M2M Now Magazine September/October 2015

M2M Now: ISSN 2046-5882

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015

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TALKING HEADS Cyan’s John Cronin on IoT in developing countries

Smart Utilities and Smarter Homes - still waiting for the paradigm shift…

IoT MASTERCLASS

SMART CITIES

INDUSTRIAL IoT

TELEMATICS

THE BLACK BOOK

Creating the IoT enabled business. Our Exclusive Analyst Report in the November/December issue.

New spaces for living, working and playing.

See our Analyst Report at: www.m2mnow.biz

The new interconnected manufacturing environment.

See our Analyst Report at: www.m2mnow.biz

Connected Cars and logistics across new the delivery chains. See our Analyst Report at: www.m2mnow.biz

Independent analysis of IoT in 5 Key Industries.

Read our Analysts’ Reports at: www.m2mnow.biz

PLUS: PLATFORMS TO WATCH: Analyst report Inside! • Reliance and Jasper partner for IoT across India • HyperCat joins the Industrial Internet Consortium • Ayla Networks on agile platforms • BlueTC on IoT network optimisation • Energy harvesting for the IoT • Aeris on connectivity analytics • www.m2mnow.biz

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CONTENTS

27 13 TALKING HEADS

45 PERSPECTIVES ON PLATFORMS

IN THIS ISSUE 4

EDITOR’S COMMENT Is age and experience becoming a critical asset in the complex, multi-disciplinary world of the IoT ?

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MARKET NEWS HyperCat joins Industrial Internet Consortium; oneM2M annouce plans for Release 2; Wearable devices and ubiquitous connectivity – new Frost & Sullivan report

20 INTERVIEW SAP’s Irfan Khan on deploying the power of real-time analytics out to the network’s edge

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COMPANY NEWS Reliance and Jasper target Indian Smart Cities; Cryptosoft joins ThingWorx; Eurotech and Arkessa partner for global IoT market

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CONTRACT NEWS & HOT LIST Latest wins for Kamstrup, Oberthur, ThingWorx and many more

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PEOPLE NEWS New names at Telensa, SIGFOX and others

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PRODUCT NEWS CSR and SK Telecom launch Smart Lighting Beacon; Redpine announces IoT Platform for device makers; Wi-NEXT targets IIoT with WiFi End Node Digital

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TALKING HEADS Cyan’s John Cronin talks frugal innovation and IoT in developing countries

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IoT MASTERCLASS George Malim focuses on service-centric network optimisation

IoT MASTERCLASS Assuring quality of service across M2M and IoT networks – a case study from Blue Telecom Consulting

22 EXPERT OPINION Can energy harvesting speed IoT adoption for devices and wearables?

24 OPINION ORBCOMM on the role of M2M in improving operational efficiency 27 M2M NOW ANALYST REPORT – SMART UTILITIES AND HOMES In this edition’s independent Analyst Report, Tobias Ryberg, co-founder of Berg Insight looks at the continued evolution of the smart energy ecosystem 40 SMART HOMES What issues are companies focusing on as they expand their reach into the domestic space?

45 PERSPECTIVES ON PLATFORMS With contributions from Ayla Networks, Aeris, Numerex, Beecham Research, Stream Technologies, Telit and AT&T 72 INTERVIEW WebNMS talks about bringing mission-critical disciplines to the world of the IoT

Cover Sponsor: Cyan provides a communication platform for energy, lighting and emerging applications in the wider Machine to Machine network. Its integrated platform and partner collaborations deliver end-to-end solutions that connect millions of devices and support bidirectional communication with the end customer. Cyan’s smart metering and lighting solutions enhance quality of service in emerging regions, through power savings, lower operating costs and increased cost efficiency. Our vision to create improved value through Smart City solutions has provided our customers with the foundation upon which to build incremental services as these markets evolve. www.cyantechnology.com

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

SMART UTILITIES AND SMARTER HOMES - still waiting for the paradigm shift

GOLD SPONSOR

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COMMENT

The role of the ‘Silver Fox’ entrepreneur in the IoT?

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Real world experience is becoming increasingly critical

Olivier Beaujard, vice-president Market Development, Sierra Wireless

One side pleasure of attending different trade shows and conferences and talking to various players in the industry is seeing people at different stages of their careers. In some areas – like mobile apps aimed at the youth market – credibility seems confirmed by the presence of tattoos, facial hair – amongst the men – and occasionally ‘interesting’ piercings. Amongst the engineeringfocused standards bodies, grey hair – or no hair at all – and similarly grey suits often seem to predominate. When it comes to the IoT sector, I’ve been getting the impression that there’s a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship coming from a more senior demographic than might have been the case in other sectors.

Often, these are people who’ve reached senior executive levels in their own vertical markets, such as automotive, manufacturing and the utilities and now, being reasonably financially secure, they’ve Alun Lewis, spotted the potential of the IoT editor, M2M and want to have some creative Now Magazine and literally enterprising fun, leveraging their many years of experience. Alternatively, there are people of a similar age from the industry ‘formerly known as telecoms’ who bring their own experience and insight – especially into understanding how things can quickly go wrong when very complex systems and corporate visions meet the sometimes harsh realities of the outside world.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple - and wrong.

As HL Mencken, one of my favourite American writers, once famously observed,

Alun Lewis, Editor, M2M Now Magazine

And, with that focus on experience, M2M Now would like to welcome Aileen Smith, now head of Ecosystem Development at Huawei Technologies, to our board of editorial advisors. Aileen is very well known and highly respected across the industry from her fifteen years or so with the TM Forum, concluding in her last role as their SVP for organisational transformation.

Finally, please check out the launch – covered on page 12 of this issue – of our IoT Global Network – a new platform that provides a broad source of information and insight for decision-makers who deal with M2M and the IoT in all their guises.

Erik Brenneis, head of Vodafone M2M

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

Robin DukeWoolley, CEO, Beecham Research

Andrew Parker, project marketing director, Connected Living, GSMA

Gert Pauwels, M2M marketing director, Orange Business

Contributors in this issue of M2M Now We are always proud to bring you the best writers and commentators in M2M and IoT. In this issue they include: Tobias Ryberg co-founder of the M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight, examines the state of play with smart utilities and homes

EDITOR Alun Lewis Tel: +44 (0) 1296 660423 alun@m2mnow.biz EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@m2mnow.biz DIGITAL SERVICES DIRECTOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 n.bisnar@m2mnow.biz

George Malim Editor of our sister title Vanilla Plus, George looks at IoT network QoS in this issue and how to guarantee connectivity consistency

Saverio Romeo Principal analyst at Beecham Research, Saverio shares his insights into the platform sector and identifies some hot players to watch

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 c.jameson@m2mnow.biz

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or © WeKnow Media Ltd 2015 in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher. M2M Now: ISSN 2046-5882

Bill Zujewski, SVP, IoT Marketing & Strategy, PTC

M2M Now - September / October 2015

MARKET NEWS Lord Errol, Hyper Cat and Stephen Mellor, IIC

HyperCat joins the Industrial Internet Consortium HyperCat today announced that it is joining the Industrial Internet Consortium. Focused on making data from a connected thing or device discoverable, searchable and addressable, the HyperCat standard is funded by the UK government and is already backed by over 500 major international businesses.

Justin Anderson, HyperCat lead and CEO of Flexeye said, “The greatest value from the IoT will come when we combine intelligence from multiple devices. The HyperCat standard, together with the work of the IIC

and the other major IoT collaborative bodies, will go a long way towards delivering the required interoperability. A recent McKinsey report estimated that this interoperability is essential to unlock 40% of the US$11 trillion potential value of the IoT.” Stephen Mellor, CTO of the Industrial Internet Consortium added, “HyperCat is an important standard that enables interoperability, which of course aligns perfectly with the aims of the IIC and so is fully complementary to our programme.”

Wearable devices set to make ubiquitous connectivity a reality, finds Frost & Sullivan Currently catering to a niche customer base, improvements in devices and newer, interesting use cases will accelerate the transition of wearables to mass market proliferation, says a new report from Frost & Sullivan – “Growth Opportunities in the Global Wearable Devices Market”.

“Wearable devices will extend beyond fitness tracking to include two-way communication between the user and

the healthcare ecosystem,” said Frost & Sullivan senior research analyst Shuba Ramkumar. “Though a number of applications currently address the business-to-consumer market, wearable devices will eventually offer support to healthcare institutions by sharing real-time data collected by the consumer. In the long term, energy harvesting and wireless charging technologies will reduce battery issues, helping wearables to capture the interest of consumers.”

Intel and Wipro join IMC to expand markets for IoT Intel and Wipro Limited have joined the International IoT M2M Council (IMC), a global trade association which Rose Schooler, has quickly gained over 10,000 members, Intel comprised almost entirely of OEMs, enterprise users, and applications developers, aims to boost understanding and sales in IoT. “The IMC is an industry-leading

professional organisation that is gaining an average of 275 new members per week. Clearly, there is a demand in the market to learn more,” says Rose Schooler, VP of the IoT Strategy Office at Intel, who sits on the IMC Board of Governors. The IMC recently unveiled its Quarterly IoT Buyers’ Index, which polls the group’s members to track buying patterns for IoT solutions according to verticalmarket sectors and more. The IMC is on track to have 15,000 members by year’s end 2015.

OneM2M announce plans for Release 2 of specifications At a recent meeting, oneM2M's members agreed on plans for the second release of oneM2M specifications and appointed new chairmen and vice-chairmen to advance the agenda of several key working groups.

Building on Release 1 of the oneM2M specifications, delivered in January 2015, ten new specifications have been identified for Release 2, in addition to updates of the existing M2M Now - September / October 2015

Release 1 specifications. The following features will be added: Enablement of an Industrial Domain - “Smart Factories” and of a Home Domain “Smart Home”; dynamic authorisation and end-to-end security; semantic interoperability; oneM2M as generic interworking framework, including support for OMA LWM2M, AllJoyn and OIC; and application developer APIs and guideline. Release 2 of oneM2M is planned for delivery in autumn 2016.

NEWS IN BRIEF New SIMalliance specification supports standardisation in M2M deployments The SIMalliance has published a new specification to allow mobile network operators to remotely load and manage subscriptions across deployed machine-to-machine (M2M) and consumer devices in a standardised way. Hervé Pierre, SIMalliance chairman, said: “For the first time, it is now possible to remotely load and manage subscriptions across devices already deployed in the field, in a fully interoperable way. As technical experts with in-depth knowledge of eUICCs, SIMalliance has welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with the GSMA on this initiative.”

Wireless Broadband Alliance launches Connected City Board The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has established a Connected City Board to help city managers and CIOs knowledge-share and create best practices with their counterparts in other cities and also determine the best way to leverage public-private partnerships.

JR Wilson, chairman of the WBA, said, “To power the vision for Smart Cities, cities around the world are deploying city-wide Wi-Fi and integrating unlicensed and licensed spectrum-based services and business models for managing connectivity, Internet of Things, Big Data and converged services based opportunities for city residents, visitors and businesses.”

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COMPANY NEWS NEWS IN BRIEF Hortonworks to acquire Onyara to exploit IoT data Hortonworks, Inc. the open enterprise Hadoop specialist, has signed an agreement to acquire Onyara, Inc., the creator of and key contributor to Apache NiFi, a top-level open source project. The acquisition will make it easier for customers to automate and secure data flows and to collect, conduct and curate real-time business insights and actions derived from data in motion.

“Hortonworks is focused on doing everything possible to enable our customers to transform their business through data-driven insights and actions,” said Rob Bearden, chief executive officer at Hortonworks. “Onyara’s impressive work on security and simplicity in NiFi, combined with their commitment to open source makes for a perfect addition to our technology team.”

Stream Technologies announces global support for LPWA networks Stream Technologies has announced the availability of LoRaWAN LPWA connectivity integrated into their award-winning IoT-X™ connectivity environment and delivered with IoTXlerate™ partners Kerlink, Nigel Chadwick, LinkLabs, MultiTech, and Stream Semtech.

Communications

Stream is a Contributor level member of the LoRa Alliance with the company’s Tracy Hopkins, SVP of Low Power Radio Networks sitting as the Chair of the Marketing Committee. “Low power radio is an integral part to our solution set”, said Stream CEO Nigel Chadwick, “No one technology is going to easily meet the requirements of all the different IoT solutions. We made the decision to support all of these networks and treat them as just another form of connectivity to help our customers move easily from cellular applications to low power alternative.”

Reliance and Jasper partner for IoT and Smart Cities across India Pairing Reliance’s eleven data centres and its Global Cloud Exchange platform with Jasper’s global IoT services Jahangir platform, also marks Mohammed, another step towards Jasper supporting projects under the Government of India’s ‘Digital India’ initiative.

“India is investing a great deal to empower citizens and enterprises with

cutting-edge technology and infrastructure, and as a result, there is a large demand for Cloud and IoT services,” said Jahangir Mohammed, founder and CEO at Jasper. “This partnership allows us to support enterprises and governments throughout India in optimising and automating every stage of their IoT service lifecycle, enabling companies to get the most out of their devices, networks and applications.”

Eurotech and Arkessa partner to create global IoT solutions Arkessa, the M2M and IoT managed services company, has announced a partnership with smart devices and M2M company Eurotech. This will allow Eurotech to add managed connectivity services to its devices and M2M gateways courtesy of Arkessa’s global multi-network cellular and satellite

service. Integration between Everyware Cloud, Eurotech’s data and device management platform, and Arkessa’s Connectivity Management platform will give customers a single point to manage their connected assets through.

RTI introduces Edge-to-Cloud connectivity software for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the IIoT connectivity platform company, has introduced Connext DDS 5.2, a software solution to address application-toapplication data exchange at both the network edge and in the cloud. The new version adds support for load balancing of analytics and transaction processing via a message queuing service. This allows IIoT service providers to take advantage of cloud elasticity to process more data and transactions while retaining low latency.

