As the Machine to Machine industry matures, the once seemingly complex value chain has become more compressed, offering faster time to market for what has proven to be an excruciatingly long business cycle. One reason is that the Mobile Industry as a whole has embraced M2M, or the “Internet of Things” as the future of wireless.
Be it 60 Billion, 6 Billion or 600 Million embedded mobile devices connected worldwide, there is no argument that a sea change is happening across the industry and it will effect every facet of our business, not to mention the very fabric of our society.
It is the promise of these innovations, both visible and invisible in our everyday world, that has attracted the attention of every Mobile Operator globally and captured the imagination of the myriad of companies that serve this exciting industry. Across every vertical: Consumer, Medical, Security, Energy, Location Based Services, Parking, Payments, Vending, Industrial Networking, and more, innovation abounds, only held back by what’s left of the complex value chain that still exists, but continues to improve.
And so the mobile operators themselves, whose networks form the cornerstone of the cellular M2M business, should be lauded for embracing our industry, and rightfully so, as M2M truly has the power to transform business, to innovate and to change the landscape of society and create a better quality of life, underpinned by real time information over their networks.
The MNOs have made this possible by opening their networks to roaming, to partners, resellers and wholesalers, pursuing partner strategies with Systems Integrators, Engineering Firms and Software Providers and making large, complex solutions easier to onboard through service management platforms and APIs.
And yet in large scale global deployments the complexity remains for the simple reason that in many cases multiple network operators must be employed in order to cost effectively address scalable solutions across multiple markets.
With multiple network operators comes the complexity of dealing with different service management platforms, different APIs, different billing and rating policies, and different supply chain rules, not to mention networking, onboarding, and support organizations. A global enterprise deploying scaled fixed wireless devices across, say, a dozen countries on three or four continents cannot be expected to manage the four or five wireless conglomerates required to effectively cover this business. The single SIM truly does not exist in this market, even though it is widely lauded as the holy grail of M2M.
It is here that Multi Carrier Subscriber Management has the potential to transform the industry. In the embedded mobile world, putting the power of subscriber management into the hands of the global enterprises and OEMs will accelerate the time to market and the ROI around the M2M Business, solving a major area of complexity.
A new breed of Enablers or Managed Services Providers are emerging out of the traditional data MVNO space in order to address these requirements. They hold the promise of becoming successful, specialized end-to-end M2M providers in partnership with the MNOs and the Global Enterprises, both of whom we serve, in helping them to bring these complex solutions to market. The good news for the industry in general is that M2M is finally in its acceleration phase, the partnerships are being formed, and the solutions to finally compress the value chain into realistic, manageable pieces are in place.
Next up is transforming our world into the Internet of Things.
