As part of a new series of blog posts we plan to introduce specifically obtaining commentary from key influential people within the Internet of Things space we had a quick chat with one of the forerunners in Sweden in the M2M and Internet of Things space, Magnus Melander.
In addition to being the CEO of WBird AB Magnus also serves as a board member of Evothings AB and is our Chief Marketing Officer towards enterprise customers.
Here is what he had to say!
A dear child has many names! M2M, Internet of Things, Telemetry and Telematics are names or flavors of putting things online. I am focusing on what happens when we connect things alongside people and businesses to the Internet, creating the Internet of Everything. The impact on society, businesses and peoples lives will be massive giving us new staggering tools to work on the key global challenges: sustainability, security and efficiency. With this approach it seems obvious why huge global companies like ABB, IBM, Apple, GE, Scania and Ericsson started invest in the area long before they knew exactly what to use it for.
Five years ago Ericsson started talking about the networked society and claimed 50 billion connected devices by 2020. This was an appreciated statement among their customers, the mobile operators, who were looking for the next big thing to go after. Almost immediately most mobile operators had their head of M2M appointed with some staff to take position in this new market to be. The mighty mobile industry almost hijacked the M2M market and analysts started report projections in mobile subscriptions. The number of M2M subscriptions has been growing roughly 30% per year and by now we should have over 150 million mobile subscriptions devoted to M2M. That is quite a lot but only a fragment of the M2M market, and only a fragment of the total mobile subscriptions. The M2M Head of TeliaSonera once stated that 10% of the subscriptions for M2M would be using their mobile networks which is a fair but still aggressive guess. It is interesting to note that North America, Europe and Asia have about the same number of mobile M2M subscriptions today.
When people and businesses were connected to the Internet 20 years ago the connections were enablers, smart users the winners and data the source of innovation and success. Internet has provided immense value to people, organizations and governments primarily in terms of efficiency and probably in the ball-park of electricity. And Internet innovators like Apple, Amazon and Google are among the most influential companies today and many others like Salesforce.com, Spotify and Twitter became well established great companies. Connecting also things to the Internet will follow the same path and the key difference is that ignorance will not be acceptable again.
The mobile industry is now focusing on partnerships and alliances like Global M2M Association and M2M World Alliance and the M2M module makers space is already consolidated into three key players: Sierra Wireless, Gemalto M2M and Telit. But in order to give enterprises the well integrated IoT solutions they are asking for the ICT players need to be involved. And this is happening now. ICT vendors have started to follow pioneering consultants and ISV:s who have been working on customized IoT solutions for some years already. Beyond statements about the potential of the IoT market, ppt slides, early references and pr we have seen the beginning of a wave of acquisitions. This is a clear statement from vendors who believe the market and timing is right. Recent examples are Google’s acquisitions of Nest and Dropcam, PTC’s acquisition of Thingworx and Cisco’s acquisition of Assemblage. Apple, Samsung, IBM, Dell, Salesforce.com and Oracle are examples of other ICT companies who have started to move. Microsoft recently rolled out its approach for IoT and joined the Internet of Everything open-source project The AllSeen Alliance, and I recently met SAP at an IoT event in Milan.
Companies providing connected things are also part of the creation of Internet of Everything. This category includes traditional brands like Nike, Philips, Assa Abloy, Volvo, Siemens and GE, new brands like Nest, Arduino and Fitbit and thousands of SME:s making things of all kinds to connect. A lot of connected products have already hit the market. A major challenge for these companies is to recruit developers for their libraries and APIs to make their products become part of complete solutions.
The key challenge building the Internet of Everything is that any IoT application includes components from at least three industries:
- sensors and connectivity to collect data,
- IT systems to verify, analyze, merge and manage the data and
- integration to or development of applications for users to take advantage of the information.
On top of this we all know that the world is going mobile.
To make the Internet of Everything develop nicely we need to enable the web developers to work across connected devices regardless of who made them and how they are connected, we need to support rapid and agile prototyping for enterprises and we need ensure easy and efficient cross platform mobile application development and testing.
Avanti!
—
Magnus Melander
CEO of Wbird and founder of the Swedish M2M Service Enabler alliance, SMSE
A dear child has many names! M2M, Internet of Things, Telemetry and Telematics are names or flavors of putting things online. I am focusing on what happens when we connect things alongside people and businesses to the Internet, creating the Internet of Everything. The impact on society, businesses and peoples lives will be massive giving us new staggering tools to work on the key global challenges: sustainability, security and efficiency. With this approach it seems obvious why huge global companies like ABB, IBM, Apple, GE, Scania and Ericsson started invest in the area long before they knew exactly what to use it for.