I started off doing combustion analysis work. So commissioning intercom systems from evolved to doing synthetic combustion work and then transitioned into commissioning our automation software.
Puma for customers, for traditional ICE customers was just setting up vessels for them. Did a lot of Bobcat works and offline Bobcat work for some heavy duty diesel customers in the US as well as internationally for them.
From there transitioned slowly into the technical sales specialist role, initially as a combustion sensor pieces from their feed has it that I transition to software fairly quickly so I started doing data management tools and management tools for the Navy also supporting those in the presales phase. And then I think during the pandemic, I had an opportunity where they offered me to take the sales position in the state of Texas, which my wife was really excited about because she's from Texas.
So it's no more winter at Michigan Tech. Let's go to Texas. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, so we transitioned into Texas and some are from Texas, also got the territory off Northern California. So it was an exciting time. So from engineering to doing technical work to the sales side, I was it's a good opportunity to learn both side of the business and the beginning of learning more about our customer, facing commissioning jobs, supporting the customer during the issues and so on and so forth.
On the sales side, you see a different side of the business, right, and pushing customers in the beginning and try to shape their requirements in such a way that we can provide a solution that meets that requirement. So it's it's very fulfilling to see both side of the business. Yeah, makes sense.
So as the industry has transitioned right or is still in the transition phase right from whatever it was ten years ago, let's say purely ICE and diesel based propulsion systems that AVL is heavily involved with. And then over the last several years, clearly a major transformation and disruption overall.
Tell me a little bit about I mean, you're clearly in one of the most interesting markets, so to speak, when it comes to this, at least up until about two, maybe three years ago, until it kind of swept the rest of the nation. But in California, we've seen this push and transformation into EVs for many years now. Tesla is only one example as many other ones. So tell me a little bit about those trends that you see. It's very different.
So when I started right, I started with the traditional OEMs in the industry in Detroit and so on and so forth. Those companies were more traditional. They had standard requirements. They knew what they were doing before they came to be able to ask us questions about it. And what I see in the EV space, in the new startup space is completely different, right? They are treating this as a software development project. It's a general development process. They don't know what tomorrow brings.
It's all about solving today's problem and let's solve the problem one place at a time, one problem at a time. And if we are failing, let's fail fast. It's a very different mindset and different methodology. So it's a different piece of work. It's sometimes chaotic, but it's pretty organized chaos. I would say the great things that are in California compared to, say, Michigan and how the the traditional versus the startup business. So it's very interesting.
It's fast pace and it's, I think, challenging inside even as well to transition into reacting at the pace of the customers demanding in California compared to having a five page RFQ from their customer. That doesn't happen anymore than if I get a one page RFQ. That's great. Most of my transactions with the customers happens over text messages, not even emails. So it's a whole different world.
Yeah, I mentioned it to somebody I don't know, three or so years ago when we were working with a customer and he said, Yeah, I'm sure you get like pages and pages. I mean, not as many as we get from a traditional OEM. I said, no, if I get a text message that's more than a few lines long, you know, and then that's good. But again, as you're saying, the excitement there is, is, hey, I need this, I need the ability to test this, allowing you then to be one degree.
You're not a very creative and finding the best solutions instead of having to say, okay, this is what it says, well, I don't think this is the best. So but this is what they're asking for is I give you so tell me a little bit about it. How how has your mind have to change to to adapt those to to those types of customers versus the customers that tell you exactly what they want. But you may struggle at times to get across that.
Let me tell you, you may actually need more or slightly less so slightly different. So how do you deal with the customers you're dealing with now? It's a different challenge, right? So when you have a very fixed set of requirements, so it's either you can meet those requirements or you can't, or you're trying to find, you know, valid exceptions to the requirements that are stated. So that's cumbersome process in itself that you have to follow through and it takes a lot of work.
And then the other end is when customers are just sending a picture saying a lot of time on one of these. Right. So then you have to come to the customer with follow up questions in such a way that you're not annoying them, you're trying to get the right information from them that changes your perspective because how do you take internally to our team saying, Hey, my customer wants an immediate test testing, but I don't know much more than that, right?
So we have to go to the website and figure out what projects they're working on, what are the specs, get a rough idea and then go to the customer saying, hey, that's what we were thinking. Correct? As if we are wrong. Right. That approach, if I go to a customer, say, in a startup company, if I go them with like a questionnaire of 50 questions, that probably will get ignored.
So the approach has been for us, what we've learned is that we should probably make some educated guess for the customer and make some suggestions based on an experience and go to the customer and show it to them and see if we are in line with the requirements. And then we can, you know, iterate from there. And then the customers really like that process and that's been pretty successful for us in the modern kind of funding market.
So besides the different approach that you just shared, which is very interesting, tell me a little bit what are, let's say Northern California or California customers and customers in Texas maybe as well that you are responsible for here. What do they do different when it comes to testing versus what you know, when when you were working in Detroit? Can you give me a little bit of an idea what what differences are there? Maybe there are not differences. I believe there are.
But yeah, so there are traditional customers in Texas already, some testing houses and so on and so forth. In the San Antonio area, there are some ... companies out in Houston. Some aviation markets there are still mature in Dallas. So those customers are more mature customers there. Their requirements are they would call me knowing exactly what they want, right? They are. We are we are having discussion with them. They know precisely what they want.
They are very do they say, very conscious of their budget. So they're always trying to see if they can get unused equipment and engineer it. Compared to that, the California market is very fast paced. They don't have time to engineer it and build something from scratch or take your spots and figure out how to make it work. They just time is so important for them because they're trying to move really fast.
