Nothing sells a concept like a case study.  The more detail you provide, the more confidence you elicit from the audience.  I bring this up because AT&T (News - Alert) and Axeda will be conducting a webinar with me on Thursday that should help the uninitiated gain some confidence that—whatever they have in their business, whatever their goals are in migrating to M2M—the groundwork has been laid by companies in the past.

Don’t get me wrong, we have a long journey ahead of us.  While the analysts point to billions of sensors, we really have only hundreds of templates supporting thousands customers that in aggregate to millions.  

However, the odds that an implementation is truly unique are very small.  Already we have solutions that work on temperature, moisture, density, volume, etc.  So the monitoring has been developed.

But the requirement for success is not in the monitoring, it’s in the business intelligence.

Discussing the use of platforms is the place where that discussion yields the best results.

The secret sauce of M2M is not the amount of data you collect, or the resources you use, its in the ability to map backwards the Input - Process - Output of your business.

For those of us who have been reengineered this should feel familiar, but since that fad in management ended about the same time ELO stopped playing; I will review.

Let’s take a simple process like vending machines.  Rather than dispatching someone in a truck to refill on a regular basis you enable the system with sensors that tell you what trays are empty, when the monies are collected, etc.  All of this can be done pretty basically.

But now let’s add a platform that starts to tell you in real time information.  For example, the brands that sell in one machine do not sell as well in other locations.  Or the high ticket items stay on the shelf too long and you should take a Walmart approach to stocking the system.  Or your customers only like to use their debit cards and if they had ability to buy multiple items on one transaction you sales would triple.

All of these are features and value that come from using a platform to get to better business decisions.

Once that is achieved, many companies have found additional value, enabling new services.

The point is that enabling M2M / IoT solutions with platforms adds flexibility and new opportunities.  I hope you join us on Thursday to learn more.