(Nice, France) — The organisers of the recent M2M Innovation World Congress held in Nice, have declared “Mission Accomplished” for the first such event. Over three days (Sept 24-26) 260 delegates from around the world learned from and met with 65 eminent speakers to foster innovation in M2M services. Some strong views emerged at the conference and you can view the video here.
According to a spokesperson for the organisers, Strategies TM, “These M2M stakeholders and implementers from a variety of industry verticals shared experiences, made new contacts, strengthened existing relationships and honed their knowledge from concrete implementations in smart grids, smart cities, retail and smart homes fields. The fruitful exchanges have been extended to the exhibition held alongside the conference as well as to the participants of the three other co-located events.” This was all part of the World Smart Week event, which gathered together a total of 1,375 ICT professionals.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/CzNoV53YnQE
Conference: Innovation and collaboration key drivers
Steve Priestley, EMEA managing director of Wyless, told the audience, “M2M is a three-letter word for a mess”. In his paper to the conference he had already reminded everyone that “there is no on-size-fits-all solution” for M2M. Asked by the moderator, Jeremy Cowan, what were the most common problems or challenges that customers bring to him, Priestley said: “We have solutions that fit multiple stratas of technology, whether they’re business-to-business or business-to-business-to-consumer. For example, we have 20-30 different solution sets, all termed eHealth. There are a bunch of technologies that come together to solve some of these problems.
“Unfortunately what happens is, you then have to fit a financial model. What our industry has got to do is lead people through how we create solutions in a far more professional and beneficial way, such that we’re solving the needs. The industry as a whole has got to take charge of that and build products that make problems go away in an easy fashion,” said Priestley.
As recalled by Deutsche Telekom‘s head of International Sales Development, Sven Krey at the plenary opening session, “Driving M2M Innovation is vital for the M2M ecosystem”. Indeed, this was precisely the slogan of the conference. Like Deutsche Telekom, other opening keynotes insisted on innovative and flexible business models to create end-to-end solutions and value.
Also key to achieving the full potential for M2M services, Dr. Gareth Noyes, chief strategy officer at Wind River, pointed out Big Data doesn’t scale: a data-centric design is required, bringing intelligence where needed in the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture.
Partnerships and collaborations were two other keywords, and they widely and forcefully debated during the panel “So you want to get M2M services to market quickly and profitably” by M2M Now’s editorial director, Jeremy Cowan (pictured above). (Click here to view the video.) Maingate’s CEO Baard Eilertsen set the tone, launching a provocative statement, “M2M is dead” to highlight that the M2M industry as still too technology driven. The exchanges that followed and the rest of the conference’s multiple sessions showed that M2M innovation is about a lot more than just technology .
On Wednesday and Thursday morning, 10 thematic sessions in two parallel tracks tackled both sides of innovation: The ‘M2M for Verticals’ track focused on the most innovative M2M implementations, the lessons learned and advanced solutions in Smart Grids, Retail and Smart Home/Smart Devices. The ‘Strategies & Implementation’ track covered tomorrow’s ecosystems and solutions that will drive M2M growth: innovative ways to better integrate ecosystems; focus on Big Data; platform interoperability issues; as well as connectivity challenges and security.
Multiple live experiences
In addition to the conference content, the Congress offered multiple live experiences, in particular a private demonstration of “Nice Grid”, a pioneer solar-energy smart grid unique in the world by its scale and ambition: The exhibition alongside provided additional opportunities to put hands on the latest solutions and products. On this occasion, ThingWorx and SIGFOX announced their partnership. The partners demonstrated an end-to-end smart meter and intrusion detection application on stage, running on the SIGFOX network and the ThingWorx application platform. Cellnetrix also showcased several live demonstrations of different configurations of M2M device identity modules for example.
The M2M Innovation World Congress experience was completed with several social events, in particular the Gala Evening held at the Palais de la Méditerranée on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais.
See slide presentations online at: www.m2minnovationworldcongress.com/proceedings
Other key sessions were filmed and videos will be available online by the end of November through the World Smart Week.TV webcast platform. And you can see event photos on the Congress’s Home Page.
