Rating: Industry reaction to the Jasper Wireless realted announcement
Whoa! There has been massive industry reaction to the seven mobile network operator alliance for M2M which we wrote about previously here. Not al of it has been positive with Frost & Sullivan questioning whether another partnership will defragment the M2M ecosystem. The one common factor which these seven carriers share is that they are all customers of Jasper Wireless. However, there are multiple suppliers for such solutions including Ericsson. Plus this is not the only alliance over M2M in existence. Significantly, this announcement has also draw attention to the fact that M2M is on the verge of exploding as a potential revenue source for mobile network operators.Take this prediction from Analysys Mason which forecasts 124.4 million M2M device connections at the end of 2012.
This will grow to 2.1 billion connections by 2021 at a 37 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Then there’s Informa-SAP’s joint survey of more than 250 global stakeholders which found that seven out of every ten service provider respondents believe that M2M will generate 5 per cent of their total revenues by 2015 – despite low revenues today.
Frost & Sullivan’s analyst Yiru Zhong observes, “This alliance does put the pressure on the other M2M connectivity platform in the market.
Ericsson’s progress with Telcos since it acquired Telenor Connexxion’s connectivity platform is relatively slow. Success here can be magnified by having scale.”
She continued, “The alliance announced today benefits Jasper Wireless directly by potentially adding new customers on to their connectivity platform, while the seven partners will receive less concrete advantages.”
“A significant advantage of this partnership, however, is addressing roaming challenges, especially in M2M industries such as automotive and logistics applications (e.g. regional and international logistics track & trace applications,” notes Ms Zhong.
“The partners will also benefit for scale arguments when negotiating M2M devices, modules, API standardisation and M2M platform roadmap development.
Moreover, these M2M Telcos will differentiate themselves from other M2M service providers.”
Jamie Moss, senior analyst awith Informa Telecoms & Media, observes, “Other high-profile carrier collaborations created specifically for the sake of the machine-to-machine industry include the strategic alliance between Vodafone and Verizon; and the M2M Service Alliance between Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, TeliaSonera, Everything Everywhere and Sprint.”
He continues, “While interoperability and collaboration as a technical possibility is important, a statement of actual intent by carriers to work together in practice is far more so.
It underscores the two most critical features of the M2M market, the need to establish partnership and the need to focus on ones own core competency for the common benefit of all involved.”
Ms Zhong points out that, “Vodafone’s M2M proposition around industrial automation places it in a strong position for future industrial M2M applications.
DTAG’s M2M aspirations also reflect a quiet push to capture a wider boundary of M2M revenues.
By using cloud as an enabling technology, DTAG lowers the barriers for small medium enterprises to participate in the benefits to M2M applications.
Its recent announcement of an M2M Marketplace is another initiative to lower barriers to entry for M2M adoption and development by vendors, application developers and end users.”
The seven carrier alliance has definitely upset the apple cart.