“As adoption of the Industrial Internet continues to grow, more companies are looking for ways to introduce new

services and products while transitioning their David Barnett, existing systems to RTI handle the scale, reliability and performance requirements of the Industrial IoT,” said David Barnett, VP of Products and Markets at RTI. “RTI is making this much easier with the release of Connext DDS 5.2. Companies can now leverage one unified solution for their Industrial IoT connectivity requirements. RTI is proud to be a leader in the industry and continue to support our customers with all of their intelligent IIoT applications.”

Cryptosoft joins ThingWorx partner ecosystem to deliver data-centric security to IoT applications

Darron Antill, Cryptosoft

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Cryptosoft, a policydriven data authentication and encryption specialist for IoT and M2M devices, has joined the ThingWorx Ready Partner Program, delivering a simplified approach to securing

the data payloads within ThingWorx driven information flows. The integration will enable customers to utilise the Cryptosoft platform to enable policybased data centric encryption and device authentication for every connected device.

“Customers in regulated industries or who are handling high-value data will now have access to a Cryptosoft

security technology enabling them to embrace the potential benefits of the IoT whilst preserving data integrity and privacy, improving security compliance and reducing risk. The Cryptosoft solution will provide ThingWorx customers with the ability to secure their most important asset: their data, as it moves from device to device,” explains Darron Antill, CEO, Cryptosoft.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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CONTRACT NEWS Kamstrup wins order from consortium of four Norwegian power utilities A Norwegian consortium consisting of Guldbrandsdal Energi, Valdres Energiverk, Eidefoss and Vang Energiverk has chosen Kamstrup as supplier of a smart metering solution that includes more than 50,000 meters, plus a communication system, central system and

integration. Over the last few months, Kamstrup has also signed several agreements with a number of Norwegian utilities including Energi Nett, Smart Strøm Nordvest and Dalane Energi. The roll-out is scheduled for the beginning of 2016 and will continue until the end of 2018.

Etisalat expands IoT operations with Oberthur and ThingWorx deals Oberthur Technologies (OT), the mobile digital security solutions company, along with Cumulocity, are now working with Etisalat Group, the UAE-based global communications

service provider, to offer M2M and IoT services across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Using OT’s M-Sense solution, Etisalat affiliates will extend their M2M and IoT services.

Additionally, ThingWorx, a PTC business, has signed a group

framework agreement with Etisalat to deploy the ThingWorx IoT development platform. By partnering with ThingWorx, Etisalat will be able to offer its customers a large IoT application catalogue to cover a variety of market needs such as Smart City requirements.

THE CONTRACT HOT LIST M2M Now September/October 2015 It's free to be included in The Contract Hot List, which shows the companies announcing recent contract wins, acquisitions or deployments. Email your contract details to us now, marked "Hot List" at <news@m2mnow.biz> Vendor/Partners Altair Semiconductor Altair Semiconductor Arkessa Arkessa ARM B-Scada CSR Digi International Ericsson Etisalat Etisalat Gemalto Gemalto Gemalto Geotab mnubo Hortonworks Insteon Ingenu Jasper Jasper Jasper Kamstrup Kapsch Kii Kore Masternaut M2M Connectivity Microlise NetComm Wireless Numerex Numerex Renesas Real-Time Innovations Sierra Wireless Sierra Wireless SIGFOX SIGFOX Silicon Labs Solair SpeedCast International Technicolor Tencent Holdings u-blox VNC

Client, Country Intelliport Solutions, Hungary Verizon Wireless, USA Eurotech, Global MeterPAN, Germany Sansa Security, Israel CBF, South Korea SK Telecom, South Korea NASA, USA SK Holdings, South Korea Oberarthur, MEEA ThingWorx, MEAA DCT, USA Tigo, Columbia Sequans, France O2, UK Hortau, North America Onyara, USA Toshiba, Japan Meterlinq, Italy Reliance Communications, India TrueMove H, Thailand Telefonica Vivo, Brazil Four power utilties, Norway Belarus Government Yankon Lighting, Tokyo Fargo Telecom, Hong Kong Belfast City Council, UK Cradlepoint, USA B&Q, UK Arrow Electronics, USA RTC Manufacturing, USA T-Mobile, USA Audi, Germany Tech Mahindra, India Arval MobiquiThings, France POST, RMS.lu, Luxembourg T-Mobile, SimpleCell, Czech Republic RFaxis, USA MultiTech Systems, USA InterOil Corporation, Papua New Guinea Cisco Connected Devices Division sensewhere Ltd, Scotland Romteck Australia Telechips, Korea

Key: AIS = Automatic Identification System

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EV = Electric Vehicle M2M = Machine-to-Machine

Product / Service (Duration & Value) LTE M2M gateway LTE IoT product development Managed connectivity partnership Managed connectivity platform Acquisition HVAC monitoring Smart lighting and smart beacon technologies ZigBee modules for space exploration Joint development of IoT platforms Security for IoT deployments IoT deployment Support for vehicle logistics apps Secure M2M services platform LTE chipsets for IoT modules Telematics solutions Data analytics for irrigation applications Acquisition Connected home applications IoT deployment in Italy Partnership for IoT and Smart Cities IoT services IoT platform Smart metering Electronic road toll system Smart Lighting Asian IoT services partneship Vehicle telematics Cloud-based LTE M2M solutions Delivery telematics solution IoT gateway development collaboration Connectivity for school signage Upgrade to LTE-based IoT services Microcontrollers for automotive apps Global partnership for Industrial IoT Global telematics solution Acquisition Wireless connectivity for IoT Wireless connectivity for IoT Collaboration on ZigBee and mesh networking Collaboration on IoT Satellite services for on-shore and off-shore Acquisition Indoor positioning licencing and investment Remote monitoring solutions and modules MirrorLink technology for processors PaaS = Platform as a Service RFID = Radio Frequency Identification

Awarded 7.2015 9.2015 8.2015 7.2015 7.2015 7.2015 7.2015 7.2015 8.2015 7.2015 7.2015 9.2015 8.2015 7.2015 7.2015 7.2015 8.2105 8.2015 9.2015 8.2015 9.2015 7.2015 8.2015 8.2015 7.2015 8.2015 8.2015 8.2015 9.2015 9.2015 7.2015 9.2015 7.2015 9.2015 7.2015 6.2015 7.2015 9.2015 8.2015 8.2015 8.2015 8.2015 8.2015 8.2015 7.2015 SIM = Subscriber Identity Module TTM = Time-to-Market

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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PEOPLE NEWS Freewave Technologies appoints new Engineering VP and president steps down Patrick Lazar has joined FreeWave Technologies, the industrial, secure M2M and IIoT wireless networking company, as VP of Engineering.

Previously, Lazar served as VP of Engineering at Netgear, Inc. where he led global teams in several US locations, China, India and Taiwan.

Kim Niederman, Freewave

“We’re extremely excited to announce Patrick as the newest member of our leadership team,” said Kim Niederman, CEO of FreeWave Technologies.

“His extensive experience across diverse industries

complements FreeWave’s core competencies well, and we will rely on Patrick to make a lasting impact on our team as we continue to grow in the future.”

The company also announced that its co-founder Steve Wulchin is leaving his role as president of the company, although be remains the company's single largest shareholder and will continue to be actively involved as a board member in the development of FreeWave’s new product platforms and in its expansion into international marketplaces.

Telensa strengthens US management team and appoints new marketing head Telensa, the long-range, low-power Smart City IoT solutions company, has hired three industry experts to support its continued contract wins and pilot deployments in major cities such as Atlanta GA, San Francisco CA and Bellevue WA.

Will Gibson, Telensa

Tim Dodge becomes regional sales manager, US East, after 11 years in the outdoor street lighting industry.

Sara Tabacchi has been appointed regional sales manager, US West, and has a wealth of experience in the lighting industry including GE Lighting. Paul Premo has been named as technical support manager, North America, to support large-scale networks that the company is currently deploying.

Telensa has also appointed Keith Day to lead its marketing. He recently led marketing for UK-based small cell pioneer Ubiquisys, which was acquired in 2013 for $310M by Cisco. Subsequently he led marketing for Cisco’s Service Provider Mobility business worldwide.

“We’re delighted to welcome someone of Keith’s calibre to join the Telensa team, especially at such a key moment in the growth of IoT,” said Will Gibson, CEO of Telensa. “We’re building the future of IoT, and our deployment momentum in smart lighting and smart parking shows that we are on the right track.”

Digi International appoints new director

Sam Lazarakis, Digi

Digi International, the M2M solutions company, has names Sam Lazarakis as a company director. “Over a 38-year career with Ernst & Young, Sam worked with some of the most storied technology companies and was a coordinating partner to more than 40 public firms,” said Ron Konezny, president

and chief executive officer, Digi International. “His experience working in emerging sectors and with companies that scaled in size and global presence is extremely relevant to Digi as we execute on our strategic plans.”

Jacob Barlebo becomes VP sales at Tweakker

Jacob Barlebo, Tweakker

Device connectivity and business intelligence specialist Tweakker, part of Spirent Communications' Device Intelligence business unit, today announces the appointment of Jacob Barlebo as vice president Sales. In this role, Barlebo will be responsible for managing Tweakker's global sales teams, new business and partner

development, and marketing. The Tweakker Device Intelligence Cloud solution uses highly accurate device intelligence data trusted by over 100 carriers. Accurate device data is particularly important in the MVNO segment because many customers bring their own devices into the MVNO's network (BYOD).

SIGFOX appoints Allen Proithis to head US operations SIGFOX, the low power wide area connectivity company, today announced that industry veteran Allen Proithis will head the company’s expansion in North America, including deployment of the SIGFOX network in 10 major U.S. metropolitan areas by Q1 2016 - San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, San Jose.

Allen Proithis, SIGFOX

Proithis, appointed as president of SIGFOX North America, comes with an extensive background in the IoT and M2M markets. Early last year, Proithis led the funding and launch of wot.io, an awardwinning IoT startup focused on accelerating value produced by the data generated by the IoT. “There is a fast-growing community within industry and government that is eager to have the SIGFOX

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Internet of Things network available in the U.S., because they have seen the company’s impressive growth and evaluated its technology and business model,” Proithis said. “I am very excited to lead SIGFOX’s North American network deployment and to work with network operators, businesses, developers and others to help bring its IoTdedicated connectivity to North America.”

SIGFOX is already FCC certified and has recently begun to work with U.S. city and regional government agencies to provide connectivity for smart-city programs, as well as businesses in multiple verticals. In addition, it has partnered with U.S. chipmakers such as Texas Instruments, Atmel and Silicon Labs to provide transceivers, modules and systems-on-chips (SoCs) for its network.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

PRODUCT NEWS Redpine Signals launches comprehensive IoT Platform for device makers Redpine Signals has launched a comprehensive IoT platform for device makers – the WyzBee platform – that includes a flexible hardware platform, development environment and cloud software and services framework. The compact WyzBee board includes Redpine’s Wireless Secure MCU (WiSeMCU™) with multi-protocol wireless module providing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and ZigBee connectivity, six-axis inertial sensors, an infrared receiver, a debug port, push-buttons, LEDs, USB ports, and WyzBee THING™ expansion connector. The WiSeMCU module runs an embedded TCP/IP networking stack with SSL/TLS/

HTTPS security, apart from complete Wi-Fi, BT 4.1, and ZigBee stacks.

Redpine Signals is also accelerating IoT device development by providing a broad portfolio of Things profiles to developers like sensor, audio, GPS, GSM/GPRS and many more.

WyzBee platform

CSR and SK Telecom launch Smart Lighting Beacon with CSRmesh™ CSR plc says that its CSRmesh technology has been used by SK Telecom to enable the world’s first range of smart LED lightbulbs - which also function as Bluetooth smart beacons networked together using CSRmesh. The intelligent CSRmesh lighting system allows an almost unlimited number of smart lightbulbs to be simply controlled and networked together in-store while also enabling location-based special offers and targeted information to smartphone users.

Wi-NEXT launches low cost, ultra-compact WiFi End Node Digital to simplify IIoT applications Wi-NEXT has announced a new product in its WiseMesh product family: the Wi-NEXT End Node Digital to connect Modbus, CANbus, Profibus and general digital machinery for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) via a Wi-Fi network. Wi-NEXT says that this now makes it possible to connect to the Wi-Fi infrastructure of the plant via RS485 or Ethernet ports in a flexible, energy-efficient way, with a very low impact on the deployment or overall project cost.

“As manufacturing is evolving and adopting newer technologies, some

machines pre-date the concept of remote connectivity,” said Armando Pereira, CEO of Wi-NEXT. “There are millions if not billions of these valuable legacy machines that are completely disconnected and ‘invisible’. Besides connecting these assets, the Wi-NEXT solution enables value-added services such as predictive maintenance, energy efficiency audits, and usage reports.”

CSR Smart Lighting Beacon

Wi-NEXT End Node Digital

OPINION

SPONSORED COLUMN

Can the Smart TV tech us about the future of the IoT? Most of us have become accustomed to pulling a new TV out of the box, connecting it to players, tuners, and finally to an internet plug or Wi-Fi. In fact, we spend more time setting up services like Amazon Prime, Hulu and Pandora in our new smart TVs, than adjusting colour, sound and other settings related to the TV as a product. Content is after all the key benefit and the TV, the enabler.

Even though the IoT is fundamentally B2B, it seems to be evolving in a direction much similar to B2C models like the Smart TV. Here, the IoT module takes on the role of the TV and services are layered onto it to deliver edge-to-app business benefits enabling new revenue streams from emerging models, expansion of services offerings and also of course, enabling savings from higher productivity in existing processes.

Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit

This layering of services, as with the smart TV, must be done by the module manufacturer. In

M2M Now - September / October 2015

order to deliver value without adding complexity, each functionality or enablement element developed with ecosystem partners, must be rooted in the module’s core software and work seamlessly with it. In September at CTIA Super Mobility Week in Las Vegas, we introduced the Telit IoT Portal, a new approach to IoT enablement that implements this concept. Now the IoT is truly on the way to become an effective tool for providers to launch new services into their markets with the simplicity of setting up and watching your favourite show on a smart TV.

