Laird PLC, a provider of hardware, testing, and design solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), has joined the London-based IoT M2M Council, the largest and fastest-growing trade group representing the global IoT sector.
IMC is said to be the largest trade group dedicated to the global IoT/M2M sector – with more than 20,000 members joining since February of 2014. Board member companies include Aeris, Digi International, HPE, Ingenu, Inmarsat, Intel, KORE, MultiTech, ORBCOMM, PTC, Re-Teck, Semtech, SigFox, Telit, U-Blox, Verizon, Vodafone, and Wipro.
A well-known technology provider in nthe IoT, Laird hopes to increase its market reach with the move, and will join the IMC’s Board of Governors as an industry thought leader.
“Laird has a very broad presence in the IoT sector, but we can always learn more from people that are deploying connected devices in the field. The IMC has over 20,000 enterprise users and OEMs as rank-and-file members, fairly evenly spread around the world, and covering 24 different vertical markets.
We think the IMC represents an excellent cross-section of the IoT ecosystem, and it will help us to gain insight and interaction with IoT adopters,” says Bill Steinike, VP of Business Development at Laird, who will sit on the IMC board.
For its part, Laird has manufacturing and support operations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, offering solutions for connecting devices in vertical-market sectors as diverse as healthcare, automotive, and logistics.
“We are proud to welcome Laird to the IMC board,” says Joel Young, IMC chairman and CTO of solutions provider Digi International, “Laird has interests and expertise that are well matched to the needs of the IoT sector. I’m sure Laird will be a strong contributor in setting direction for the IMC and the IoT industry.”
The IMC provides lead generation, promotion and research to its sustaining member-companies, and has recently introduced a number of new initiatives.
Most recently, the trade group has concentrated on a series of initiatives to bring buyers and sellers together in the hard-to-define IoT sector, including an RFP program that helps connect users to IoT software vendors, a software-widget tool that gathers opt-in information from IoT users, and a series of new events. “We hope that the IMC’s scale and initiative will help the IoT sector to realise its potential,” says Steinike.
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