May 15, 2012
Security, efficiency and sustainability are the three key promises of M2M to businesses. And most applications of M2M address one or several of these straight forward issues in an organization: minimize use of service cars, avoid production stops, save valuable time with accidents, make processes more efficient, automate to avoid expensive labour work, etc. These are straight forward in the sense that we address concrete problems quite easy to put numbers on and investments can be verified using business cases and ROI. But the ultimate value of M2M comes from innovative business models, increased brand value and other less tangible things. And these are much more complicated to identify and dress in numbers. Innovation and creativity is clearly an important part of such efforts and I would suggest companies to look at the M2M consumer market to get ideas and cases to bring home.
There is actually a fourth promise of M2M which I normally don’t talk about to businesses – convenience. But in the consumer market this is a key driver and differentiator. Other reasons to look carefully at the consumer market are the typically limited budgets forcing innovative and cost efficient solutions and the absolute requirement for easy to install and use solutions. In addition consumers are generally more open to cloud services and many of them are early adopters with smartphones, pads and other gadgets. Examples of things and tricks to bring from the consumer space to business could be the use of smartphones to connect devices cheaply to the Internet and the host of innovative cloud services using sensors and gadgets in the growing personal health and fitness market. Imagine how much the home care providers can steal with pride from here! Take also a closer look at how well many consumer services enable their users to use any and all of their devices for the service. A lot to learn there.
And by the way, isn’t the Internet-of-Things a misleading name? There is only one Internet of People and Things.
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Business Models, Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, User Interaction | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, business case, Business model, Internet of People and Things, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, roi, usability | 
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Posted by magnusmelander
May 8, 2012
Connecting things to the Internet opens up for a new wave of innovation to society, companies and consumers. That fact has been talked about and dressed in numbers for the last couple of years. Still we see quite little action beyond connecting “big phones” and electricity meters. Something is obviously missing and I think I know the answer.
We have good enough technology available and we have been blessed with a new category of smart mobile devices with apps perfect to visualize functionality and value for people. And we are in the beginning of the cloud and Big Data era which constitutes a perfect environment for M2M-applications and the data created. Still little action.
As often when powerful technology comes to market it is too abstract for most people to see how they and their organizations will benefit from it. What it will do to their life, business and society. Our industry needs to educate people and help them see the value and opportunities of M2M solutions. It is definitely not about technology – it is about business and should be discussed with business developers, product owners and management teams.
I believe a combination of meetings and a lot of relevant examples is what it takes to create understanding and feed a creative and rewarding thought process. The examples are most often not that your competitor did this, but rather someone in an adjacent industry did something and that was the result. Meetings with theoretical examples don’t work. We have seen some of that already and it sometimes feels like people from the M2M industry tell other people from the same industry how it works. And it is still too early to provide relevant ideas “stand alone”, without face to face meetings, since the context and overall education often is missing.
The method I am using with clients starts with an overview of the market (education) and continues with discussions about problems and challenges in their business relevant for M2M solutions. This normally becomes discussions about cost savings and efficiency which is great. Further down the road we look at business cases and ROI calculations. But the true power of the M2M concept comes to play when we start discuss potential new innovative ways of doing business enabled by M2M solutions. Collecting, cultivating and leveraging the data generated. Selling services or functions instead of products. Going from product life cycles to continuous R&D. Offering customers an unexpected service or feature. Effects to the brand and new weapons in recruiting employees or customers. This is what I believe is the real power of M2M solutions and the Internet of people and things.
This is what I call “M2M for real” and I will do my best to promote this approach beyond our company. A good acid test will be an “M2M For Real” event in Stockholm which the media company Mobil Business is organizing June 20, TeliaSonera is main sponsor and where we will provide a solid introduction and status update on M2M solutions followed by a “smörgåsbord” of examples from all kinds of industries and opportunities to discuss.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, M2M | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, Business model, innovation, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
May 3, 2012
An absolute requirement for M2M to really take off is a common architecture and a set of global standards. A robust common service layer is needed. The standardization organization ETSI started en effort to create such architecture and standard in January 2009 and has started to deliver. ETSI has released a multi-service layer enabling an easier and efficient access to the telecommunications network functionalities, designed to support a wide range of services over different underlying networks. It has to be noted that the work is IP only why issues like moving fax machines and other analog devices from PSTN to mobile networks isn’t covered.