So they are coming to us as the experts in the field and asking us for a solution that we can deliver instantaneously. So the timing is also very different. So Texas customers do understand that, you know, things like our testing would take another six months to a year lead time. But in California, to come back and say, hey, can you do this in two months? And what what does it take to get us there? So that's the different approach to the basis different.
And that's what I see that startups in Texas too, that behave very similar to Californian customers, it's just a difference between started was something of traditional more established players in the market. So when we look at California customers, oftentimes I think of some of the startups and more established ones there to kind of push this, let's say, over the air updates for vehicles. Right. Do we have something similar that they demand from you when it comes to test equipment?
Meaning give me this piece of hardware that I can test and e-motor a battery, a fuel cell, and oh, by the way, I hope I on a regular basis consistently get software updates. Is that similar with in their mind with test equipment? So over the over the air updates for software, that's something we don't encourage at all because of the safety aspects of spinning objects in general. So we try to stay away from it. Sure. But on that similar line, I can give you an example.
And so in my previous role at for Data Management in one of these startups in the California market had asked us to provide them a data management solution, which we can. So we had solutions for that. So we recommended to them and they wanted that software as a service and we're like, Oh no, no, because most of our customers don't want this data to be sitting in a cloud that's shared. And you can often, yeah, compromise the data.
Everybody wants the data on PREM and the engineers are accusing me of being stuck in 2010. That's software firm anymore. So this is a different mindset. So they don't necessarily want to own the software all the time. It's not that exceptions, obviously. So it's a different way of thinking how software to manage. So when you have software as a service, it's expected that updates automatically happen.
Yes, you're managing the software for them on a horse or a cloud somewhere, so you manage the infrastructure for them, which is very different than our traditional customer base who do not want to do anything but storing the data in a public cloud. Sure, that that is what. And so the new versus old mindset, right? Not necessarily wrong one way or the other, just a different culture and think exactly.
So when you think about what the equipment with the software, data analytics, data management, all these things, when you see what you're seeing today, what do you see in five years? What do we worst the industry going in five years? Well, it's very hard to predict what's happening in six months from now because things are changing so fast. It's I, I, I can't predict very well what's going to happen in five years.
I not in a good position to tell you, but what I can say is I think the aviation trend is going to be higher. So the electrification trend is going to be strong and you will see a lot of double work in different battery chemistry, different kind of battery packs that people are trying to develop to optimize it for different applications. So I see a lot of that happening, a lot of improvement in the ADAS. It is space. There is a lot of investment that I see in the market right now in the space.
So a lot of work is still this industry is pretty nascent right now, so I'm expecting a lot of investment in that space. e-motor, e-axel That's I think getting to a point where things have matured for some of the bigger players in the market. I believe smaller players still have to get there. So there's not a lot of investment that's going to happen in that space as well. Do you do you see more of a demand? Hey, I need to spend any more or even faster. I need to get even more data out of it.
So even faster acquisition times, more involvement of artificial intelligence too immediately, as soon as I get this data, use analysis tools and give me results and maybe predictive type thing instead of analyzing the data as is, but looking trying to look forward through AI and other things, you see that as well. Happening quite a bit. So in the traditional space of immature or excellent testing, that's just catching up in my opinion from what I'm seeing in the market.
But in the ADAS/AD space that's already there, it's very hard for you to classify the data that are getting done, like terabytes. In terms of data, you don't have time to do it manually training eyes to do that quite a bit. That's already happening, but you're seeing that as well. But say after testing, right, there's so much getting created during our practice, you can create a tiny amount of data. The easy right. That's a lot of data to analyze.
So there's a lot of analysis software that are being used. People are writing their own scripts to analyze through them. We have some tool chains that we offer in that space as well. We have daily software that we allow customers we use for customers to better choose the edge cases so they can test the cases and not every single point of the factorial arm. So as it's happening there in that space as well.
Okay. So California companies, he talked about it before very advanced in some of their thinking and what they want to do, maybe relatively speaking. Right. Do you see a big push in your markets and with your customers to try and get totally away with any physical testing, go to purely simulation and model based testing there? I think there is there's always going to be some place for physical testing no matter how much you do monitoring and simulation.
If you validate those models inside a simulation using some physical data. So it won't be 100% there. But I feel like it's getting pushed to simulation and modeling quite a bit. So that's where a lot of the development is happening and then once they have some some designed, they try it for the physical prototyping and validate those models and then keep reiterating that process over time. Okay. Yeah, I'm trying.
Can you elaborate a little bit on our involvement, what we do with Lucid and the technologies that we have them, why they came to us, etc., from from your perspective. From lucid has been great at our great customers to us at AVL. So they involved us initially with their battery testing space.
So we have provided some solutions in that space in the beginning when they were still Latina, since then in the powertrain space, they have decided on the selected AVL as a supplier to provide them the next generation of testing hardware and software in those spaces. So anywhere from the e-axle testbeds to e-motor test stands or even chassis dyno from validation work is all being sold through AVL.
so, they have they're getting the AVL ecosystem of software that allows them to collaborate between these different testing profiles. Right. So anywhere from e-motor test to chassis dyno, it’s all going to be on the same software space that will allow them to collaborate better between their own departments as well. Okay. Any final thoughts from your side on where the market is going? And it's exciting times.
You know, we are seeing new applications right now anywhere from in all these electrified air taxis to electrified cars to all kinds of cool technologies that are coming out into the market. Exciting times to live in. And I'm excited to work with these companies. Very good. Thanks, Thompson, for your time. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Thanks for listening to Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you'd like to episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.