Andrew Gilbert, Qualcomm: We tend to be working on things
18 months or so before you see them 
  
 
  
Matt Desch, Iridium: Assets can be tracked continuously
from origin to final destination 

 
 
 

Andrew Gilbert unfolds a piece of paper and reveals a small piece of circuitry which looks as though as though it is a fragment from a vandal’s attack on a laptop. It is about 20 millimetres across, a brown circuit board with a few components attached.
“This,” he says, “is a complete cellphone. It has a built-in accelerometer.” And, of course, it has a battery and a SIM card. “We’re into some really crazy things.”
Gilbert is an executive vice president of Qualcomm and the president of Qualcomm Europe: he joined the mobile technology innovator when it bought Flarion Technologies in 2006.
The device — though it’s still in its early days — is one of Qualcomm’s contributions to the emerging industry of machine-to-machine communications. “We tend to be working on things 18 months or so before you see them,” he smiles.
What would this device be used for? He shrugs: perhaps for in-vehicle signalling to warn about an accident. But there are clearly a range of other possible applications, such as asset tracking. A device only 20 millimetres across and weighing just a few grams would find snugly, and unseen, inside any sort of package.
Vehicle tracking already accounts for 60% of the overall — though still small — machine-to-machine market, according to a report this year by Wireless Logic. The market took a fall during the recession but appears to have recovered to pre-recession levels, says the analysis company.
Established applications in this sector have remained healthy and continue to grow steadily — including asset tracking, business-to-business smart-metering, alarming and monitoring. But adoption is appearing in a number of other sectors, says the company: notably healthcare, e-commerce and applications for remote patient monitoring.
Phil Cole, who co-founded Wireless Logic: comments: “Earlier this year ABI Research forecast the mobile M2M connectivity market will grow to approximately 225 million connections globally in 2014. Our figures exceed this at around 75% annually and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re starting to see uptake in new and interesting sectors.”
 
 
Complete recovery
 
The vehicle tracking sector took a hit during the downturn as credit disappeared for many companies, he notes, “but we have seen a complete recovery in this sector to 2008 levels — due, in part, to the emergence of new financing options which have made it easier for companies to get projects off the ground.”
What of the other sectors? Companies are starting to see machine-to-machine as a way to make savings by installing business-to-business smart metering, There’s also an increase in applications for what Cole calls “hard-to-reach or rugged environments”, thanks to the appearance of ruggedised PDA.
The analysis shows that uptake has increased in e-commerce — including online takeaway services, with many using M2M to speed up the order fulfilment process. The retail industry, too, is using routers to provide better coverage to connect their PDAs, PCs and point-of-sale systems as they increasingly use mobile devices.
“The industry saw huge growth in the healthcare sector,” adds Cole, “with M2M being used in a host of patient monitoring applications.” According to management consultancy McKinsey, the healthcare industry could save $175-$200 billion annually by managing chronic diseases through remote monitoring.
Others agree on the potential market for machine-to-machine communications. According to Strategy Analytics, the mobile M2M communications annual market is estimated to grow from approximately $16 billion a year in 2008 to more than $57 billion in 2014.
 
