Beyond the existing billion of PCs, tablets and mobile phones, more and more devices embed communication capabilities. Soon there will be more machines communicating with each others than humans! This is the hidden world… my fridge will tell the grocery store that I need more food, and a robot will start to pile food for me on a small electric truck with navigation system to come and deliver to my house! Ok I still need to open the door, but who knows – soon there may be a robot for that too! I will simply use a remote control to authorise him to open the door!
Operators are starting to ship M2M SIM cards for e-readers, cars, tracking devices for containers, smart meters, home care and health monitoring systems etc.
It was interesting to read recently that GSMA has just started an initiative to define a new small form factor for SIM Cards to be embedded in very small devices like sport cameras for instance! http://bit.ly/eMKFmP.
Communication Service Providers are in a unique position to deliver those SIM cards, adding some specifics such as global roaming in many cases. But besides that, they can also provide many other services such as device management, billing or ecosystem management. They can bridge different verticals such as Automotive, Utility or Healthcare with smaller-sized developers, content providers and companies that supply or use M2M information and services.
HP CMS has a number of critical assets that can be deployed today to enable and speed up M2M: Dynamic SIM provisioning to optimise SIM card catalogs, Device Management to cope with heterogeneous devices, data and service management to effectively deploy and manage M2M devices, service delivery solutions to control information being shared and enable a rich innovative ecosystem, and Cloud solutions to bundle and offer as service with some third-party M2M applications. HP Labs have even built a revolutionary sensor network with accelerometers one thousand times more sensitive than anything existing today, that will lead the path to new applications such as earthquake detection or bridge surveillance. Even cardiologists see the value!