The Internet of Things is a whole new world as shown in this Beecham Research diagram

Recently also Cisco has announced dedicated routers for the M2M market, stating that it believes it will become an important mass market. This is just the latest announcement of a series of recent initiatives in the M2M market, both in the US and in Europe.

In April of this year Ericsson (another OEM!)  announced the acquisition of long-time  M2M platform provider Telenor Connexion, while in July TeliaSonera announced that it had signed the cooperation agreement with France Telecom-Orange and Deutsche Telekom to increase the quality of service and interoperability for M2M services.

In May of this yeat the operator T-Mobile USA announced that it had cast-off its M2M operational business to long time service partner Raco Wireless, although in July T-Mobile USA struck a partnership with asset protection provider IContain and Asset Protection Products LLC (APP) to help reduce operating costs in the US$7 billion US rent-to-own (RTO) sector.

These and other initiatives signal that the M2M market is deemed ready to become a truely mass market, and players (from hardware providers to M2M specialists passing through telco operators and sytem integrators) are trying to position themselves to reap the benefits.

Does eveyone have a clear strategy? For telco operators a few ideas:

• The market is exploding now (Yankee Group forecasts that SIM volumes will almost triple from 23 million in 2011 to 61 million in 2015, a CAGR of 22%.), the time to have a clear vision on the M2M market is now, tommorrow could be too late… Cisco stated it wanted to position itself as a trusted hardware provider, but others have more ambitious plans…
• Being a complex market, where it is highly improbable to have all the competencies required for a complete M2M offer in one company, it is essential to form partnership and reinforce a balanced ecosytem for all the actors involved. Each party should be able to bring its distintive skillset – Telco operators should be able to leverage its tradition of network building & management – to build a complete offer.
• Using their experience in the Cloud, and continuing to develop their distinctive offers for that market, Telco operators can leverage that experience since many of the problematics of an M2M service can be solved and/or alleviated by using Cloud technology. One offer could reinforce the other.

Any other ideas?