Specialist M2M Service Enablers make it happen!

June 15, 2013

SMSE-logoAn 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!

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M2M in its teens – the industry is shifting gear

April 5, 2013
The M2M industry is rapidly leaving the first connectivity focused baby phase – thank god! – and enters the productivity phase. This is where we look at operational issues, capabilities and value. Vendors and operators are preparing themselves to be able to serve the market better and more efficiently. And new partnerships, alliances, initiatives and M&A activities pop up on a daily basis. This is all very good and makes life easier for developers, integrators and customers. But it is more about preparing for the business to take off than making it taking off. It mainly improves the capabilities to deliver in an efficient way.

Today’s initiatives are signs of a developing industry. Building blocks are put together into candidate platforms and architectures. As always most of them will fail over time but still it is an important part of growing up. Let’s look at a couple of recent M2M “teenager activities”:

  • Telefónica and Telit cooperate in M2M Air, providing managed M2M services globally
  • Etisalat group just joined KPN, NTT DOCOMO, Rogers Communications, SingTel, Telefonica, Telstra and VimpelCom in the M2M Multi-Operator Alliance
  • Ericsson and SAP announced a partnership at MWC and talk about the M2M Eco-system
  • Satellite operator Orbcomm acquired MobileNet who provides custom mobile data solutions for the heavy equipment and railroad industries
  • Wipro and Axeda announced a strategic alliance to provide services and end-to-end solutions to help organizations connect with any asset, leverage machine data to enhance business processes and develop new innovative enterprise applications.
  • TeliaSonera, France Telecom-Orange and Deutsche Telekom collaborate to increase the quality of service and interoperability for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications
  • Claro Brazil joins a growing list of Jasper Wireless operator partners including AT&T, América Móvil, NTT DOCOMO, Telefónica, VimpelCom, KPN, SingTel, Etisalat, Telstra, Rogers, CSL and more
  • Several operators including TeliaSonera, Swisscom, XL and have signed up with Ericsson to use DCP for improved M2M service delivery
  • AT&T has several M2M initiatives including AT&T Control Center together with partners like Jasper Wireless, Axeda, Sierra Wireless and SensorLogic.
  • Airbiquity and China Unicom are teaming up to provide telematics services for the Chinese automotive market
  • Vodafone Vehicle Connect and Towers Watson’s ‘DriveAbility’ programme will accelerate the pace at which insurers can get new services to market, and at a competitive cost
Looking at mobile operator subscriptions for M2M, the market continues to grow roughly 25-30% per annum. The number of cellular M2M subscriptions nearly doubled between 2010 and 2012 to reach 143.7 million according to Pyramid Research. They also claim China is growing over 40% per annum and will become the largest cellular M2M market this year. We should remember that a lot of M2M applications share cellular subscriptions or use other technologies to connect.

So operator’s M2M business is growing quite rapidly but from small numbers. In a fairly well-developed M2M market like Sweden, M2M subscriptions are roughly 20% of all mobile subscriptions today. But still most of the market potential is untouched. Policy-driven markets like smart meters, big global markets like connected cars and consumer oriented stand-alone solutions are all fairly well addressed. But small business is big business also when it comes to M2M, and these companies are only addressed by independent Service Enablers, developers, integrators and turn-key solution providers. The alliances, partnerships and M&A activities aren’t reaching that far. A company connecting 100 of their “things” per year in maybe 25 countries across the globe is simply of no interest to any of the large players. The same goes for ,a company who want to develop a specific application to connect 25 of their “things” in a country, unless they are filthy rich.

Success in SME will come from successful platform support for specialist service enablers, developers, integrators and turn-key solution providers. That has little to do with technical issues and a lot to do with trust and business models. This has to be resolved before M2M will grow up.

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Posted by magnusmelander

M2M the third wave of mobile communication

November 7, 2012
Yesterday was a good day for M2M. TeliaSonera’s M2M Symposium 2012 was a well organized full-day event in Stockholm with almost 30 exhibitors, over 300 conference delegates and a number of great speakers. Telia’s CEO Lars Nyberg stated that M2M is the third wave of mobile communication with massive impact on society and businesses. Hans Dahlberg, Head of M2M Globally at TeliaSonera dressed this in numbers and expect one billion connected devices in the Baltics and Nordics by 2020, with 100 million of them using a SIM card. He also announced that TeliaSonera signed an agreement with Ericsson to implement the Ericsson Device Connection platform (EDCP) to prepare for the market take-up.
This was a good day for M2M since it manifested continuous development of the M2M market. But several speakers said that the M2M questions now have reached the board rooms which I believe to a large degree is wishful thinking. Decision makers need to understand the potential implications of M2M to their industry and business but unfortunately few do that today. But we are working hard to evangelize them and I gave my pitch about “data being the gold of M2M” also yesterday.

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Posted by magnusmelander

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