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WHAT’S HOT ONLINE

IoT Global Network launches to promote business development for the Internet of Things A new online resource dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT) has been launched to provide transparency and promote business development for the IoT market. The IoT Global Network is described as “The definitive global IoT and M2M company, product and services showcase”, listing more than 600 specialist companies worldwide, and over 500 Iot and M2M communication enabler products. IoT Global Network is the intelligence platform for the global machine-to-machine communication value chain, and a source of information for decision-makers who deal with the Internet of Things in all areas of industry and public services, including consumer-related IoT, energy, financial, industrial, healthcare, security and transportation.

George Malim, IoT Global Network brings together insight into how IoT concepts, regulation and standardisation are progressing

The platform gives visitors a searchable resource, listing IoT products, companies, and services worldwide. Here you can connect with industry experts and network across the IoT community to build your own successful IoT business, enabling everyone to “Get it together in IoT”.

with blogs, expert opinions, regulatory and standards news, press releases, and white papers. vendors and providers can also upload details of their new products and services on the network to showcase their offerings to potential customers.

IoT Global Network enables companies and organisations looking to employ IoT technological solutions to find relevant companies and service providers. Its easy search functionality gathers all the information they might need in one unified location.

The IoT Global Network is edited by George Malim, one of the UK’s pre-eminent communications writers and commentators. “We saw a need for a global network to bring together insight into how IoT concepts, regulation and standardisation are progressing as the market matures,” says Malim. “IoT Global Network provides that platform and it features thought-provoking discussion and insights from senior IoT industry insiders, analysts, researchers, and regulatory and standards bodies. We look forward to bringing readers great, original content plus the latest product information and our global directory of the companies that are creating the Internet of Things,” he adds.

The platform is growing daily with an interactive, searchable database of the latest M2M and IoT products around the world. Visitors can search it by keywords, products, companies or services.

The site lists IoT categories ranging from Automation to Tracking and Maintenance.

In addition, IoT Global Network is updated daily

For IoT and M2M News, Views and Interviews go to: www.m2mnow.biz For the definitive showcase of global IoT and M2M companies, products and services go to: www.iotglobalnetwork.com

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

TALKING HEADS

John Cronin, executive chairman, Cyan

Squaring the circle of frugal innovation and smart utilities: meeting the demands of rapid urbanisation in developing countries The relationship between new technologies and what’s clumsily referred to as ‘the developing world’ has rarely been a successful one. Although some initiatives – like the Green Revolution of the 1960s and mass immunisation against childhood diseases – have succeeded beyond all expectations, far too often solutions developed for Western markets have been shoehorned with a top-down perspective into alien environments with often disastrous results for environments, economies and individual citizens.

When it comes to using communications to solve the many problems that beset developing countries the picture has been a lot murkier. Just listing the problems these regions face - rapid and unplanned urbanisation, pollution, healthcare, inefficiencies in access to basic utilities, resilience to disasters - man-made and otherwise, transport

congestion, inefficient supply chains leading to huge food waste to name just the major ones – shows the challenge we as a species collectively face.

So what can the IoT world do to start addressing these problems in properly appropriate ways?

M2M Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently sat down with John Cronin, executive chairman of Cyan Technology – a company based out of Cambridge in the UK, but with a fast-growing global footprint in Africa, Asia and Latin America – to discuss how the right IoT solutions can bring real and positive change to cities and indeed entire societies in the developing world.

M2M Now: John, you’re a well-known and very successful innovator and leader in the telecoms world – we first met around fifteen years ago when you founded Azure, the revenue assurance specialist – and since then you’ve ▼

Since the late 1990s, mobile communications has been recognised – and heavily promoted by organisations like the GSMA and the ITU – as the obvious answer to resolving the digital divide between rich and poor societies. Mobile payment systems started in Africa as a means for migrant workers without bank accounts to send money back to their families, while fishermen, traders and farmers could use SMA to access accurate market prices and get a fair deal for their goods.

More recently, the emergence of the sub-US$50 smartphone and the rapid expansion of LTE and WiFi coverage in developing countries continues to drive innovation in personal apps and content.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH CYAN M2M Now - September / October 2015

13

TALKING HEADS

been deeply involved in a number of IoT-related companies such as Arqiva with smart metering and Antenova in radio technology. What’s Cyan’s history and how did you come to be involved?

JC: Cyan started life around fifteen years ago with an idea that came from a few extremely bright PhD students at Cambridge University to develop an open, generic and easily programmable microcontroller suited for almost any application and, significantly for the IoT space now, that had extremely low power demands making it ideal for battery powered devices. Working initially as part of Cambridge Consultants, Cyan was eventually spun off as a separate company – just like the highly successful Bluetooth specialist CSR - and was launched on the AIM stock market around ten years ago, with a fabless manufacturing model for its chipsets.

Over that period, as the IoT market started to mature, Cyan saw that its core technology and business model was a perfect fit with the needs of the developing world, combining a powerful mesh networking technique and supporting management systems with individual point solutions that could economically support large scale deployments able to resolve specific problems - initially around the cost effective use of energy in urban settings such as smart metering and smart lighting. 2007 saw our first street lighting deployment in China, followed shortly afterwards by smart metering developments and installations in India.

I came on board in 2012 and, since I seem to have a professional knack of being in the right place at the right time, the business has continued to boom with major orders from Tata Power, Enzen and Essel Utilities in India, Nobre and Ilumatic in Brazil, XLink in South Africa and a strategic partnership with Vodafone. We’ve also recently received a US$3 million letter of intent for our smart meter solution for a deployment in Ghana.

M2M Now: You obviously see the utilities – and especially the power infrastructure - as being central to the successful evolution of

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developing societies. Can you talk us through the issues as you and Cyan see them and what particular problems need to be resolved?

JC: It’s easy for us to forget in the western world what a critical factor the reliable and ready supply of electricity is in keeping our civilisation in existence. People often comment that when it comes to food supplies, any city is only five days away from riots given the near real-time supply chains we have now. Experience, ironically enough in some western cities, shows that we can be only hours away from riots when the electricity supply fails. Lack of power impacts both the public and the personal rapidly and intensely and has huge knock on effects. On one hand, children need light to study and parents need light to help prepare food. On the other hand, without significant investment in back-up generators, whole chunks of a city’s civilisationcritical infrastructure quickly becomes useless, impacting the availability of clean water, dealing with sewage, cooling sensitive buildings like hospitals, ensuring public safety in transport and signalling, or leading to a rise in crime in unlit streets.

While those are the obvious problems, what’s missing in that depressing list is the actual root cause: the inability, for a host of often interlinked reasons, of utilities to accurately and costeffectively measure and bill for energy consumption. Enabling utilities to do just that is the key driver behind Cyan’s technology and commercial strategies – unless they get return on investment, they won’t invest and things will just get worse.

Take a typical city in a fast-developing country – and it’s important to remember in this context that, according to the United Nations, we’ve just passed the tipping point where more than half the population now lives in cities – there are a whole host of factors that impact the efficiency of utilities. Rapid urbanisation often involves an explosive growth in unmanaged shanty towns – I won’t tar them with the word ‘slums’ as they’re often remarkable places that can show the positive side of humanity as much as the ▼

Cyan saw that its core technology and business model was a perfect fit with the needs of the developing world

M2M Now - September / October 2015

We’ve also focused on the kinds of training and support packages that street level installers need, deskilling as appropriate

John Cronin joined the Cyan board in 2012 initially as a non-executive director, and took over as executive chairman in May 2012. Since joining Cyan, he has helped the company to grow and expand into markets across Asia, African and Latin America. John has been instrumental in mergers and acquisitions worldwide, raised equity, debt facility and vendor financing funding between US$50m and $900m and set up operations in international markets. In addition he has created significant value for shareholders with 4 Company exits in Picochip, Azure Solutions, i2 and Netsource Europe totalling $600m.

negative. Implicit in this rapid growth is a lack of geographical data or street addresses – so how can a traditional utility bill without a stable street address or traceable billing identity? Meters that do get installed often get stolen or vandalised, electricity is stolen wholesale by hooking wires up to overhead cables – often by local gangs who then extort the inhabitants – while access to these lawless spaces can be personally dangerous to utility staff.

The Cyan strategy – and this is where we work closely with the utilities and via technology licencing deals with equipment manufacturers in each country such as Tata Power in India, El Sewedy in Egypt and Vodacom and X-Link in South Africa – is to add our low footprint radio transceivers to meters, meaning that they can be read remotely and safely from 200 metres away - over one km with line of sight - by either a data concentrator for backhaul to the billing system or a suitable equipped handheld device. Our model allows this connectivity to be installed during meter manufacture or retrofitted to an existing meter.

Complementing this, once a utility knows that it’s getting accurate and timely usage information into its systems, it can start looking at implementing similarly low-friction solutions for payment, sharing bills via smartphones and m-payment systems. It’s an ultimately virtuous cycle that also goes a long way to removing corruption from the system as well.

M2M Now: That still implies that there’s still going to have to be a heavy investment from the utility themselves in that unpleasant overhead so hated in the telecoms sector – the dreaded ‘truck roll’ – and with literally millions of metering points needed in even an average-sized supercity in a developing country, surely that’s going to take a very long time?

JC: That’s an issue we were well aware of as we were designing the entire offering. As well as providing an intelligent and I’d like to think elegant end-to-end system solution, we’ve also focused on the kinds of training and support packages that street level installers need, deskilling as appropriate. With one of our recent customers, CESC in Mysore India, one installation team have been able to install 100 meters in a single day – an important metric if India is to achieve Prime Minister Modi’s aim of 100 Smart Cities and 130 million smart meters in the next few years. It’s

a critical issue when there are already an estimated 200 million meters in India, 450 million in China and around 70 million in Africa.

I should also add that there other wider and equally critical issues addressed through smart energy, as it then starts to become possible to adjust the distribution grid and generation assets in more intelligent ways through load balancing or adding variable resources such as solar and wind power.

M2M Now: You also mentioned smart street lighting as a complementary offering via Cyan’s CyLux solution. How’s that progressing?

JC: It’s a very similar model where you can also instantly see the benefits of an integrated, end-to-end value chain that uses the mesh networking model operating in an unlicensed spectrum to gather data and then share it with appropriate city management applications and systems. Once again, our approach of working closely with local manufacturers and simplifying product integration means that you can readily add new functionalities to existing street lighting products, such as adding pollution, traffic or temperature sensors.

This sort of incremental strategy is the best to take when we’re looking at the challenges facing developing countries. You can help your partners to slowly develop their own capabilities and skill bases by working closely together, encouraging them to take ownership of solutions. That, in turn, stimulates local innovation and entrepreneurship that can then be applied to solve similar regional problems and drive the wider economy from the ground up.

Numerous academic studies, both historic and current, show the huge knock on indirect benefits that come from investing in transport infrastructure such as road and rail. We’re bringing that principle into the 21st century world of digital infrastructure, but using technologies, business models and partner relationships that are appropriate to the particular sets of problems that developing countries, economies and societies actually have. Build the right network and further applications and services will inevitably come, just as they have with the internet and GSM….

IN ASSOCIATION WITH CYAN M2M Now - April September / May /2015 October 2015

15

IoT MASTERCLASS

Josep Balaguer, BlueTC

Natalie Duffield, intechnologyWiFi

Service-centric network optimisation IoT services used to rely almost exclusively on cellular networks, with some satellite connectivity provided in remote locations, but now connectivity options are proliferating with low power wireless technologies, ZigBee and other bearers entering the fray. This provides wider choice - but also makes the decision process regarding which bearer to use accordingly more complex.

Scott Sumner, Accedian Networks

Steve Bowker, TEOCO

“New technologies such as Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) are an alternative to delivering IoT solutions over existing mobile cellular networks,” says Steve Bowker, vice president of technology and strategy at TEOCO. “They’re better placed to address key challenges such as minimising the cost of connected devices, and achieving reliable communications and connectivity with the minimum amount of power. Mobile networkbased IoT solutions are typically based on 2G technology due to the issue of power constraints.

However, new research currently underway aims to solve the challenges of IoT for its use with 5G networks, which are expected to launch commercially in 2020.”

For Scott Sumner, the vice president of solutions development and marketing at Accedian Networks, the choice still hinges on two aspects: connectivity and transport. “Today, many IoT devices – such as smart home thermostats and alarm systems – connect using Wi-Fi,” he says.

“Transport, though, is more important than connectivity: how does data get from one IoT device to another? And how is that traffic

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prioritised based on the service’s characteristics?”

Sumner says basic IoT applications are characterised primarily by their bursty nature.

IoT safety applications, on the other hand, are both bursty and high priority. Smart thermostat alerts therefore can’t be treated in the same way as streaming video surveillance from an alarm system.

Horses for courses – and finding the right terms That level of difference in requirements from service to service is also present in the differences between M2M and IoT terminology, although for many the terms have become conflated. “There is a clear tendency in the industry to mix or treat both terms at the same level,” says Josep Balaguer, the sales director of Blue TC. “To us, IoT is a much more broader concept than M2M. In fact, M2M is a building block within the IoT ecosystem.”

He goes on to explain that the IoT ecosystem is composed of the device layer – the sensors, actuators and controllers, the IoT aggregation or platform layer, the deployment of the applications and the connectivity to link all of those.

“Connectivity requirements are mainly driven by application or device requirements,” he says.

“Issues such as energy consumption, coverage, mobility, resilience, quality, data throughput, communications latency, real-time data ▼

Ronan Kelly, ADTRAN

Economies of scale and greater technology choices present Internet of Things (IoT) service providers with more options to ensure quality of service and optimise their IoT networks, writes George Malim.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

requirements and communications opex and capex should all be considered, among others.”

Balaguer adds that in his view cellular operators are more aligned to supporting M2M applications than the wider IoT ecosystem. “Mobile operators are very much focused on M2M type communications but, from the IoT ecosystem point of view, these are just one alternative to consider,” he emphasises.

