Survery shows M2M Market status as Providers talk strategies

Infonetics Research, a market research company that conducted M2M Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey has released partial findings to the public. The survey was to profile insightful information regarding the machine-to-machine (M2M) market. Twenty M2M service providers all over the world participated the survey, companies contributing to a quarter of the global M2M service revenue.

The study examines different aspects of M2M services that they are offering or planning to offer to their customers, including connectivity, provisioning, installation and reporting. It also assessed current infrastructure, technology as well as end to end devices such as cameras, meters and POS terminals. Also taken into account are service features to include coverage, management tool, service level agreement, even pricing and support.

Excerpts of the report showed that more than half have considerable size of M2M connections, which means that they can provide at least a million connections to customers locally and globally. However, infrastructure-wise, M2M connections are still predominantly using 2G technology. The survey results also reveal that M2M solution features mostly national coverage, web-based management tools and SLA's. Nearly half of all M2M connections also revolve on automotive and transportation, logistics, and utility applications such as GPS vehicle tracking, fleet management, remote diagnostics for automotives and smart metering. Most service providers believe that a service platform is necessary to jump start this kind of business and more than half of them are using internally developed platforms at this point. Most service providers believe that a service platform is necessary to jump start this kind of business and more than half of them are using internally developed platforms at this point.

"Our latest M2M service provider survey shows, M2M is now scaling to be a significant business for a good number of providers around the world," confirms Directing Analyst of Infonetics Research, Godfrey Chua. He further added that, "The leading tier of M2M players have committed meaningful resources to developing their M2M businesses and now have significant scale to show for it. They have strategies in place and have created standalone M2M business units comprised of overlay go-to-market and technical organizations. M2M is no longer just an extension of the enterprise business unit for these "