M2M needs focus on core competency for the common benefit of all

By Jamie Moss

The M2M market is gaining momentum and industry participants are eagerly waiting for the moment when growth stops being slow and steady and becomes exponential. One of the drivers for this anticipated scale is the M2M service providers’ ability to address the needs of the market as widely as possible – something that is achieved through ubiquity of coverage and seamless continuity of service availability. This dovetails with the need of enterprises wishing to augment their operations using M2M connectivity to do so as simply as possible.

KPN, NTT Docomo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefónica, Telstra and Vimpelcom have announced their intention to cooperate for the benefit of the machine-to-machine market globally and it is note-worthy that each one has an M2M service delivery platform supplied by Jasper Wireless. Jasper is a vendor that has always advocated the benefits of interoperability, the Acquisition Engine component of Jasper’s offering acting as a pipeline to funnel business leads between its fraternity of carrier customers.

But while interoperability and collaboration as a technical possibility is important, a statement of actual intent by carriers to work together in practice is far more so. It underscores the two most critical features of the M2M market, the need to establish partnership and the need to focus on ones own core competency for the common benefit of all involved. Other high-profile carrier collaborations created specifically for the sake of the machine-to-machine industry include the strategic alliance between Vodafone and Verizon; and the M2M Service Alliance between Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, TeliaSonera, Everything Everywhere and Sprint.

Informa Telecoms & Media carefully observes the expansion of the M2M market along with the fortunes of its service providers and is engaged in producing forecasts based on the most granular archive of real-world data available. M2M contract dynamics for carriers differ greatly to the consumer world of short-term tariff plans and are instead they are based on incremental, long-term, cumulative deals, where the participants are partners rather than clients and patrons. The value in the M2M market is real and the variety of possible use cases is enormous.

Informa-SAP’s joint survey of more than 250 global stakeholders found that seven out of every 10 CSP respondents believe M2M will generate five per cent of their total revenues by 2015, despite low revenues today.