Others bemoan the industry’s continued focus on cellular technologies when established alternatives exist. “With the massive number of connected devices currently accessing 3G, the reliability of this network often already operates at a reduced and, at times, insufficient capacity,” acknowledges Natalie Duffield, the chief executive of intechnologyWiFi. “While, for now, 4G may provide a faster, more efficient option, as the number of IoT devices using such networks increases, they are likely to encounter the same connectivity issues.”

“Unlike cellular networks,” she adds, “Wi-Fi is ready to connect billions of IoT devices to the internet, to each other and to the billions of consumer electronics and computing devices already in use. Wi-Fi’s scalability also means that its service will not falter as demand increases, provided it is properly maintained.”

Blurring the edges – the role of fog Optimising an IoT network requires not only reliable access to bandwidth but an awareness of the attributes required by each service. “To optimise an IoT network, service providers must be able to use the network intelligently, which means prioritising both bandwidth and latency strategically to achieve the desired QoS for each particular service,” explains Sumner. “Fog computing – that is, storing and processing some IoT data on local devices, or on edge devices – can help.

But even with fog computing, it’s still necessary to use finite network resources intelligently to successfully deliver the desired QoS. This in turn requires complex coordination across multiple network domains and elements.”

Others think much of the optimisation work has already been done and lessons have been learned from making the internet reliable. “Ultimately the IoT industry is standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to considerations for reliable communications,” says Ronan Kelly, CTO of ADTRAN. “The internet has evolved from being something only suitable for non-mission critical applications, to becoming the backbone of choice for much of the world’s modern communications tools. Over the past 20 years there have been many protocols and mechanisms developed to permit reliable communications over either unreliable or congested network infrastructures. With many of the IoT solutions designed to use dedicated networks like SIGFOX, there are means to negotiate appropriate QoS requirements and, thanks to the bi-directional communication path, reliable transmission of signals can be confirmed.”

“Service providers must manage bandwidth and latency in order to deliver IoT services,” he adds. “However, humans ultimately are the network’s end customers. This means that optimising for the IoT must start with a ‘first, do no harm’ strategy. As varied as IoT services are in terms of network impact, they should be considered as a whole and balanced against the need to maintain QoS for existing services like voice calling. This can be achieved when bandwidth and low latency are prioritised intelligently to those services and users that need it most – and de-prioritised for those that don’t.”

TEOCO’s Bowker also identifies the different requirements of IoT applications as key considerations in selecting network types. “The underlying communications technologies typically all support different QoS classes, however it’s critical to monitor all aspects of the service delivery chain and automatically identify any anomalous behaviour,” he says.

“Different IoT applications require different approaches: mission-critical real-time alerts – for remote monitoring of healthcare patients, for example – must use robust radio channels to ensure messages and data are transmitted and successfully received. By contrast, a connected drinks machine that sends a regular automated stock update to the distributor can just wait to re-send the message if it isn’t delivered first time round.”

As the sheer scale of IoT traffic continues to grow, organisations will need to optimise their IoT networks in order to keep the costs involved in line with the value of the services delivered.

That requires maximised utilisation of IoT network capacity.

Self-optimising networks – the final goal “Ultimately, the requirement here is to create a self-optimising network that’s capable of driving utilisation as effectively and efficiently as possible,” says Accedian’s Sumner. “This is possible if the network is set up properly to dynamically reconfigure resources automatically, in real-time. This type of intelligent network is sufficiently self-aware to decide how to allocate resources fast enough so as to keep up with the demands of both traditional applications and IoT ones.”

“Most importantly, in terms of the IoT, a self-optimising network must be able to handle bandwidth spikes without compromising prioritised services,” he adds. “IoT applications are notorious for triggering bandwidth spikes – for example, if something sets off a home security system that’s audioenabled or that uses infrared sensors. IoT services that involve video streaming especially can cause major problems with bandwidth spikes, if not handled appropriately.”

Bowker advocates that, as IoT upgrades, organisations share larger volumes of capacity to even out such spikes. “The efficient use of any network improves with scale and tends to be more efficient the higher its workload,” he says. “The IoT is no exception. Organisations can become more efficient by working together to consolidate their various IoT solutions on a single network, and it’s for this reason that we’re likely to see more organisations working together in consortia. Already, we’re seeing that with traditional mobile network operators.”

Optimising for the IoT Yet, the Internet of Things is taking over the human internet.

Infonetics Research forecasts that 70% of total network traffic by 2020 will be IoT or M2M-based, so internet QoS is becoming IoT QoS. “Delivering the desired QoS for different IoT services depends on five interdependent factors: real-time, end-to-end visibility over the entire network, which in turn empowers operators to gain control over increasingly complex networks, which in turn ensures performance that supports exceptional end-user experience, which is itself necessary for the competitive differentiation of IoT applications,” says Sumner.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

For maximum network efficiency, it’s important to consider all of the available technologies and then design networks from the ground upwards. “The decision on whether to use mobile technologies versus dedicated IoT solutions is still not clear cut since power efficiency is continually improving with LTEAdvanced, and also as 5G evolves,” says Bowker. “Mobile technology’s role in the IoT is also more likely to benefit from economies of scale since the use of shared technology and standards globally means production costs will fall. However, currently the biggest challenge for IoT is ensuring quality of service without compromising security.”

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IOT MASTERCLASS

Assuring quality of service in M2M and IoT connectivity Despite being a key building block of any wider M2M solution, there are important differences between M2M connectivity services and traditional mobile services that need careful consideration as these, by definition, can’t provide human feedback. On top of this, many M2M users need global connectivity, which in turn involves international roaming partners. Is trusting global roaming partners sufficient or should the market demand a more sophisticated approach from those operators providing M2M services - in particular where mission-critical M2M/IoT services are involved, asks Miguel Angel García Matatoros, managing director, Blue Telecom Consulting.

This IoT Masterclass is intended for operators and MVNOs who provide connectivity services via cellular to M2M businesses and for companies who already employ or are planning to implement M2M/IoT technologies in their businesses.

Are roaming partners the Achilles Heel of M2M? As has been said many times, “trust is good, but control is better”. Given the contractual responsibilities of any M2M operator, they need tools to not only assure services within their own network but, just as importantly, in visited networks as well - and that includes all possible roaming scenarios. It would be nice to believe all networks are similar, but they are not. From the research BlueTC has carried out to date, the quality of service depending on location and roaming partner can vary dramatically and, on occasions, falls below acceptable thresholds. Just allowing devices to connect to any network is a dubious strategy and, instead must be appropriately controlled and optimised to get true industry grade connectivity.

90000 ms 80000 ms 70000 ms 60000 ms 50000 ms 40000 ms 30000 ms 20000 ms 10000 ms

last 6176 ms 9062 ms 1 0 0

min 8522 ms 8102 ms 0 0 0

avg 7505.27 ms 51829.5 ms 0.19 0.7 0.12

max 13991 ms 84388 ms 1 1 1

10:55am

10:00am

09:00am

08:00am

07:00am

06:00am

05:00am

04:00am

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08/28 02:19am

0 ms

(all) (all) (all) (all) (all)

Designed for national and international use, the solution supports roaming but can also be used by operators for internal measurements. These may be performed in real-time on 2G, 3G or 4G/LTE networks and go beyond the traditional measurements often made of just connection availability and pure radio or core network metrics. Instead, the solution can control and analyse all service layers, from radio access to OTT applications via IP, SMS and voice, and these should support most M2M/IoT services and applications.

The system measures the quality experienced and gives the customer the ability to optimise its services and so improve customer experience in any location, all based on real-time data.

Test-Unit-1_SIM-A: Internet access delay - Compared (8h 35m 30s)

2G - Time for PDP+IP address 3G - Time for PDP+IP address Current network is X Current network is Y Current network is Z

At BlueTC we have come up with a cost effective way for anyone to be able to independently monitor the QoS provided by any M2M operator and use this to improve customer experience. To provide better insight, BlueTC has developed its M2M Active Monitoring System, a cloud-based solution that gives M2M operators, M2M service providers, vertical solution providers, MVNOs and corporate customers the ability to independently monitor QoS across the value chain.

This has proven to be more effective than just placing SIM cards in data centres or using an operator’s internal measurements. These approaches have limitations as they’re essentially simulations, don’t provide an end-to-end perspective and they normally only measure basic metrics. In comparison, BlueTC’s solution collects real-time data that’s relevant to each company’s specific business needs and based on a series of KPIs previously defined and variable from industry to industry and customer to customer.

More importantly, this is all non-intrusive and does not need the involvement or agreement of

▼

Miguel Angel Garcia Matatoros, Blue Telecom Consulting

Measure the real-time performance of any network

IN ASSOCIATION WITH BLUE TELECOM CONSULTING 18

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Designed for national and international use, the solution supports roaming but can also be used by operators for internal measurements

the host operator. This makes it possible to compare the performance of different operators before or after signing an agreement with them.

BlueTC’s solution also includes the ability to configure customised alarms that are triggered when the required KPIs reach specific thresholds, so enabling corrective action.

Our system is already working in live networks around Europe and delivering powerful data. In this Masterclass, we are able to present surprising results as shown in our Use Case below where M2M relevant measurements have been collected from three anonymised operators. While this Use Case focuses on international roaming and data traffic, there could of course also be Use Cases for SMS or even voice.

area, the delay in 3G increased to around 20 seconds - much higher, but still within acceptable parameters.

However, when we forced the device to select network Y, shown in the green area, the performance for 3G fell dramatically. On some occasions, the value was around 9 seconds, but in most of the cycles it took between 75 and 85 seconds to connect to the Internet! This means that it was almost 1.5 minutes before the device could start sending data after waking up and, on top of this, comes the time the actual data transfer lasts. While the device would still be working and the delay might go unnoticed by the end customer, in the case of critical M2M applications, acceptable QoS levels and even the service delivery itself may be endangered, with possible damage not only to the end customer but also to any verticals basing their operations on M2M.

Use Case - significant variations on KPIs for data services

Main takeaways for operators and MVNOs

As connectivity is normally available through several partner networks, the visiting operator – who we’ve named Operator A - can steer the roaming to their preferred network.

Alternatively, it can leave it up to the device to attach to a network by default, with the possibility of fall-backs when needed. In this case, our assumption was that the QoS provided would vary depending on the host network selected - here named Operator X, Y and Z.

Operators should monitor the QoS both of their own and third party networks. It’s only when they hold this objective data that they can make informed decisions that will actually improve the QoS delivered to their customers. As this solution can be used for both internal and external third party networks, many interesting Use Cases may be devised. Comparing data from several operators will give insights into which ones are best to collaborate with for national or international roaming, both with regards to quality and to volume.

BlueTC monitored the service provided for M2M devices roaming abroad on behalf of Operator A. Roaming agreements were in place with three local operators in the country in question and there was no preferred network. By using data SIM cards from Operator A, we were able to run tests that measured several KPIs for data services and gave important insights into the KPIs from an end-to-end customer perspective. These allowed Operator A to make adjustments that directly enhanced the M2M service that they were able to deliver to their customers.

When combined with other service elements – such as M2M platforms – monitoring can also help operators to effectively differentiate their offerings and offer a premium service for superior QoS. Some corporate customers might also be interested in a service where they can get real-time insights into the QoS that they receive. This could form a new, valueadded service that operators could offer as a demonstration of transparency to enhance their reputation and/or to charge for at a premium.

Automatic tests were run every 9 minutes, forcing 2G and 3G access in each testing cycle and including batches of ping and file transfer tests. Our system allows remote control of the testing devices to select which network operator – the PLMN was to be tested, and we performed several test cycles for each of the three networks across various periods of time.

Which PLMN was provisioning radio service at each cycle, across both 2G and 3G technologies, also provides a valuable KPI because it shows when a network fails and fallback to another is needed.

We found differences in many KPIs for each operator, particularly regarding latency (e.g. ping RTT delays between 200 and as much as 800 ms) and also for upload throughput.

However, the most significant difference involved Internet access delay - the time elapsed from the moment the application requests the cellular modem to apply for a PDP context until the device is assigned a public IP address and can access the Internet. The graph below shows the values of the KPI for Internet access delay for both 2G and 3G, represented by red and blue lines respectively. The PLMN values have been mapped to identify exactly when our testing device was registered with each network.

In the area with purple colour that represents Operator X, we can see that the time it takes to get full access to the Internet from an unregistered state is around 7 seconds for 2G and 9 for 3G – ‘normal’ M2M parameters. When we steered the testing device to choose network Z, represented by the yellow

M2M Now - September / October 2015

How enterprise customers might benefit Network performance data allows enterprise customers to make better informed decisions about which operator to choose for their M2M/IoT services. They can monitor and analyse how a M2M operator is actually handling services, with quality of the connectivity or other network metrics being an intrinsic part of the enterprise customers’ own service assurance process. By not having to wait for a notification or feedback about a faulty service from the operator, staff can work proactively before the end customer is impacted, ultimately providing an improved service, saving time and money. Even the end-users themselves can be automatically alerted to abnormal situations when certain KPIs reach values outside customised thresholds.

About Blue Telecom Consulting Blue Telecom Consulting (BlueTC®) provides innovative solutions and services aimed at evolving and optimising telecom networks for operators, system integrators and network equipment manufacturers. It divides its offerings into the following main areas: network and performance analytics, service monitoring and assurance, network security and conformance audits, and system and operational automation and optimisation. The company works with top tier companies in the telecommunications sector in various countries and takes on projects globally. BlueTC was established in Madrid in 2005, opened an office in Sweden in 2012 to serve the Nordic countries, and began commercial activities in the United Kingdom in 2013.

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INTERVIEW

Bringing the power of real-time analytics out to the edge – and sorting out the centre One industry phrase prevalent at the end of the last century described the telecommunications explosion as creating a ‘network of networks’. As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to extend its tendrils into almost every area of our professional, public and personal lives, it’d probably be more accurate to describe its continued evolution as creating a ‘system of systems’. We’re now moving valuable information to be used in mission-critical decision making – rather than just raw data – around between multiple devices, IT platforms, applications and business partners.

Irfan Khan is CTO of the Global Customer Organisation at SAP: @i_kHANA

In search of answers to some of these problems, M2M Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently spoke with Irfan Khan, CTO of the Global Customer Organization at SAP who see their HANA cloud platform, specifically created to support the IoT environment, as having an increasingly major role to play across multiple industry sectors.

