Rise of the machine

Seventeen years ago, I remember sitting in a meeting discussing the coming opportunities for doing business on the internet. At the time a very small percentage of the population knew what the internet was or how it was going to affect their lives. In the next few years the internet business climate could have been likened to the ‘Wild Wild West’ or the ‘Gold Rush’.

Eventually we saw a consolidation of the industry where the strongest players with the best business models and financing began to emerge. Many of those companies are a successful and integral part of our economy today. Now the internet is as part of every day life as shopping malls and television.

Seventeen years later I now sit in meetings having the same discussions about M2M. The telemetry opportunity today is as exciting as the internet was then. We are at the point of the exploding business climate where network pricing, module pricing and applications are all joining together to create the perfect business environment.

Growth in the next few years will be exponential as M2M becomes an important part of everyday life. I believe the next applications to see the largest growth will be those that will appeal to the business community because they will be able to justify the ROI more quickly then the average consumer. AMR and AMI will be part of this growth in the next few years. Utilities have been exploring this space for a while but are now moving forward with large deployments at the consumer level.

As I look at the various deployment strategies I see again some of the turmoil of the early internet days. Companies are trying to decide which approach to take – should we manage the different pieces of our solution ourselves – should we allow someone else to manage and support all of our solution – or should we choose something in between.

In the more established parts of the M2M space we have seen companies wrestling with these same issues and concerns. The fleet vertical is probably one of the most developed areas to already address this. In the Fortune 500 space many companies initially decided on the first approach of managing everything in house. These companies went out to bid and chose devices, software solutions and network solutions that they managed directly. With their buying power each company thought this would give them the best value.

However the eventual deployments did not show this to be the case. Managing the software applications and solutions became much more complex then originally thought. With the rapid changes in the M2M space, companies could not keep up with the latest developments that would allow them the best ROI and the best user experience. M2M experts were busy developing better solutions that these companies missed.

Also the network choices were managed the same way. Large corporations thought that because they had managed their own voice and data networks internally they could manage the wireless space as well. Wireless technologies were changing so rapidly that this quickly became a problem for them. If they chose the wrong network solution (i.e. analog) they were faced with complicated and expensive redeployment costs to replace those outdated technologies.

Also managing a wireless network isn’t as easy as it may appear. You don’t have to look far for deployments that have not gone as planned and now companies are having to incur significant costs to redeploy another new solution. No one wants to have to go back to regulatory commissions or agencies to get approval for additional monies to fund these redeployments.

John Horn has been at T-Mobile for over six years during which time he has developed and managed Indirect Distribution for the California launch - the largest launch in wireless history. He is currently working with T-Mobile’s European partners on M2M programs that can be supported in the US and Europe. In 2007 and 2008 he was named a M2M Pioneer.