According to Mr Enrico Scarrone, Chairman ETSI TC M2M, they try to build the standard on existing and available bits and pieces and focus on identifying gaps and fill them. At M2M Forum in Milan he presented also the oneM2M initiative which is a global partnership project aiming at removing the barriers for the Internet of Things created by local and industry related differences and approaches. We all know the power of 3GPP which strongly supported the developments of the third and fourth generations of cellular networks. Hopefully oneM2M will pave the way for a rapidly growing Internet of Things where data from different industries can be combined to create new innovative solutions and business models.
Leave a Comment » | M2M, M2M Service Enablers | Tagged: 3GPP, B3CC, CSD, Enrico Scarrone, ETSI, Internet of Things, M2M, M2M Forum, oneM2M, PSTN, Standards | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
April 24, 2012
Services like Skype and Spotify utilizing the Internet just as a connection are often referred to as over the top services or OTT. Consumers normally love them but operators typically have a more complex view of them: great since they create demand for their IP services but not that great if they replace services the operators charge for. Most M2M applications are really tiny in terms of traffic generation which explains why over 95% of the mobile ones still use 2G. For mobile operators M2M is more of a subscription business than a data business today. It is hard to estimate how M2M solutions will impact data volumes since it’s a combination of actual applications and volumes of connected devices.
I always claim that the M2M consumer market is a great place to look for innovation and interesting examples to bring to the business market. One example is what could be referred to as M2M OTT, where vendors of connectable devices use people’s ordinary mobile devices to connect to the Internet and an application in the cloud or elsewhere. This can make the device cheaper and smaller to manufacture and use. By using for example Bluetooth to connect to the phone and leverage the existing subscription and data plan. Data from the device can be made available to an application somewhere typically adding no cost to the user. And no new revenues but more traffic to the operator. There are many examples of this in the consumer market today and the personal health and fitness segment is one worth looking at. A mix of books, trends, research, services and products has created a rapidly growing movement and industry. Dr David B. Agus’ bestseller “the end of Illness” and the sleep monitor Zeo are good examples. The Zeo is a complete system taking sleep analysis out from the labs. By connecting a Zeo headband to an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth, the sleep data collected is made available to an app for reporting. But the sleep history data is also made available to the user’s account at mysleep.myzeo.com where analysis, backup and other services are available.
Using the mobile devices for local collection and presentation of data and access, over the top, to an application and services in the cloud is a model we can use in other situations. There are obviously downsides having to deal with Bluetooth, phones running out of power or stolen etc. But for some applications this is a great model maybe also in the business environment. There is simply not one or two models for M2M but many, and it is important to carefully look at all possible approaches available when implementing an M2M project.
Leave a Comment » | Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, Networks | Tagged: 2G, Agus, Android, apps, B3CC, B3IT, Bluetooth, Internet of Things, IoT, iPhone, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, OTT, over the top, SIM, smartphone, zeo | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
April 12, 2012
The mighty mobile industry is a major force behind M2M today. They have what it takes to connect things, they need to find growth beyond the six billion active SIM cards today and they are promoting the concept of M2M aggressively. But at the same time it is quite obvious that a lot of things will be connected without SIM card. We already have a lot of connected devices in the PSTN network, many electricity meters are connected using PLC or other wireless network technologies than the mobile networks and wireless technologies like W-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and RFID are already used in many applications. Different technologies have their strengths and weaknesses, new ones are coming to market while old ones are fading away. But the concepts of wide area and local area networks remain. Generally speaking it takes technologies optimized for LAN or WAN to build cost and capacity efficient networks. Sometimes even a shorter range network structure is needed like a Personal Area Network.I believe the mobile networks will be used for some connected devices, especially moving things or if one want to avoid dealing with Firewalls. But more so as the preferred WAN solution for things connected to a local area network solution. I have come across estimates that one out of ten connected devices will have a SIM card and I think that could be a reasonable estimate. If Ericsson’s “50 Billion connected devices by 2020” would be reality, 5 Billion of them would have a SIM card. That is a lot more SIM cards than the 108 Million mobile M2M SIM cards that Berg Insight estimate are active today world-wide. But what about the other 45 Billion connected devices? How will they be connected and managed and how will relevant data generated by these devices become easily available for application developers and integrators?
