The new year isn’t even a month old and we’ve already seen a flurry of activity in the M2M space, from mergers and acquisitions to strategic partnerships. We at Pedigree have certain had our share of “enlightened” conversations with some of the big players who are looking to make even bigger plays in the market.
One thing that has struck me in these conversations is how diverse the opinion is on “what’s needed” to make that bigger play.
For some hardware companies and carriers, it’s a platform to build applications. For platform companies, it’s OEM deals for connected services. For the rest of the carriers, it’s package solutions that their sales force can explain and sell easily, while the software guys are trying to stay ahead of the curve by integrating new devices and tracking tags while moving their applications to tablets and smart phones.
Then, of course, there are the issues of standards, global availability, and the issue no one wants to talk about in polite company–device management and the costs of enablement (hardware, provisioning, installation) that can quickly erode margins.
And this raises an interesting question: where is the sweet spot in M2M?
I would imagine that few people would argue that the device companies are in the sweet spot, even though hardware units are the proxy that the industry uses to measure itself, given the competition and commoditization that threatens all but the most specialized devices.
Conventional wisdom would say that the carriers have the upper hand when it comes to delivering solutions. Because so much of the industry depends on mobility, they have to be part of the solution, and they already service almost every enterprise in the country with cellular or landline service.
The M2M Sweet Spot
We certainly believe that there is value in the hardware and network, but it’s the software that produces actionable information and is really the key to delivering value.
However, if you believe the M2M analysts and pundits in the greater world of Mobile Resource Management (MRM), the real sweet spot is in service enablement.
Service enablement is what turns M2M into a profit center. As the old adage says “people buy things for two reasons: to make money or to save money.” Up until now much of the conversation has been centered on the “save money” side of the ledger. That’s about to change.
The opportunity to use M2M communications to launch value-added services is clearly being embraced by large enterprises, from energy, automotive, medical, agriculture, food and beverage, and just about anyone else that relies on service delivery to support their business. Many of these companies are figuring out that service enablement is the sweet spot for M2M.
Service Chain Management
Over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time developing an integrated solution for service enablement that we call Service Chain Management.
We see this as a world where modular applications can be combined to quickly deliver turnkey solutions and where customers and their service vendors collaborate in the cloud using real time M2M data from their operations.
This is made possible by the profound changes in costs, functionality, and mobile computing that are possible with tablet-based workforce applications that synchronize seamlessly with cloud-based applications to manage enterprise operations.
Stay tuned. We’re hosting a series of webinars to explore these significant changes to the M2M market in the coming weeks in conjunction with the launch of enhanced version the OneView solution and the related POV tablet applications.
Sign up for the webinar Service Chain Management Makes M2M Investments More Profitable to learn how machine-to-machine technology can help you automate the service chain. Sign up today!
