The Tech Behind the Industry – Pets

There’s been so much digital transformation over the past decade. And in the last year, transformation has accelerated ever further as businesses turned to technology to help them operate as efficiently as possible during the pandemic. But in certain industries, we don't necessarily think of technology making huge innovations in a way that impacts us on a day-to-day basis. And one of those is the pet industry.

Anyone with a pet will tell you they’ll do anything to keep their animal happy and healthy. But it’s always been a challenge to know when something is wrong with a pet. What pet owners can do is look at their pet’s surroundings and try and learn what they can from their behaviors. This is where technology can really make a difference. It has the tools for monitoring and identifying environmental and behavioral changes and the platforms for sharing insights at scale.

To continue our series on the technology that drives industries, we invited Jacob Zuppke, President & COO, Board Member at AutoPets and Patrick Husting, Founder & CEO, The Equestrian App onto the Cloud Talk podcast. Joining them are three Rackspace Technology employees: the familiar Cloud Talk host and Chief Technology Evangelist Jeff DeVerter, Amir Kashani, VP of Cloud Native Development & IoT and Juliana Chapman, Field Marketing Manager.

Tune in to hear about the following:

• How technology is bringing us closer to our pets
• The impact of IoT and wearables
• The dangers of becoming too reliant on software
• Amazing use cases from AutoPets and The Equestrian App
• Technology adoption challenges such as low digital and technology literacy

Jacob Zuppke explains how collecting data about pet behavior benefits the entire industry and consumers. “We're hyper-focused on adding more value to pet parents' lives to help them understand their pet pattern, and later on, allowing veterinarians to understand that data better and allowing the industry at large to understand that data better. Because if we know how frequently two-year-old Bengal cats are going to the bathroom, we can help other pet parents learn from the larger group of customers that we have. And the data platform starts to become really an insightful pet platform that all consumers around the globe can learn from.”

Amir Kashani discusses the evolution of AutoPets. “They have a lot of great ideas. By embracing the cloud, and finally having a platform they can build on, they're not stifled. So they can go as fast as they want to go and not worry about the platform slowing them down.

Juliana Chapman discusses the aspects of the horse world that technology can assist with. “It's really through health and safety. Horses are out on their own, either in the stall or in a field for long periods of time. So there are smart halters to monitor the horses, their heartbeat and rhythms, with AI capabilities so it learns behavior over time. So that's just an example on the health and safety side. There's a lot of apps that can help equestrians manage the day-to-day, whether it's feeding, cleaning, vets, etc. So that's really important. And it feels like that job is never done. So tech can really help in that aspect. And then thirdly is stabling and transportation. You know, a lot of equestrians like to compete and go to horse shows. They have an app now called Equo. It’s like Uber for the horse world. So yeah, it's exciting!”

Patrick Husting created a piece of software for recording information about his horses and that grew to an app being used globally with over 20,000 users. “It's fascinating. We have added a whole barnyard of critters including cows, dogs, pigs and sheep to the app. It's kind of grown a little bit beyond horses. It's really fascinating to see where people take the app.”