The most immediate challenge for the M2M industry is to establish a rich assortment of M2M services enablers in order to make development and maintenance of M2M application more resource and time efficient. M2M Service Enablers will have different features and specialities and they can be deployed in three different ways: on top of operator connectivity services, as in-house solutions or in independent service providers.
But another very interesting area to be addressed is how to connect devices in a local infrastructure in order to enable resource efficient development, maintenance and monitoring as well as a structured way to deal with relevant data. I use to refer to “Local M2M Gateways” and I have started to look for clever ideas and solutions in the market. I am convinced there is room for a whole range of different products optimized for different situations, still providing a quite standardized interface to M2M Services Enablers. In some cases we need to connect locally using only one technology and in other situations we need to support a mix of several technologies. Connecting sensors or things with sophisticated embedded systems put different requirements on the Local M2M Gateways. The choice of WAN-connection, with or without backup, is yet another area where we will need different solutions. And whichever solution we end up using, it has to be cost efficient, easy to deploy and maintain and robust. These will be important tools when helping organizations to design relevant M2M solutions to meet their challenges and opportunities.
3 Comments | M2M, M2M Service Enablers, Networks | Tagged: B3CC, Berg Insight, Bluetooth, Ericsson, Internet of Things, IoT, LAN, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, PAN, PSTN, Rfid, SIM, WAN, WiFi, ZigBee | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
March 30, 2012
This post was published on M2M Daily March 15, 2012: http://www.m2mdaily.com/m2m-editorials/m2m-enables-new-business-models/
Many industries end up in the huge global market with ever increasing competition putting immense pressure on cost, performance, functionality, service, etc. One approach to change game plan is to change business model from selling products to selling functionality. Something-as-a-service and pay-per-use are concepts along those lines. It is likely that clients in general prefer such offerings since it feels fair to pay for use, it feels good not to have to take care of product problems and in relevant cases it’s great not even having to host or see the products. For vendors it is easier to manage manufacturing, production and service if they own the products, they improve R&D since they get to know everything about the product life cycle but they will get their revenues distributed over maybe 34 to 60 months instead of up front. That is horrifying and require a lot of change to any company going down this path.
M2M is a key enabler to business transformation. Today we can connect products to the vendor’s relevant systems for planning, maintenance, financial reporting, invoicing, support, etc. From a technical point of view this enables change of business model to for example a pay per use model. Since we can monitor, control and manage the products remotely we can constantly improve everything that relates to the product during its life cycle including preventive maintenance, tune for more efficient energy consumption, decrease downtime due to alarms, make software upgrades over the air, etc. These are obviously relevant benefits also with a traditional business model but the point is that with full control of a product through out its life a service oriented business model looks more attractive.All of this is pure technical and no one should underestimate the complexity from a business, organization, systems and management point of view to make changes like this. But still, M2M makes it technically possible today.
We see an increasing number of cases where companies connect their products but it is most often to improve a specific thing like maintenance. And the risk is that the technical implementation works for the purpose but can’t support the next request coming up somewhere else in the company. It is still quite rare that vendors also change the business model but there are interesting examples of companies who do. Innovative business models seem more for newcomers than for established businesses. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it! Well, if it is a good idea someone will do it and it might be disruptive.
I would argue that now is the time for companies to start look into these things. Keep an eye of what competitors and players in adjacent industries does, start play with ideas of what we could do if we connected our products and what the results would be. And most importantly, if you decide to get going, ensure you build a solution supporting needs you might have over the life time of the products.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, M2M | Tagged: as-a-Servcie, B3CC, B3IT, Business model, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, Pay-per-use, R&D | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
March 23, 2012
A key challenge for the M2M industry right now is to enable time and resource efficient development of specific M2M applications to industries or even companies. As soon as the interesting devices are connected in a proper way, data needs to be collected, organized and combined with other relevant data in order to provide useful information to new or existing applications. Devices need to be monitored, alarms have to be taken care of and maybe even transfer of money needs to be handled. This is what is done in M2M Services Enablement systems – the key to successful M2M deployments.