 
Monitor efficiency
 
Cole sees the rise in interest of its management platform as indicative of a desire to extract real intelligence from each connection: “Unlike voice, a data SIM can reveal a lot of very useful information for customers looking to save money and monitor the efficiency of their services.”
One of the key players in the market is Kore Telematics, which has been AT&T’s largest single data customer for three years running. Kore says that 500 types of device are now running with its equipment.
In 2009, more than 20% of the company’s net device additions came from health-related applications, says the company, which produces devices not only for GSM networks — used in most of the world — but also for the CDMA networks that are still present in the US and a few other countries.
“Offering the widest selection of both GSM and CDMA devices is essential to getting our partners’ M2M applications to market as quickly as possible,” says Alex Brisbourne, Kore’s president and COO.
According to Kore, n the past 12 months, it has added support for 63 new devices, with growing demand in industries such as e-health, payment processing and utilities. It supports 341 GSM devices from 95 vendors, including Cinterion, Sierra Wireless, Enfora and Telit, as well as 197 CDMA devices from 42 vendors, including Sierra Wireless, BlueTree, Calamp and Novatel.
In this range there are nine devices for e-health applications, 14 devices for payment processing and 15 devices for the utilities industry.
Sierra Wireless itself claims to have achieved revenues of $221 million in 2009 in the machine-to-machine sector, which it claims to be “the highest of any M2M communication product supplier globally”. The company’s business was boosted by the addition of Wavecom, a rival company, in March 2009.
“Before the acquisition, Sierra Wireless and Wavecom combined held the number two position in the market,” says Yoko Kaneko, analyst with Techno Systems Research. “As the company has expanded in the past year, its combined revenue from embedded modules and standalone wireless gateways has made it the indisputable market leader in cellular M2M communication worldwide.”
Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst at Berg Insight, adds: “We forecast strong market growth for cellular M2M devices over the next several years, as M2M continues to expand from traditional industrial applications to more consumer-facing devices, such as e-book readers and personal navigation devices.”
According to Jason Cohenour, the president and CEO of Sierra Wireless, “the integration has been very successful, and the synergies created from our respective product portfolios and market positions are now producing tangible results.”
 
 
Ericsson alliance
 
The excitement about machine-to-machine is leading to a number of other alliances throughout the industry. Earlier in 2010 a US wireless machine-to-machine vendor, Digi International, announced a relationship with Ericsson, so it could use the equipment vendor’s 3G and HSPA systems.
Digi will be using Ericsson’s HSPA mobile broadband module in some of its cellular gatewaysto help adoption of 3G connectivity in M2M applications.
Larry Kraft, Digi’s senior vice president of global sales and marketing, comments: “We are driving M2M adoption in numerous industries, such as energy, fleet management, retail and security.”
Mats Norin, the head of mobile broadband modules at Ericsson, is optimistic about the prospects: “Ericsson envisions 50 billion connected devices by 2020,” he says. “Everything that benefits from a network connection will have one. There is a strong trend towards connectivity in a wide range of industry applications and our embedded modules enable HSPA in any device. The collaboration with Digi opens up new opportunities for us in a rapidly growing market.”
Adds Kraft: “Our customers can easily develop new high-speed wireless M2M applications, such as video surveillance and other high-bandwidth applications where higher upload speeds are required.”
Many industries are being transformed by the introduction of connectivity in their processes. In the energy sector, smart metering increases business efficiencies and decreases operational expenses for energy companies.
Transportation tracking solutions improve route optimisation and safety for vehicles on the road. The healthcare industry is also looking into improvement of patient care through instant device communications, remote monitoring and disease management.
The market for machine-to-machine is even expanding into space. Satellite operator Iridium has formed a partnership with a US company called SkyBitz, which will integrate its technology into one of Iridium’s transceivers — mainly for asset tracking.
 
 
Worldwide tracking
 
Iridium’s satellite network covers the world, even around the polar regions which are out of range of regular communications satellites.
The technology is ideal for markets such as trailer tracking, oil, gas, chemical, rail, cargo shipping and government, where — according to Iridium — there are requirements for intelligent sensor solutions and power-efficient, two-way communications to deliver what it calls “critical insights on valuable assets”.
A benefit of this approach is that it can provide continuous, global visibility from origin to final destination — something unachievable with conventional cellular networks once assets are taken into remote areas or on the ocean.
Homaira Akbari, SkyBitz’s president and CEO, comments: “This partnership provides our existing and prospective subscriber base of several hundred thousand the ability to manage their assets for the first time ever on a global scale anywhere, anytime.”
Iridium’s CEO, Matt Desch, notes: “The two companies have already co-developed solution prototypes and conducted testing.” When the product is commercially available, SkyBitz will be offering it to customers needing worldwide asset tracking.
“Working with SkyBitz has the potential over time to substantially increase our M2M
subscriber base,” adds Desch. GTB