DFor
years, vendors have been painting a tantalizing vision of the business
and even personal benefits that can be gained by tying together various
objects using powerful networking devices.
Whether it was using RFID technology to track products for supply-chain purposes or embedding monitoring devices into healthcare delivery systems to improve patient care, no one could dispute the potential value of these innovations. But few organizations could actually deploy them successfully.
A combination of less than promised functional capabilities and greater than expected technical complexity and costs often have conspired to prevent the promise of “connected devices” from becoming a reality.
Now, a new generation of cloud-based machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions is gaining momentum and beginning to produce a growing number of exciting success stories in a variety of industries.
An example is Axeda's new cloud service, which leverages economical infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) resources to capture and store data from the vendor’s remote device appliances, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to enable users to deploy its application and access the data being collected. The company also has created its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to enable users and partners to create their own applications.
A measure of the power of cloud-based M2M is the growing assortment of brand-name companies that are deploying these capabilities, including, in the case of Axeda, Abbott Laboratories, GE, and Varian Medical Systems.
Another indication of the rising appeal of cloud-based M2M is the ecosystem of partners Axeda has attracted, including AT&T, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com, which has been the leading advocate of the idea of the “social enterprise,” based on the supposition that people are becoming more connected. Now, Salesforce.com wants to connect its social apps to cloud-based M2M solutions.
Strategic advisory firm Analysys Mason forecasts the number of M2M device connections will grow from 62 million in 2010 to 2.1 billion devices in 2020, at a 36 percent year-on-year growth rate.
The growing potential of the M2M market has also prompted Verizon to announce its intention to acquire Hughes Telematics.
First, there has to be a substantial increase in available bandwidth to accommodate the explosion of big-data being produced by the new endpoints created by M2M solutions.
Second, the deployment and administration of M2M applications has to be simplified. Today’s applications require too much customization and can’t be deployed easily enough yet to become pervasive and mainstream.
Third, there are still too many security concerns about compliance issues or access control problems.
Finally, there aren’t enough skilled M2M engineers among third-party consulting firms and not enough corporate managers within enterprise organizations who can guide the planning, implementation, and administration of M2M deployments.
So, while the technology is evolving rapidly to satisfy the functional requirements for successfully deploying M2M solutions via the cloud, attitudes and skills to capitalize on these capabilities still need to mature.