The Services Enablement systems can be deployed in three different ways: as extensions to operator connectivity offerings, as independent services from a third-party or as an in-house service to support M2M initiatives. It seems obvious that devices in many cases will be connected using a mix of technologies which further complicates this issue. It is my experience that we always end up in different communication technologies for wide area networks, local area networks and personal area networks/short-range communications. And even though wireless most often is preferred when feasible, also fixed networks will be used onwards. Needless to say, it is challenging to build a Services Enabler solution and to choose which solution to use in a specific situation.
We need to make it easier for potential customers to understand and decide which type of solution to use in order to accelerate deployments of real M2M solutions. Six Swedish companies just joined forces under the name of “Swedish M2M Service Enablers” in an ambition to start work together on educating the market on the importance of Services Enablement solutions and to try establish some common language and even APIs. The collaboration is also an attempt to market the companies to customers and partners abroad. Please visit http://www.swedishm2m.se to read more about the initiative or take a look at the press release issued today at http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/view/pressrelease/swedish-m2m-services-enablers-initiative-launched-to-jointly-promote-swedish-companies-with-world-class-solutions-744720
Leave a Comment » | M2M, Networks | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, Internet of Things, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, open api, SMSE, Swedish M2M, Swedish M2M Services Enablers | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
March 8, 2012
This post was published on M2M Daily February 23, 2012:
http://www.m2mdaily.com/m2m-editorials/walking-in-the-customers-shoes/Mobile
M2M is back again with more support than ever. One difference from the last attempt is that now the M2M market is quantified back and forth. Another difference is that we have a huge amount of smart meters rolled out or in the process to be.
In the rear we have Ericsson’s 50 billion devices thunder roaring. And closer to the market we have analysts looking down the different verticals and mobile operators working to position themselves well now when the race is about to begin. Media sings the M2M song loud and clear and many M2M conferences, newsletters, blogs and web sites are in place, which wasn’t the case either back then, ten years ago.
I believe it is time for mobile M2M now and base my view on three things:
1) it is a great idea – connecting things and putting computing on top can help us sort out a lot of challenges
2) we have what it takes to get going – technology, services and know-how is in place and affordable now
3) we can’t do without it – efficiency, safety and sustainability are the three key promises of M2M and these issues are on the serious agenda in all countries and organizations around the world
We are still missing things like a solid standardized service layer to make application development for the very complex and fragmented market more efficient and scalable but even without that, we have what it takes to get going today.
But even if everything looks fine I see a potential risk to the M2M project. The messages come very much inside out, from the industry to the market. Still we know that nothing happens until people understand what technology will do for them and their business. Some organizations have used mobile M2M to resolve issues despite the complexity and cost involved and I must assume the reason for that has been that they saw obvious and big benefits thus an attractive ROI. But in most cases this is not obvious and that is something we in the industry have to resolve by more interaction with potential clients directly and through extensive partnerships. More outside in. When we look at our selves we know that most of the maybe 100M M2M SIM-cards activated today are used in electricity meters pushed by politicians and in eReaders and other “big phones”. We have to work harder and smarter to address the more complex and fragmented “real” M2M market where ROI is king and the potential is enormous.
Leave a Comment » | M2M | Tagged: B3CC, Ericsson, Internet of Things, M2M, M2MDaily.com | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
March 5, 2012
Mobile World Congress 2012 is over and to me it was a busy congress without any exciting major themes or news. Nobody is using Bluetooth headsets any longer, most exhibitors used apps on pads and smartphones to visualize what they deliver and the expected grand return of Nokia never happened. Among the most interesting things were Mozilla’s Open Web Devices – a mobile open source os built-in html5 – and Wireless Power Consortium with their prototypes.
M2M was presented, discussed and promoted almost everywhere but it was more the presence of M2M at the congress than what was demonstrated that made impact on me. Once again there was a Connected House filled up with consumer products connected to Internet and a couple of cars outside. The Embedded SIM was demonstrated by GSMA in partnership with Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient and it was cool to see over the air provisioning of operator credentials in action. This ability to change mobile operator over the air will make life easier for owners of M2M installations and vendors of connected things.