M2M Now: Irfan, can you talk us through some of the issues that led SAP to develop the IoT extensions for the HANA platform?

IK: The IoT is growing at an incredible rate these days and that’s starting to cause some problems for some companies’ IT infrastructures. To set out the picture with some very broad brush strokes, there are a number of factors at work. Firstly, there are continuing tensions between the centre and the edge – for very good reasons, more processing is being done at the edge, supported by growing intelligence in devices and gateways and the use of Fog techniques to complement the Cloud. Secondly, each part of the IoT ecosystem is evolving at different rates and each largely operates at a different speed and this can also sometimes cause issues with historic ‘one size fits all’ solutions. Finally, the IoT is starting to dramatically change the ways that companies do

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business and how they structure themselves, both internally and in their relationships with customers and partners. As a result, databases and their supporting analytic and dashboard tools increasingly have to operate in a silo-free fashion horizontally and in much more dynamic and responsive ways than ever before. Working with our various sector partners – such as Siemens, Intel, Accenture, T-Systems and Jasper SAP HANA can provide an elegant and effective way to eliminate these bottlenecks on the path to a world truly integrated IoT data, information, services and solutions.

M2M Now: The breadth of information that it’s now possible to capture from both inside and outside companies is startling – and all of it could be commercially or technologically useful. What sorts of application areas is SAP HANA able to reach into and support and which do you think will be the most valuable in the near future?

IK: We’re essentially building on our existing data and application services - which already include predictive analytics, telematics, geo-location and much more – to get the device cloud and its data flows working far more quickly and more leanly than before. SAP HANA now also includes device management, IoT messaging and IoT application enablement including data modelling. In terms of the wider operating environment, SAP customers can run their own device cloud or operate one for their customers. To encourage customers to start experimenting with these new ways of doing ▼

But how do we coordinate the flows of this information and, more importantly, ensure that analytic processes and decision making – whether using human or machine intelligence – are based on consistent and holistic collections of data?

M2M Now - September / October 2015

business, SAP, for a limited time, is including free and unlimited access to the SAP SQL Anywhere suite – supporting lightweight, embeddable databases for remote devices for use with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

To put this into a more strategic and real world kind of context, there will increasingly be situations where information must reside at the edge on the device or gateway if it’s to be fully exploitable in the context of that particular situation.

Latency – of the communications networks and core systems involved – while always getting better will, in some application areas never be good enough to support all applications. This is why we’ve focused on bringing a number of in-memory data and application technology innovations and what you could call a frugal architecture to SAP HANA to deliver this speed of response.

If that’s the situation at the edge, there’s also a complementary need to find better ways to deal with what’s going on at the centre – though any ‘centres’ as such are becoming increasingly virtual in such a distributed environment. Synchronising data across multiple departments, databases and locations has always been problematic, but increasingly it’s become a real barrier to moving towards smarter ways of doing business, as summed up by SAP’s motto of ‘Run Simple’. How can a company run analytics – transactional, predictive, geospatial or any other flavour you want – if the data needed is lurking in different places and held under different rules and formats. SAP HANA manages to resolve both these conundrums at both the edge and centre simultaneously.

M2M Now: Can you give our readers some examples of real world applications of this?

IK: The range of potential benefits that can be extracted is huge, extends across just about every environment, from the workplace to public spaces to the intensely personal. One very good example of how we’re bridging these spaces involves a project that we have underway which is using the IoT – supported by HANA - to create a zero harm environment in mines. Part of the IoT kickstarter program at the SAP Co-innovation Lab in Silicon Valley, this product is being developed jointly by SAP, wearable technology firm Vandrico, and SAP systems integration and management consultancy Illumiti.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

The solution receives real-time information from sensors in the mine and miners reports from smartwatches. These reports are analysed and converted into alerts in SAP HANA when a safety hazard is detected. The Canary Platform is then used to send alert messages to the miners’ wearable devices. In addition, safety tips and triggers requesting safety status of the workers are sent on a schedule to the miners. The watch also has safety checklists for miners that will prompt a worker as he/she begins to use a piece of machinery. The watch will send confirmation notices and ask if there are any issues to report to maintenance. The miners’ responses will feed into enterprise resource planning and then get logged for any future audits.

Switching to the overground world, Hamburg Port Authority which currently handles around 9 million containers each year and manages as many as 8,000 truck movements every day, is now using a solution called the smartPORT logistics (SPL) IoT platform, a co-production between SAP, which supplies real-time technology via the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Deutsche Telekom, responsible for the telematics systems, and logistics specialist DAKOSY. Fleet management is one of the services that were opened up to participants in the Port of Hamburg’s transport chain last November. Forwarding agents pay a monthly fee based on the services they use in return for information about when their trucks arrive at and leave the container terminal. Truck drivers can then log onto their tablets for information about the best routes to take to avoid traffic jams and keep waiting times to a minimum. SPL is able to track data about truck positions, vacant parking spots, congestion at the cargo terminals, traffic jams, raised bridges, and accidents – giving the Hamburg Port Authority’s road manager a bird’s eye view of the traffic situation right across the port premises.

These are both very good examples of how with SAP HANA you can combine sensors, devices and some edge-based processing with core processing, analytics and decision support systems to keep all your resources – human and mechanical – cooperating together in frictionless harmony.

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EXPERT OPINION

Energy Harvesting - the Internet of Things accelerator?

Reaping the benefits of energy harvesting sooner rather than later

Dr. Manos M. Tentzeris is Professor of Electromagnetics within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA). He is an IEEE Fellow and has served as the IEEE Distinguished Microwave Lecturer. He is currently an IEEE C-RFID (Committee on RFID Technologies) Distinguished Lecturer.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is reportedly to have said that, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” Without proper supplies, catastrophe soon looms. With his characteristic wit, Benjamin Franklin was also driving home the same point in his oftquoted observation: “A little neglect may breed great mischief...for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.”

Likewise for the Internet of Things (IoT), close attention must be given to its fundamental components - those “must-have” elements without which the IoT will be unable to fully realise its huge potential. One key IoT enabler now being researched around the world involves the possible use of ambient power sourcing - extracting energy from external sources, also known as energy harvesting.

The IoT must rest on solid foundations – and energy harvesting is a strategic priority for nations If the expansion of the IoT vision does indeed generate a mind-boggling number of connections - the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) anticipates seven trillion wireless devices by 2020 - we can readily assume that powering all these is rapidly going to become a defining mission-critical issue.

Energy harvesting is certainly not new as a research domain. Over the last decade, many academic and commercial groups have been involved around the world in the development and application of cost-effective technologies aimed at capturing energy from ambient sources. The emergence of the Internet of Things is now concentrating that focus.

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Beyond making business sense, the insertion of energy harvesting capabilities in all aspects of life also makes sound strategic sense. With a multitude of sensors and actuators embedded in a country’s infrastructure such as roads, bridges, levees, canals, rail networks and dams, connecting them to power sourced from an external grid is not only very expensive, but also

▼

Alain Louchez is managing director of the Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT) www.cdait.gatech.edu

M2M Now - July / August 2015

exposes them to possible attack.

Independent power sourcing makes those nodes implicitly less vulnerable to malicious intent.

Beyond the eco-friendliness of selfpowered systems and the straightforward geopolitical advantages to be gained from energy independence, security considerations also contribute to making energy harvesting a national priority.

In the United States, for example, the role of energy harvesting for the military has been recognised by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). For instance, DARPA’s new (April 2015) Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operations (NZERO) program seeks to overcome the power limitations of persistent sensing by developing wireless, event-driven sensing capabilities that would allow physical, electromagnetic and other sensors to remain dormant - effectively asleep yet aware - until an event of interest awakens them. N-ZERO seeks to exploit the energy in signal signatures to detect and recognise attention-worthy events while rejecting noise and interference.

Energy harvesting in ambient environments Among the multiple possible ambient energy sources, wireless energy-harvesting technology has dramatically grown recently due to profusion of wireless signals now filling the airwaves. The concept of wireless energy harvesting was first proposed by Nikola Tesla and Heinrich Hertz: simply radiate wireless power to free space and convert the wireless power to usable Direct Current (DC) power. This concept of wireless transfer requires no motion, pressure or heat flows to generate power.

There are two main types of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) and harvesting: near-field or far-field systems.

Near-field WPT systems utilise electric/magnetic induction or magnetic resonance to transfer power wirelessly. For the far-field WPT systems, the energy harvesting devices use antennas to collect remotely radiated electromagnetic waves and diode/transistor-based circuitry, such as rectifiers and charge pumps, for the RF– DC conversion.

Numerous available renewable ambient energy sources exist in nature. Exploitable ambient energy sources are presented below: Solar power is one of the most commonly used sources and can also operate in a hybrid mode in conjunction with other

M2M Now - September / October 2015

types of energy source. Photovoltaic technology has been well developed over the last 60 years and its physical properties such as flexibility and durability and its electrical properties - efficiency, output voltage, and so on - keep improving.

Thermal energy is also widely utilised.

Electrical power can be generated directly by exploiting temperature differences and taking advantage of thermoelectric effects.

Thermoelectric devices can operate continuously as long as there is a temperature difference or heat is flowing across them, although they are usually rigid and heavy when compared to solar cells. Thermoelectric energy harvesting devices typically require relatively large form factors in terms of volume to generate useful amounts of power.

The piezoelectric effect generates electrical voltages or currents from mechanical strains, such as vibration or deformation. Typical piezoelectric-based energy harvesters keep creating power when there is a continuous mechanical motion, such as acoustic noises and wind, or they sporadically generate power for intermittent strains, such as human motion via walking or clicking a button.

Ambient RF energy has a relatively low energy density compared to other energy sources. However, a larger amount of total available power can be harvested by using a high gain antenna. Additionally, the energy density of ambient RF and wireless sources keeps increasing due to everexpanding analogue/digital TV, AM/FM radio, and WiFi and cellular networks.

Ambient RF power density is usually higher in downtown urban areas and near power sources such as TV towers. RF energy-harvesting could be especially useful in charging a battery or powering up electronics wirelessly when it’s hard to replace batteries, such as in numerous bridges and buildings. It is also useful when devices are deployed in areas hazardous to humans or difficult to access, and they can operate at any time of the day and within any topology as long as there’s a minimal ambient power. Ambient RF energyharvesting systems can be easily integrated with different types of antennas as well as with other harvesting technologies, such as solar cells.

A more detailed review of these technologies and their role in the development of self-sustaining wireless platforms can be found in an October 2014 IEEE paper on “Ambient RF EnergyHarvesting Technologies for SelfSustainable Standalone Wireless Sensor Platforms”.

Among the multiple possible ambient energy sources, wireless energyharvesting technology has dramatically grown recently due to profusion of wireless signals now filling the airwaves

Conclusion As the efficiency of energy harvesting improves, the range of applications for self-powered sensors goes on expanding and examples of these can be found in a recent (August 2015) paper from EnOcean on “Energy Harvesting Wireless Power for the Internet of Things”.

While battery reliability, safety and storage capacity continue to evolve, they will not be enough to support the anticipated expansion of the IoT. There will be places where changing batteries when completely drained or defective will be too risky or costly and where power will have to be scavenged from ambient sources.

Independently powering “things” with the size, weight, and capabilities of the likes of smartphones and tablets is not yet within reach - we are still about two to three orders of magnitude below that – but energy harvesting is advancing by leaps and bounds, making it, at least for the time being, well suited for low-power devices.

That said, efficiencies will slowly improve over the next five years or so. If you couple kinetic and thermal energy harvesting with ambient wireless energy specifically for wearables, for example, we may have a real solution sitting on our wrists or in our clothing within the next four to five years. This potential – no pun intended - would certainly have appealed to Benjamin Franklin who, with his potentially perilous experiments with lightning, set the scene 250 years ago for the developments discussed above.

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OPINION

Improving operational efficiency and profitability the M2M way – the view from ORBCOMM In today’s competitive world, businesses need the right information at the right time in order to improve productivity, maximise utilisation and increase profitability – enter M2M communications, says ORBCOMM’s Sue Rutherford, VP of marketing.

With the advancement of technology, M2M communications have significantly evolved from merely connecting devices and enabling the collection of remote data, to become sophisticated end-to-end solutions able to gather large amounts of data, process it to identify valuable information and then share that information with the appropriate parties in real-time across multiple platforms – seamlessly.

The desire for smarter and more readily available remote data has marked a significant development in the way data is acquired. This has mainly involved increasing the interoperability of hardware, network and application solutions to deliver reliable, cost effective and integrated ways to track, monitor, control and manage assets anywhere in the world. ORBCOMM offers the widest variety of capabilities in the industry, with a range of satellite and cellular connectivity options, state-of-the-art tracking, monitoring and controlling devices, and robust applications that enable the delivery of tailored, comprehensive solutions to the field.

As capabilities of the Internet of Things and M2M continue to evolve, the technology has found its way into diverse market applications including fleet and asset management, smart utilities and pipeline monitoring, among others.

Smart leak detection www.ORBCOMM.com

Detecting leaks and burst pipes is cumbersome

and expensive. Manual meter readings require the deployment of a troop of meter readers and a fleet of vehicles to take them everywhere that the pipes go. Intervals between meter readings may be a month or more, which means leaks can go undetected for long periods of time. On top of this, the labour-intensive workflow this involves ends up being reactionary rather than preemptive and that can become very costly indeed. Even with automated meter reading (AMR) devices that report via private fixed radio networks, there is a heavy price to pay for their initial setup and ongoing maintenance.

There is however a better way. AMR/Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) techniques using ORBCOMM’s M2M products can help prevent significant water loss caused by pipeline leakage.

These smart systems monitor the infrastructure around the clock and deliver notifications when irregularities are detected, allowing companies to increase leak detection by as much as 400%.

