Even with all of this, however, there is a case to be made that what can really help CSPs excel in the market is not a clever persona or a million partners. The key to building a successful M2M network is rooted in many of the concepts that are central to building any kind of network.
While M2M networks represent a definite paradigm shift on the surface, customers are still looking for agility, flexibility, reliability, and all of the other attributes that make a network useful. “The stack doesn’t change,” said Fareed Khan, Director of Wireless Solutions for ConceptWave, a firm that develops transaction management, product catalog, and customer experience management solutions. “It’s just a new use case. We’ve been doing machine-to-man, so machine-to-machine is just an extension and an innovation of that.”
Khan notes, for example, that the same concerns that make a product catalog desirable for consumer communications solutions are also incredibly valuable for M2M solutions. In fact, given all of the permutations possible in M2M offerings, the need for a common catalog is even more pronounced.
In addition, Khan notes that the move towards M2M is helping to further usher in a variety of other new services. “We’re seeing the M2M cloud emerge at a certain level,” Khan told Pipeline. “When it comes to providing these M2M services to commercial accounts, they’re bundling cloud services in, so it’s a whole end-to-end application.”
This is just one example of the potential of M2M for service providers. CSPs know how to connect the dots in a way that the enterprises that are now producing connected devices have never needed or wanted to know. Khan says that’s a golden opportunity for CSPs to step in and offer to handle the delicate business of communicating for their customers, inviting them to say: “We’re your trusted telecom provider. We know cloud. We know hosting. We know servers. We’re used to 99.999% uptime. Let us manage that for you.”
But not every carrier is up for the challenge. As the new year came upon us, Gartner analyst Eric Goodness remarked in his blog that while M2M has lots of potential, 2012 may not be the year to see it all brought to fruition. He notes that in a recent survey on these sorts of solutions, Gartner contacted over 600 user companies in the US and Western Europe, and found that 377 had no plans to deploy M2M. This hesitance is due in part, in Goodness’s appraisal, to the ebb and flow exhibited by carriers as they inflate pre-sales expectations only to back off when confronted by actual expectations and demands.
This suggests that the need for differentiation isn’t only external. Some service providers may need to spend some time figuring out what exactly their M2M model is, and how it differs from those of the other CSPs in the market. In doing so, each company can gather up all of those important “p”s and get to the important work of helping machines have long-awaited conversations with other machines.
