An M2M Industry in its teens is a reality. Decision makers are beginning to looking into threats and opportunities with M2M / IoT, and especially product owners are moving to real-life trials and action. I have still to come across a trial which didn’t bring unexpected results and insight! Therefore I keep on arguing that people should leave Excel and Powerpoint behind for a while, and make a trial. Just connect five-ten devices and see what comes out. My favorite example is Springworks who always work very thoroughly and connected their boss’ car and made it tweet to the employees.
If trials and action is the right approach at this stage of M2M, then the value of Service Enablement is even more obvious. If you can find yourself a company who already have built the basics of what you need (i.e. the connectivity part, a cloud based context-aware data service and distribution capabilities through apps, web and maybe other interfaces), who understand your application and are willing to help you getting going fast – just do it! For little money and effort you will get fantastic data in almost no time.
This is why I established Swedish M2M Service Enablers (SMSE) in March 2012. Our objectives are educating the market, promote Sweden as a good place to look for M2M Service Enablement and to promote the alliance members. As of yesterday we added two new members – Fridat and Vinnter – and now we are 12 members and 5 sponsors including TeliaSonera, Telenor Connexion, Tele2 and Net1.
Now when decision makers and product owners want to start doing things the M2M industry runs the risk of loosing them since it is very hard to know where to go to get help. Their existing IT and technology partners will not be able to help and quick small trials are not really what the operators and the consulting firms are keen on. This is where the specialized M2M Service Enablers come in. They will help the industry picking up the interest and turn it into small affordable good enough quality trials. We have presented this pitch at events, meetings and in articles internationally over the last 15 months and we sense momentum building up. Service Enablers from other countries want to join us (and we work with some informally) and we are increasingly asked to come for events and customer meetings, even bilateral efforts.
Swedish M2M Service Enablers (SMSE) is an informal small alliance of companies sharing the desire to be part of building the connected society, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything or whatever we want to call it. They all work really hard in a tough immature market and their creativity and determination to make it happen is fantastic. And there are similar fighters around the world of equal importance to the success of the industry. In my mind they are the key to a successful Internet of Things and I would welcome any initiative that would make life easier for them. Our next big effort is on Tuesday when we run M2M For Real™ 2013 in Stockholm, sharing eleven inspiring real-life M2M-cases with a large number of decision makers. Please keep your ideas, proposals and invitations coming!
connectcompute 