In addition to efficiently identifying leaks, a comprehensive monitoring solution can connect to other remote assets such as water meters, water quality sensors, flow sensors and level sensors, making it possible to obtain information as to flow rate, water levels, water quality and the quantity of water consumed. With process automation and access to smart data, utility companies are able to improve operations and reduce the costs and logistics associated with manual processes. ▼

Intervals between meter readings may be a month or more, which means leaks can go undetected for long periods of time

IN ASSOCIATION WITH ORBCOMM 24

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Sue Rutherford, ABC ORBCOMM vice president of marketing Sue Rutherford has more than two decades of global technology marketing and business development expertise in the telecommunications, software, semiconductor, SaaS and industrial automation industries and has led a number of multifunctional teams, working to increase constituency awareness and build market presence, customer footprint and strategic business value.

Prior to ORBCOMM, Ms. Rutherford was the vice president of marketing at SkyWave. She has also held senior marketing management positions with Protus, SpotWave Wireless, CrossKeys, MOSAID, Lumonics GSI, and Mitel driving into new markets and transitioning their businesses.

Oil, gas and utilities ORBCOMM’s M2M solutions are also active in the oil and gas industry, monitoring and collecting data from remote field equipment without having to send workers out into the field.

These solutions allow users to check equipment more frequently than was previously possible and save on labour costs, which can swiftly mount when this involves isolated locations. In addition to regularly-scheduled field updates, event-based alarms and notifications allow organisations to react instantly to field issues, rather than losing money and remaining non-operational until a technician’s next scheduled appearance.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) solutions also enable more efficient and cost-effective collection of operations-critical data such as tank levels, flow meter and pump bearing pressure readings, while also allowing the remote control operation of valves and other equipment.

Fleet management, trailer and container tracking M2M technology is also widely used in applications for tracking vehicles and other mobile assets. Having a complete visibility of their fleets helps businesses optimise route efficiency, control fuel costs, protect cargo and communicate with drivers. The range of capabilities here are effectively limitless. A fleet management/asset tracking solution includes telemetry, notifications when vehicles enter or leave specified locations or stay in a location longer than specified, cargo tampering alerts, fuel usage reports, preventative maintenance scheduling notices, and status/position reports for intermodal shipping containers travelling via road, rail or sea.

Solutions for the safe and regulation-compliant transport of refrigerated goods also rely on machine data to deliver status reports and alarm notifications if the cargo area temperature in a refrigerated vehicle strays above or below a specified range. In addition to temperature monitoring and compliance, ORBCOMM’s wide range of two-way devices make it possible for transportation companies to adjust a trailer’s temperature remotely without any onsite intervention. ORBCOMM’s endto-end solutions for refrigerated monitoring are fully integrated with robust applications for analytics and sophisticated report generation to help users deploy their

M2M Now - September / October 2015

assets more efficiently, minimise costs and react quickly to emerging problems.

Maritime tracking With ships frequently out of range of conventional network communications, satellite-based communications have become highly valued in maritime markets. M2M data coupled with satellite connectivity make it possible for businesses to manage fleets, enforce maritime and fishing regulations, monitor vessels, track oil spills with smart buoys and enhance the safety of seaborne crews anywhere in the world.

For sophisticated maritime intelligence applications, customers combine M2M data with ORBCOMM’s Satellite AIS (Automatic Identification System) data to track vessels responsible for oil spills, identify illegal fishing, notify vessels of inclement weather, provide fuel-saving route information and assist in search and rescue operations.

Military, government and public safety applications Finally, government agencies and military organisations require secure and dependable communications to track and monitor personnel and mission-critical resources in remote regions. Monitoring solutions based on ORBCOMM’s satellite/cellular connectivity allow governments and the military to track mobile and fixed remote resources such as vehicles, vessels and equipment. Satellite-based communication is ideal for maintaining vital links with field and military personnel, as well as with valuable resources that travel across borders and into regions where other communication services are unreliable or unavailable.

Whether monitoring water utility pipelines, a fleet of trucks and containers or a flotilla of ships, every customer requires a solution designed specifically to address his unique requirements. ORBCOMM provides a wide range of solutions that seamlessly integrate devices, multiple terrestrial and satellite networks and powerful applications into comprehensive, turnkey solutions. With a truly global reach, ORBCOMM delivers peerless M2M products and services that connect the world’s assets.

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ANALYST REPORT

SMART UTILITIES AND SMARTER HOMES - still waiting for the paradigm shift

GOLD SPONSOR

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info@berginsight.com | Phone +46 31 711 30 91 | www www.berginsight.com .berginsight.com

CONTENTS

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ANALYST REPORT

COMPANY PROFILES

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CREATING THE COMPLETELY CONNECTED HOME

ANALYST REPORT 30

M2M NOW INSIGHT REPORT Our series of specially commissioned Insight Reports continues with Tobias Ryberg, co-founder of M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight and a leading international expert on wireless IoT communication and applications, examining how energy utilities around the world are adapting to a much more interactive and dynamic relationship with their customers. He also explore issues around energy conservation, the regulatory environment and the growing role of smartphone enabled thermostats for remote control and monitoring

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COMPANY PROFILE AT&T’S offering in these markets is explained

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SMARTER HOMES What are the choices that companies have to make when they’re looking to develop products for connected living spaces?

GOLD SPONSOR

ANALYST REPORT

Smart Utilities – still waiting for the paradigm shift…

The idea of the ‘Smart’ utility has been around for almost a decade. What was first envisioned as a swift and radical revolution has however turned out to be a much more lengthy transformation of an industry that already faces a multitude of economic, political, technological and environmental challenges. The energy sector is seemingly incapable of keeping up with the pace of technology innovation, especially as regulations and structural issues set limitations for which applications that may be implemented, as well as where and when. Despite these barriers, the long-term trend is however clear - smart utilities are becoming a reality explains Tobias Ryberg of Berg Insight.

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Yearly smart electricity meter shipments (EU/US) 35 30 25 Million Units

Between 2010 and 2015, smart electricity penetration increased from 17% to 42% in the US and from 16% to 27% in the EU28+2. By 2020, Berg Insight projects that the penetration rates will reach nearly 60% in each region.

Meanwhile, adoption is also taking off in Asia-Pacific, led by ambitious smart grid programs in countries like China and South Korea. Parallel to the adoption of smart meters, the installed base of smart home systems is also growing fast, enabling individual energy management applications based on devices such as smart thermostats. Berg Insight forecasts that the number of households using smart thermostats in Europe and North America will grow at a CAGR of 60.1% from 3.2 million in 2014 to 53.9 million in 2020. Finding the right formula for a mutually profitable coexistence with the emerging smart home industry will be one of the key challenges ahead for utilities who aspire to be called ‘smart’.

20 15 10 5 0 2014 USA

2015 France

2016 Poland

2017 Spain

2018 UK

Germany

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2020

Rest of EU

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Europe: Strong growth ahead for smart meters on the back of nationwide rollouts The EU28+2 currently has 281 million metered electricity customers and the annual demand for electricity meters for new installations and replacements is in the range of 12–16 million units. Penetration for smart meters, providing more comprehensive functionality than basic meter data collections, was 24% at the end of 2014. By 2020, Berg Insight projects that this penetration rate will increase to 58%, driven by large rollouts in Spain, France and the UK, in combination with nationwide rollouts in several smaller countries. The installed base of smart electricity meters is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.8% between 2014 and 2020 to reach 163.8 million units at the end of the period. The rate of installations is expected to accelerate towards the end of the decade as nationwide rollouts in France and eventually also the UK get underway. Berg Insight also anticipates that deployments of a new generation of smart meters will start in Italy by around 2020 as the first generation of intelligent metering devices installed in the country reach the end of their technical lifespan. Moreover an uptake in adoption in Germany is likely, although full-scale installations cannot be expected to begin before the mid-2020s.

Regulations drive adoption Europe’s national governments play a key role in the adoption of smart metering. The EU’s highly publicised 20/20/20 targets merely include a recommendation for the member states to evaluate the technology and introduce it – if there is a positive business case. Over the past years, almost all European countries have performed cost benefit analyses of smart metering and the majority of the cases have resulted in a recommendation to go ahead with a rollout. Italy and Sweden were the first countries in Europe to complete smart meter rollouts in the late 2000s, followed by Finland at the end of 2013. A second wave of deployments is now prepared or underway in France, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and several other countries in Western Europe. Estonia is doing

M2M Now - September / October 2015

the first nationwide rollout in Eastern Europe, where other markets with a high level of activity also include Poland and Latvia. At the beginning of 2015, a total of seventeen European countries had developed regulatory roadmaps for the full-scale introduction of smart meters and at least two more were planning for partial rollouts. Among the largest countries, only Germany remains indecisive about smart meters. The official position of Germany’s federal government is that the country should design the roll-out of smart metering systems in a targeted fashion which meets the needs of its energy reforms. A proposed plan for a partial rollout to around 30% of households is currently being evaluated. If approved, Berg Insight believes that it could result in a gradual ramp-up of smart meter deployments in the late 2010s and full-scale replacements beyond 2020.

Gradual progress in key markets The past few years have been mixed, with both positive and negative events affecting the smart metering industry. On the positive side, the major French utilities ERDF and GrDF finally announced that they were going ahead with their smart meter rollouts, signing large contracts with equipment vendors.

There were also several new projects announced in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Latvia. On the negative side, the UK’s DCC announced that it will be unable to launch the national smart metering solution on time and proposed a one year delay until the end of 2016, which probably postpones the start of the mass-rollout until 2017. In the area of smart meter communications, the most significant event was the tie-up between Alliander and Enexis to deploy a joint CDMA450 network for smart grid applications in the Netherlands.

North America: Smart meter market stabilised after peaking in early 2010s North America has taken a different path to smart metering from Europe, reflecting fundamental differences in the

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structure and regulation of energy markets. Most of the region’s utilities adhere to the traditional model of vertical integration, with generation, distribution and retail combined in a single monopolistic organisation. This means that the North American utilities in general are better positioned to take a holistic approach to the smart grid than their European counterparts. Another key difference is that a majority of the largest players are investor-owned, as opposed to the still government-controlled energy industry titans in Europe.

Regulatory fragmentation is however a characteristic shared by the regions. Utilities are regulated at the state-level in the US and by the provinces in Canada. In some jurisdictions like California, Texas and Ontario, the regulators have mandated the introduction of smart meters as part of their energy policies. Elsewhere, smart meter projects have been blocked by the regulators due to concerns over cost or privacy. The main stimuli from the US federal government was the Obama Administration’s Recovery Act of 2009 that included US$ 3.4 billion in investment grants for smart grid projects. The program accelerated a number of smart metering projects and led to a peak for smart meter shipments in 2010/2011.

After the completion of several large high-profile rollouts in the past years, the focus of the market has shifted to small and medium-sized municipal and cooperative utilities, which constitute the majority share of the remaining addressable markets. Smaller projects contribute to stabilising demand and gradually increasing penetration rates in the coming years. While large populous states such as California, Texas and Florida are already at or near full penetration, there is still less than 15% coverage in major population centres such as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. In Canada, the early rollout in Ontario has been followed up by similar projects in other major provinces, including Quebec and British Columbia.

Private low-power wireless networks dominate the smart grid sector Smart meter solutions deployed in North America primarily rely on private wide-area wireless networks, controlled by the utilities. Berg Insight estimates that there were around 56 million low-power wireless network nodes utilised for smart

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metering applications in the region at the beginning of 2015.

The networks are based on proprietary technology platforms utilising unlicensed spectrum in the 915 MHz or 2.4 GHz frequency bands. Silver Spring Networks, Itron and Sensus are the leading technology providers, with 15–20 million nodes each, followed by Landis+Gyr and Elster. Based on the expected life-span for smart metering solutions of 15–20 years, the networking environment is set to remain fragmented across proprietary technologies until the end of the coming decade. The next generation of smart metering systems will however most likely be based on more widely adopted IoT networking standards, whose applications are not limited to the energy industry.

Asia-Pacific: China to complete a smart meter rollout by 2020 Asia-Pacific is beginning to see a massive uptake of smart metering, led by the countries in East Asia. Large-scale rollouts to residential customers are underway in Japan, South Korea and China. South Korea has adopted a national plan for the construction of a smart grid by 2020. Japan already has the world’s most advanced power grid monitoring systems in place and several of the leading utilities have announced plans for smart meter deployments over the next ten years. China is investing massively in the expansion of the nation’s energy infrastructure to keep up with the rapidly increasing power demand. The national utility State Grid of China which provides electricity for almost 90% of the population, is in the second phase of a three phase plan for the adoption of smart grid technologies through to 2020. Since 2011, the utility has been replacing legacy meters among its 300 million customers with smart meters in a process that should be completed by 2015. The following year, State Grid began constructing a back-end network of data concentrators for collecting meter data via wired lines and PLC. During 2012 and 2013, the utility procured approximately 18 million data concentrators from around 30 different vendors, of which the vast majority are presumed to use cellular communication for network connectivity. In September 2013, State Grid announced that 166 million households were connected to its automated meter data collection system. Over the next five

M2M Now - September / October 2015

years it is intended that coverage should be extended to rural areas, though the operational conditions here are more challenging in both technical and economic terms. Australia and New Zealand are other early adopters of smart metering in the Asia-Pacific region. In Australia, installations of smart meters have started in the most populated states Victoria and New South Wales. New Zealand is on track to achieve almost complete coverage of all electricity customers, through a rollout entirely driven by the energy industry.

Smart gas metering: Europe next in line for adoption after North America The adoption of smart metering in the gas sector began in North America, where today the vast majority of all gas meters are remotely read. The coming years will see the first major rollouts of smart gas meters in Europe, while the AsiaPacific region is expected to show a low level of activity.

