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The Rise of the Machines?
Friday, June 23 2006
by Anthony Quinn


The long anticipated 'Internet of Things' could be one step
closer based on new research from IDC.



According to IDC analysts, strong demand from Western
European corporations is to drive machine-to-machine
communications -- an aspect of the so-called "Internet of
Things" -- and revolutionise the wireless industry.





IDC predicts the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications
market will grow from USD3 billion in 2005, to USD19.8
billion by 2010.





The news follows a recent visit to Dublin by founding father
of the internet, and Google Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf,
who predicted that by 2010 household appliances will
communicate online via a broadband-enabled electricity
supply.





"I suspect we will see device-to-device interaction which
will dwarf human e-mail traffic," he told reporters while
visiting Google's European HQ. 





Machine-to-machine communications take many forms, with the
most widespread solutions currently in automatic meter
reading, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications,
and fleet control systems. According to IDC senior analyst
Brian Troelsen, in principle, the only limit on deployment is
imagination.





"The Western European machine-to-machine market holds huge
potential," he said. "Most of the market infancy problems
are being properly addressed and vendors are starting to see
the first signs of the promised market potential being
fulfilled. The prime growth drivers are regulation on
automatic metering and declining prices on data transfers and
RFID tags."



Already there have been many reports of M2M applications. In
2004 mobile phone operator Orange introduced an M2M Connect
package in France which offers data pricing and a suite of
software tools to help European companies jump on the
machine-to-machine bandwagon



Confectioner Nestle has been installing hundreds of ice-cream
vending machines in France and England that send daily
reports on their sales and notify drivers if they're running
low on ice lollies, while Canadian train and plane maker
Bombardier has reportedly fitted railcars in Britain with
radio devices that transmit reams of preventive maintenance
data to central servers.





"The fight for this market is a battle between vendor
types, namely hardware vendors, software vendors, systems
integrators, and telcos," said IDC's Troelsen. "These
players are fighting fiercely for market dominance with their
respective competitive advantages. Until now the systems
providers have had a head start due to strong competencies in
business process understanding, which is a key element in
most machine-to-machine implementations. However, hardware
vendors and telcos are starting to look at how to gain
similar competencies on their own."