The last 12 months has seen a stream of announcements covering new M2M partnerships, centres of excellence and even customers as telcos return to the opportunity with renewed interest.
The research firm Ovum claims this is not simply a rerun of earlier M2M bursts of enthusiasm, most of which have vanished without significant achievements, but suggest that M2M's time might just have arrived.
The firm points to the following as indicators of change:
The impact of scale, especially on the market for M2M hardware
- The increasing importance of connectivity in consumer electronics devices, and the advent of the cloud paradigm for applications and services
- The availability of device management software, which has become an integral part of M2M platforms and makes it possible for solutions to be deployed on an industrial scale.
Of equal importance, believes Ovum, is the fresh approach being adopted by operators. While their appetite for M2M has not diminished, most now have a much more realistic appreciation of their own position in the M2M value chain. Article