Seven European countries – Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK – have made positive assessments in their national cost benefits analyses and plan full-scale rollouts. The Netherlands made the installation of smart gas meters mandatory for new connections and replacements in 2012 and the UK has also started with replacements on a small scale. During 2015, large-

Yearly shipments of smart gas meters (EU) 12 10

Million Units

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scale installations are planned to begin in France and Italy as well. Belgium has also appeared as a potential candidate for a mass-rollout as the country’s principal gas industry player ENGIE (formerly GDF-SUEZ) announced plans to deploy a nationwide IoT network based on Sigfox’s ultra-narrowband wireless technology. At the end of 2014, there were 2.5 million smart gas meters in operation, corresponding to a penetration rate of around 2%. By 2020, Berg Insight projects that the penetration rate for smart gas meters will increase to 40%, mainly driven by nationwide rollouts in the UK, Italy and France. The installed base of smart gas meters is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 63.8% between 2014 and 2020 to reach 49.0 million units at the end of the period.

Dealing with smart meter data Smart meter rollouts are highly publicised projects with large capital budgets that attract similarly large bidders for equipment, installation and IT solution contracts. The combination of awareness campaigns and criticism over cost, technology and privacy issues tend to generate negative press coverage and sometimes even spark political debate.

Projects are frequently delayed, but rarely abandoned.

Eventually, every household in the utility service territory gets visited by an electrician who installs the new smart meter.

After a while the customer is notified that the refined data stream from the new metering device will be used for billing purposes. Once the system is fully operational, the meter reverts to its natural role as an invisible recording device that the utility and consumer hopes will operate smoothly without creating any fuzz for the next 15 years. Only one question remains – how to make use of the data?

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Challenges ahead in data management and security

4 2 0 2014 France

2015 Italy

2016 Netherlands

2017 UK

M2M Now - September / October 2015

2018

2019

2020

Smart meter rollouts, especially large ones with nationwide scope, represent a paradigm shift for the understanding of energy consumption at all levels in the power grid. The volume of data that can be collected from smart meters is unprecedented. Ontario’s smart metering system, collecting

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ANALYST REPORT

hourly values from a population of almost 14 million, generates more data transactions per day than the province’s banking system. For a country with the size of the UK, the same level of granularity will result in the collection of more than 700 million meter values per day, which makes the repeated delays of the national centralised data collection system for meter data understandable. Based on recommendations from the EU, the European countries that currently deploy or plan to deploy smart meters are devising mechanisms for making the meter data available to end-customers and trusted third parties. In most cases, energy regulators plan for centralised secure data repositories where all access to information, except data required for billing and network management purposes, is controlled by the consumer. Germany, where the issue of if and when a mandatory rollout may take place remains unresolved, has gone one step further in its efforts to maintain privacy. Under the German smart metering regulations, energy data should be physically stored in a communication gateway located at or near the customer’s premises. If fully implemented, the model will result in a network of 10–30 million micro data repositories. To summarise, energy consumption data will largely be available to both the energy industry, consumers and trusted third parties after a rollout. How and in what form will however differ between countries, service territories and utilities.

Unlocking the value of smart meter data Traditional energy industry players are the first to benefit from smart meter data, through billing based on actual consumption and detailed statistics on energy use down to individual customers. The wealth of information accumulated from smart meters generates new demand for increasingly sophisticated data analytics tools. Leading smart grid data analytics specialist C3 Energy reports that 52 million meters are addressed by its applications, generating savings and benefits in a range of areas from energy grid capital asset allocation, transmission, distribution, and advanced metering, to the customer experience and energy efficiency programs.

According to research cited by the company, smart grid analytics can save utilities US$ 50–65 per meter and per year just in the areas of predictive maintenance, grid cybersecurity

34

and voltage automation. In customer-facing operations at a utility, the availability of individual consumption data creates several opportunities for closer relationships and interactions with clients. Energy consumption information can easily be made available for convenient access through web portals and smartphone apps. Furthermore, a closer analysis of the individual consumption profile can provide a sound basis for profitable advice on energy savings, something which energy retailers in many countries and territories are obliged to provide. A leading player in this field is Opower, whose customer engagement platform is used by nearly 100 utilities, serving more than 50 million customers in eight countries worldwide.

Processes and applications supported by smart meter data

Utility

Customer

Regulator

• Billing/CRM

• Energy awareness

• Compliance reporting

• Cost savings

• Energy conservation schemes

• Grid analytics • Field services • Operation planning

• Smart home applications

Beyond the meter – smart homes versus the smart utility While the global utilities industry widely nurtures a vision of the grid-connected intelligent meter as the future hub for smart energy applications, leading IT industry players approach the market from a different perspective. In their view, energy management is a key part of a broader portfolio of smart home applications. Google’s US$ 3.2 billion acquisition of Nest in January 2014 signalled that the race is

M2M Now - September / October 2015

on for attaining the coveted position as leader in this emerging new marketplace. Appleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s HomeKit, Samsungâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SmartThings and a host of other platforms from various OEMs and service providers are also in the competition. The chances for individual energy industry players to prevail with their own solutions in such a fast-paced and competitive market are slim. Rather, they will need to work hard to find a relevant position in the value chain. One obvious strategy for energy suppliers it to act as resellers of smart home solutions for energy management. In competitive energy markets, energy saving technology help suppliers differentiate their value propositions while at the same time creating a positive brand image. By simply selling the solutions, energy suppliers can become one of multiple channels for smart home providers.

Under the right circumstances, energy suppliers may however become the ultimate sales channel for smart home solutions by delivering a strong business case for energy management.

Finding incentives for energy conservation Energy management has turned out to be a more difficult business than expected. In the late 2000s, energy prices were rising fast and policy makers predicted that continued increases would stimulate large investments in energy conservation.

Then the global economic recession hit, reducing demand for energy and ending the price hike. Particularly in Europe, the energy industry has been hit hard by the changing market conditions, making large capital investments in new technology that further reduce demand seem more financially unattractive than ever before. Consumers still pay a little bit more for energy year after year, but the average monthly cost is still far from alarming for most people, leaving them with little financial incentives for capital investments in energy savings. The only stakeholder left with a strong interest in energy savings is government, as overall reductions in consumption contribute to a wide range of policy goals.

Governments have a strong influence on the energy sector everywhere in the world through detailed regulations and in many cases as controlling shareholders in major industry players. Publicly owned utilities generally make investments not only based on strict financial criteria but also take into account any economic benefits created for the whole society.

In markets predominately served by private industry players,

M2M Now - September / October 2015

regulatory mechanisms can create powerful incentives for investment by providing a guaranteed financial return.

Regulatory incentives for energy conservation in the utilities industry In the context of smart energy applications, this means that energy suppliers may have different forms of incentives to promote energy savings among their customers. Public energy efficiency programs like ECO (Energy Companies Obligation) in the UK place legal obligations on the larger energy suppliers to deliver energy efficiency measures to domestic energy users in the areas of carbon emissions reduction and home heating cost reduction. In the US, thirteen states including California and New York have various regulated mechanisms that compensate utilities for lost revenues from decreasing sales due to energy efficiency programs. LRAM (Lost Revenue Adjustment Mechanism) is the most comprehensive scheme, providing utilities with full compensation for verified lost revenues. The right combination of regulatory mechanisms and smart home platforms with energy management can create a compelling value proposition that delivers significant cost savings for the customer.

Smart thermostats drive growth in the smart home market The global market for smart home systems is slowly taking off.

North America is the leading region with an estimated installed base of 10.2 million systems at the end of 2014.

Europe is a few years behind with approximately 3.3 million systems at the same time. A majority of the systems are primarily designed for home security. Energy management and climate control is the second largest application category, available in around a quarter of the smart homes. An average US household spends US$ 2,500 per year on energy, of which heating and cooling accounts for more than 50%. This explains why smart thermostats have acquired a prominent position as one of the main categories in the emerging smart home ecosystem in both North America and Europe. In addition to being a desired feature by consumers, smart thermostats are a major area of interest for utilities, as part of

35

ANALYST REPORT

Homes with smart thermostats 60 50

Millions

40 30 20 10 0 2014

2015

2016 North America

36

2017 EU28+2

2018

2019

2020

Connecting the smart energy eco-system The fragmented nature of the smart energy eco-system results in a complex market for communication providers.

There are three main forms of communication infrastructure in use â&#x20AC;&#x201C; public telecommunications networks, private wide-area networks operated by utilities and private home-area networks operated by smart home providers or consumers.

Among the public telecommunications networks, mobile Installed smart electricity meters by technology type in EU/US 300

250

200

Millions

the energy efficiency programmes as described above. Berg Insight estimates that the installed base of smart thermostats more than doubled in North America during 2014 to reach 2.5 million at the year-end. The market is led by companies such as Nest, Honeywell and Ecobee that have gained traction by marketing their products as point solutions especially in the retail, utility and professional installer channels. Furthermore, smart thermostats are popular as part of whole-home systems and are included in the standard automation packages offered by companies such as ADT and Vivint. In this channel, one of the leading thermostat vendors is Radio Thermostat Company of America. The European market is smaller, with around 1 million households having a smart thermostat in mid-2015. The leading smart thermostat vendor in this region is eQ-3 whose smart radiator thermostats have been installed as point solutions and as a part of whole home systems in around 0.3 million homes. Other successful examples include the smart thermostat programs led by the energy companies British Gas in the UK and Eneco in the Netherlands. British Gasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hive solution had approximately 0.14 million users at the end of 2014, whereas Eneco had signed up around 0.1 million users for its Toon solution. Berg Insight forecasts that the number of households using smart thermostats in Europe and North America will grow at a CAGR of 60.1% from 3.2 million in 2014 to 53.9 million in 2020.

North America will remain the largest market at the end of the forecast period with 32.6 million homes having smart thermostats, whereas Europe is expected to reach 21.3 million equipped homes.

150

100

50

0 2014

2015

2016 PLC

2017 LPW

2018

2019

2020

Cellular

technologies are most widely used. A gradual transition is taking place from traditional 2G to 3G/4G to support larger data volumes from communication hubs and to future-proof solutions for operation in the next 10â&#x20AC;&#x201C;20 years. The hardware cost of 3G/4G modules and limitations in radio coverage remain barriers against adoption that limit the uptake. The emerging LTE-M standard promises to alleviate these issues by reducing the complexity and cost of 4G radios and improving coverage at hard-to-reach locations. By the next decade this will result in rising adoption of LTE for smart grid networking at the expense of other technologies. Private wide-area networking is the most widespread solution for connecting smart meters all over the world. The networking platforms in use are either based on low-power wireless (LPW) or Powerline Carrier (PLC) technology. LPW is most popular in North America where a number of proprietary platforms using the 915 MHz band are in use. In Europe adoption is mostly restricted to the Nordic region where some mesh radio solutions using the 868 MHz band have been deployed. Private LPW networks are however on the rise in Europe, supported by emerging new standards like SigFox

M2M Now - September / October 2015

and LoRA. Both technologies are considered for large-scale smart gas metering projects. Moreover, the UK has decided to deploy a private radio network based on Sensus’ FlexNet long-range radio technology to enable the smart meter rollout in the northern part of the country. Elsewhere in Europe, PLC however remains the dominant smart meter networking technology. A majority of the smart meters deployed in the region in the next five years will have PLC communication based on one of two utility industry defined standards, G1/G3-PLC and PRIME. China has the world’s largest installed base of smart meters using PLC communication, comprising several hundred million devices.

Smart home solutions rely on a range of short-range wireless technologies for connecting devices to a local network gateway. Ultra-low power consumption and minimal networking overhead are two key requirements, dictating the use of streamlined standards and protocols. ZigBee has emerged as the most widely supported standard for smart home networking, with annual shipments projected to exceed 100 million units in 2015. Google and other supporters of Thread hope that their new home networking standard will gain strong traction in the market once it becomes commercially available at the end of this year. There are also wellestablished proprietary platforms such as Z-Wave, which had an installed based on 40 million units in mid-2020. The two wireless standards most well-known to consumers – Bluetooth and Wi-Fi – have certain characteristics that make them less suitable for smart home networking. Wi-Fi is optimised for bandwidth, delivering high data rate at the expense of power-consumption and footprint and Bluetooth is primarily designed for communication at very short distances.

Tobias Ryberg is co-founder of the M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight and a leading international expert on wireless IoT communication and applications. Having covered the M2M/IoT sector for more than a decade, he is one of the most experienced analysts in the industry and author of numerous reports and publications covering the market. He is also recognised as a leading authority on the smart metering market in Europe and worldwide. Mr Ryberg holds a degree from the School of Economics and Commercial Law at Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Berg Insight is dedicated M2M market research firm based in Sweden. We have been specialising in all major M2M/IoT verticals such as fleet management, car telematics, smart metering, smart homes, mHealth and industrial M2M since 2004. Our vision is to be the most valuable source of intelligence for our customers. Berg Insight can offer numerous market reports, detailed market forecast databases and advisory services. We provide custom research tailored to your requirements including focused research papers, business case analysis, go-to-market strategies and bespoke market forecasting.

Our clients include many of the world’s largest mobile operators, utilities, smart metering equipment vendors, vehicle OEMs, fleet management solution providers, wireless device vendors, content providers, investment firms and venture capitalists, IT companies, technology start-ups and specialist consultants. To date we have provided analytical services to 750 clients in 69 countries.

If you have any questions about our market report subscriptions and advisory services or simply want to understand how Berg Insight can help you, don't hesitate to contact us at info@berginsight.com

M2M Now - September / October 2015

37

COMPANY PROFILE

Company Summary Enterprises, M2M Integrators, resellers, and MVNOs all require ubiquitous wireless coverage in the markets in which they deploy. By using GSM, the most widely available technology, AT&T customers benefit from a wider range and lower cost of solutions and devices, smoother network migration path, and easier integration with new and emerging technologies from legacy GPRS/EDGE to HSPA/HSPA+ to 4G LTE and beyond. Moreover, AT&T facilitates deployment with easy to understand billing, a single carrier/single SIM solution, and a global service management platform.

Smart Homes When it comes to the Smart Home, AT&Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Digital Life solution provides customers with an easy to use app to help them manage their homes remotely. With programs to simplify daily routines and text and email notifications, Digital Life is aimed at giving users the flexibility to manage their home from almost anywhere using a smartphone, tablet or computer, covering a wide range of home security and automation functions, such as controlling their cameras, lights, locks, and thermostats or detecting leaks before they can do any damage, all through one integrated app.