The take-a-way from MWC 2012 was the M2M momentum in the industry. Nothing surprising yet good to see. I heard statements like “M2M is one of the few growth areas we are investing in” over and over again during the week. It feels like M2M is here to stay now.
1 Comment | M2M | Tagged: apps, B3CC, connected house, embedded sim, gemalto, giesecke & devrient, html5, Internet of Things, M2M, Mobile World Congress, mozilla, mwc, open web devices, pads, smartphones, wireless power consortium | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
February 18, 2012
The 10 Million dollar M2M question is how to support thousands of business processes in tens of thousands of businesses in an efficient and scalable way. Beecham Research’s M2M Sector Map (see Interesting reading) makes the point of the fragmented and complex market very well. Mobile operators typically have few services with very many users while most potential users of M2M will have industry specific or even company specific needs in relatively small numbers. This is why most connected devices in cellular networks today are terminals in large volumes (typically electricity meters or eReaders) with small ARPU but also little work required by the operator per terminal deployed. The issue with this is that the electricity meters are rolled out primarily due to political decisions and one can argue that eReaders, iPads, etc are just big mobile phones and not really M2M solutions.
The other type of deployments today are primarily those where the value gained is big enough to pay for integration, software development, customization, etc. And these are “real” M2M solutions leveraging the value of connecting things and putting computing on top.
I come to think of the “bankruptcy gap” in between the only two viable business models over time: low price/low cost/high volumes and high price/great perceived value/customization. In the bankruptcy gap you will find average products with average prices. There is an obvious risk today to address the bulk of the very fragmented M2M market: quite an effort to provide what the customer want and price sensitiveness due to not big or clear enough benefits is a scary combination.
This looks similar to the bankruptcy gap but with one big difference: the driver putting businesses across industries into the bankruptcy gap is commoditization of products and services. But in the case of M2M we are in the early days! How can this be?
I think the situation is dangerous since it threatens to once again leave us with a great idea, a lot of energy and efforts, poor results and many investments and opportunities wasted. To me the key reasons why we face an artificial bankruptcy gap in M2M now are:
– Parts of the solutions, like plain vanilla 2G data subscriptions, are more or less commodities today. Other connectivity for M2M like PLC, Satellite, Wi-Fi, Rfid, NFC and PSTN are not commoditized and combinations of them are complex to deal with.
– Today it is too much effort to develop, integrate and support the M2M applications. Robust, efficient, large scale service delivery platforms are needed supporting standardized complete development stacks, different networks and numerous APIs.
Good news is that there is progress in these areas. Most mobile operators have or will deploy Service Enablement Services (SES) taking care of horizontal requirements on top of the connectivity. Module and equipment vendors, independent start-ups and others are working on similar often cloud based offerings and some of them support combinations of different connectivity technologies. Many standards development organizations have recognized the need for a common cost-efficient M2M service layer that can be embedded in different hardware and software to provide robust connectivity between terminals and the application servers. The ITU Focus Group on Machine-to-Machine Service Layer, initially focused on e-health, announced January 16 is a good example.
The best way to avoid another M2M flop is to ensure strong collaboration in establishing a rock solid common M2M service layer with standardized protocols and APIs and to always start working on real customer problems to avoid brilliant answers to questions we don’t know.
1 Comment | Cloud computing, M2M | Tagged: B3CC, bankruptcy gap, Beecham Research, Internet of Things, ITU, M2M, NFC, PLC, Rfid, Service Delivery, Service Enablement Services, service layer, SES, Wi-Fi | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
Security, efficiency and sustainability are the three key promises of M2M to businesses. And most applications of M2M address one or several of these straight forward issues in an organization: minimize use of service cars, avoid production stops, save valuable time with accidents, make processes more efficient, automate to avoid expensive labour work, etc. These are straight forward in the sense that we address concrete problems quite easy to put numbers on and investments can be verified using business cases and ROI. But the ultimate value of M2M comes from innovative business models, increased brand value and other less tangible things. And these are much more complicated to identify and dress in numbers. Innovation and creativity is clearly an important part of such efforts and I would suggest companies to look at the M2M consumer market to get ideas and cases to bring home.
connectcompute 