Smart Energy In the area of Smart Energy for the connected home, AT&T is also helping modernise the USA's electric grid, working with multiple vendors in the smart grid industry. While smart metering was the original focus at the beginning of the development of smart grid, utilities are now moving beyond the meter and focusing on a whole new set of smart grid applications that will help transform the electric energy industry.

By combining smart meters, sensors and monitors with wireless technology and software, customers and utilities can closely monitor energy use and reduce consumption when the availability of electricity is stretched to its limit and proactively make repairs before an outage takes place. This smart grid model ultimately helps consumers understand the economics of their consumption patterns so they can make intelligent decisions about their power consumption.

The smart grid technology available today from AT&T will also help to enhance reliability and energy efficiency, lower power-line losses and provide utilities with the ability to remotely automate service, improving reliability and providing cost-savings for consumers. In fact, the AT&T wireless network is already enabling the reading of millions of electric smart meters.

For more than ten years, AT&T has developed a set of solution capabilities specifically to serve the needs of M2M customers.

By combining their global network, service delivery and application platforms, with networking expertise, industry alliances and professional services capabilities, AT&T has and will continue to deliver best of breed M2M solutions that fit their customers' needs across a wide range of industries.

PREPARED BY AT&T

38

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

BEECHAM RESEARCH REPORT SMART PARKING: TOWARDS BUILDING SMARTER CITIES

SMART PARKING –

TOWARDS BUILDING SMARTER CITIES CITIES HAVE EXISTED FOR MILLENNIA, EVEN BEFORE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NATION STATES. TODAY CITIES REMAIN CENTRES OF BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY, PRODUCE WEALTH AND INNOVATION, COMPETING WITH ONE ANOTHER AS THEY HAVE ALWAYS DONE. City authorities are therefore concentrating on projects that will make their cities work better in a number of ways through the use of modern communications and information technologies.

Whilst mass transit systems are a vital part of city business and other activities, parking continues to be a major problem for cities of all sizes. Vehicles circulating looking for a parking space are a source of needless congestion, time wasting, petrol or diesel use and exhaust emissions.

optimise their parking pricing and policies.

Sensors can be installed in streets in selected areas of a City, where congestion is at its heaviest, e.g. shopping streets, business districts and tourist areas. Various technologies can then link the sensors in the street with central IT systems, while navigation technologies direct motorists to the nearest empty spaces.

Alleviating parking congestion in the immediate term would therefore: • Reduce air pollution – recognised as being a leading cause of asthma • Reduce congestion • Reduce frustration for motorists and loss of working time • Increase business turnover for merchants in congested urban areas • Increase parking revenue yields • Augment or reduce enforcement personnel as needed.

Specially designed IT systems can then subsequently use the data collected to provide specific information according to the needs of each City. For some cities, keeping traffic moving and avoiding congestion so customers can park, spend money and do business will be the main aim, whilst for others maximising the amount of revenues collected from parking will be their priority. This information may be analysed in conjunction with other information gathered from various sources, gaining a multidimensional view of how the City operates and how people move about in it.

A mixture of the right data and the right policies and interventions could make traffic run more smoothly. In the longer term, information gleaned from smart parking projects would help cities

The list of players needed to deliver a smart parking solution is long. In addition to the technology providers - sensor makers, wireless network designers and operators, and IT systems

developers - essential additional players are needed to complete the delivery chain. These are the City authorities, funding bodies, concession owners, building contractors - not forgetting as well the motorists who will use and pay for their parking spaces. In Beecham Research’s new report – Smart Parking: Towards Building Smarter Cities we highlight the dual challenges in: • Fine tuning the M2M chain components to work well at lowest cost • Helping small companies who offer state of the art technologies to negotiate successfully with large traditional entities such as City departments and public services providers.

Specialised skills are needed to enable these partners to work together. The larger partner can offer the know-how to understand the City’s political processes and handle the inevitable long, drawn out negotiations, whilst the smaller partner brings new ideas, agility and state of the art technologies.

We also explain the different stages involved in deploying smart parking projects and the multidimensional factors that lead to their success – or failure. Finally, the report provides an overview of the status of smart parking projects in the US and Europe.

More information about this study from www.beechamresearch.com M2M Now - September / October 2015

39

OPINION

Working towards the smarter home Whether they – or we - like it or not, the Smart Home vision is about to come knocking on many people’s front doors over the coming years, writes M2M Now’s Alun Lewis. In some cases, it will be as a result of definite decision by the home owner to get connected, attracted by advertising that promises to turn their smartphone or tablet into a means of controlling their home remotely, checking its security status or turning heating on or off. In others, the process will be a little more involuntary, initiated by utilities installing smart meters or insurance companies promising lower premiums. Alternatively, driven by changes in demographics in developed countries, many projects are currently underway to see how ‘Ageing in Place’ principles can be applied, using technology to assist the elderly remain independent – but safe – for as long as possible.

Erret Kroeter, Bluetooth SIG

40

Frost & Sullivan has also carried out consumer surveys, looking at current European market perceptions of this space. Key amongst these was the fact that cost is central, but that while there’s inertia, there’s also evidence that consumers will invest in solutions with tangible benefits, such as reduced energy consumption or enhanced levels of security. In terms of the all-important user interface, smartphones are the favoured control method for connected home solutions with around 60% of respondents opting for this interface, while almost 10% state a preference for wearables. Energy providers are seen as the leading innovators in this space by nearly 40% of respondents and, through their partnering with innovative vendors such as Nest and Hive, some of these firms are developing a position of ‘innovation through association’.

Even the most superficial look at the Smart Home space reveals a – even to the expert – potentially bewildering range of technology options, business strategies and different players in the value chain to engage with. Whether these involve the underlying communications technologies; the protocols, platforms and applications that control and integrate things; or the all-important user interface that simplifies the underlying complexity, we can’t say that we’re not spoiled for choice.

That said, there are huge security implications inherent in opening doors – digital or otherwise – into our homes. There have already been a number of high-profile hacks, such as of baby monitors, and it’s always possible that the Smart Homes market could be killed by security issues. It might become a race to the bottom on price for these devices and the typical mass-market shopper in the aisles of their local superstore won’t have security at the front of their mind.

Home: a place where people – and devices – can talk If we take connectivity first, there’s the usual

▼

Whatever the reasons, its potential looks huge.

Work by Frost & Sullivan’s Visionary Innovation team suggests that the wider Connected Living market will be worth US$730 billion by 2020. The global Connected Home market, combining products and services, will be worth US$230 billion by this time, representing both products and services.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Even the most superficial look at the Smart Home space reveals a – even to the expert – potentially bewildering range of technology options, business strategies and different players in the value chain to engage with

The potential of Bluetooth Smart Mesh is also emphasised by Eric Miller, CEO, Avi-on Labs: “This offers a price point, performance and ease of use never before seen in the residential and commercial lighting controls market. It has the potential for simple setup, requires no centralised gateway, and can be operated from most current smartphones and tablets. We have, we believe, the first line of Bluetooth Mesh products to reach mainstream retail. This consumer-focused approach may finally lay the foundation of widespread adoption and use that has been missing in the industry so far.”

But other options exist, as Dr Berenice Mann, marketing manager, AMIHO Technology explains, “For connectivity of sensors, appliances, cameras and so on, cost impact must be minimal and realistically this limits the options. To gain worldwide sales global standards are needed and this probably means the 2.4 GHz used in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. However power consumption must be kept low – and Wi-Fi is power hungry and unreliable. Bluetooth is cheap and efficient and offers a convenient gateway being available on most Smartphones which gives a familiar and simple user-interface, though Bluetooth’s range is short.”

She continues, “One third option for gateways

M2M Now - September / October 2015

uses the Smart Energy networks already being rolled out. Once this is in existence, longer range wireless technology such as Wireless Meter-Bus the standard for Smart Metering in most of the EU - can potentially be extended to use other devices on the network. Wireless Meter-Bus operates in the range below 1GHz, is designed to be low power and will already soon exist in the majority of European homes.”

Standards for working together

Eric Miller, Avi-on Labs

There are of course also other important standards such as ZigBee and Z-Wave – each with its own Alliance and passionate supporters and investors. Mitch Klein, executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance comments: “There are currently over 1350 interoperable Z-Wave products available in the market, around 35 million Z-Wave-connected devices worldwide, and it’s actively supported by over 325 manufacturers and service providers throughout the world. You’ll find it extensively used in both residential as well as business environments, and is supported by ADT, Alarm.com, AT&T, DSC, GE/Interlogics, Honeywell, Lowes, Verizon, Vivint, and many others. While it already has a high level of security, we’re currently engaged in enhancing that still further. One important security related point is that these devices don’t need outside connectivity to work amongst themselves. We’re also keen to grow adoption amongst smaller companies and have monthly product concept competitions where the winners get a free Z-Wave development kit.”

One complementary perspective on interoperability comes from Scott Lofgren, president of the UPnP Forum: “A key requirement of successful mass-deployed technologies is that they’re easy for customers to use – and that involves harmonisation between growing numbers of vertical segments. Many IoT projects were built vertically with little or no consideration for interoperability with products from other verticals or vendors, leading to fragmentation of the market and limiting consumer choice. To address the vertical challenge, manufacturers need to agree on a limited number of open standards with

Dr Berenice Mann, AMIHO Technology

Mitch Klein, Z-Wave Alliance

▼

acronym soup to wade through. As ever, each of the technologies on offer has a different heritage and some have already been evolving in recent years to adapt better to the connected world of things. Erret Kroeter, VP marketing for the Bluetooth SIG, highlights the recent evolutions of that technology: “In 2010, the community launched Bluetooth Smart, optimised for power efficiency and capable of running for one year on a battery and with a new and flexible apps development environment – that’s helped the recent explosion in wearable devices. The SIG then announced at the start of this year that work’s begun on enhancing Smart with Mesh capabilities to give consumers access to Bluetooth-enabled smart locks, lights, HVAC systems, and appliances.”

41

OPINION

UPnP being one that’s vendor-neutral and provides a foundation to complement a variety of management gateways and device control scenarios.”

set of data that’s available inside the home?

Unless this is done with great altruism, it could either mean that consumers are turned-off by privacy concerns or that potential future revenue streams bypass product developers.”

Choosing the right technology mix

Cees Links, CEO, GreenPeak Technologies

Scott Lofgren, UPnP Forum

Benoit Joly, Technicolor Connected Home

42

Links asks, “When are the big players going to realize that pursuing ‘a winner take all’ scenario is not the best way to proceed, and instead, that they need to come to mutual agreement that benefits all the players, as well as the device makers, the service providers, and most importantly of all, the end users?”

This strategic uncertainty is also echoed by Michael Barkway, consultant, TTP: “Wireless technologies most often use a hub and spoke model but sharing a hub that’s already there may not be the perfect match. Almost every home has a WiFi network, but getting access to this means a complex association process and it’s really difficult to make that user friendly for small devices. WiFi guzzles power too, which is a big problem for battery-powered sensors. Zigbee, Bluetooth and Z-Wave provide ‘standardised’ means of connecting devices, and operate at much lower power levels, but it’s less likely that there’s a usable hub in the home. The product proposition therefore needs to include one, which adds cost to products and risks inviting your competitors in. It’s for this reason that several proprietary networks have emerged – with the cost of another hublet built in, it’s tempting to try to shave cost and exclude competitors by making everything custom.”

Barkway adds, “Against this backdrop, Google’s Onhub could offer much-needed compatibility, but herein lies a different risk for product developers – what is Google’s intent for the rich

Who to join forces with ?

As we move up the value stack, these issues start to become critical. Benoit Joly, SVP Smart Home at Technicolor, says, “Companies looking to integrate their products into the smart home environment have several options depending on their strategy.

They can develop their own ecosystem to control everything - devices connect to their company’s cloud, they use a chosen communication technology, a specific communications protocol and so on. This may give fast time to market and keep customers captive. The problem is that no consumers choose a single brand for every product. Proprietary software also involves increased development costs, reduces flexibility and limits future use cases to this single company.

The second option involves joining a closed ecosystem such as Apple, Google or Samsung which is a better guarantee of future proofing. But license fees could limit deployments, or involve a high hardware bill to be compliant. Additionally, these giants will want to collect and monetise usage data they see as theirs - and not yours.”

“There is however”, Joly adds, “a third solution.

There are a couple of organisations that exist to enable interoperability and offer an alternative to closed ecosystems. Technicolor, for example, is a premier member of and contributor to the Allseen Alliance, a collaborative project at the Linux Foundation that enables the widespread adoption of billions of devices through the open AllJoyn framework and its thriving technical community.

We contributed to the framework by providing our Qeo technology, and our ize smart home solution is based on this. The principle is very simple : A single protocol allows products and apps to expose their capabilities and interact with other devices and apps. Exposing these capabilities leverages third party developer creativity to deliver unexpected and innovative use cases for things we may not have thought of yet.”

Another offering in this context comes from QIVICON, an alliance of leading businesses initiated by Deutsche Telekom (DT) to take the Smart Home forward. It is a cross-vendor platform, which means that consumers can combine the solutions of several providers and

▼

Michael Barkway, TTP

A summary of the current confusion comes from Cees Links, CEO of GreenPeak Technologies, “Device makers don’t know which technology they should embrace. Should they accept the expense and complexity of creating products that support a variety of different platforms or should they wait to see which one is the winner?

Technology solutions like Apple’s HomeKit, Intel and its Open Internet Consortium, Qualcomm’s AllJoyn and others are battling amongst each other while at the same time, existing wireless communication standards like Bluetooth, WiFi , ZigBee and other 802.15.4 based radio technologies are also squabbling, trying to take over each other’s networking territory.”

M2M Now - September / October 2015

A single protocol allows products and apps to expose their capabilities and interact with other devices and apps

already has over 30 partner companies, including EnBW, Vattenfall, RheinEnergie, Miele, Kärcher, Junkers, Sonos, Osram, Philips, and Samsung.

Holger Knopke, VP of DT's Connected Homes explains: “Consumers need a broadband connection and a control device such as a smartphone, a tablet, or a PC. They then need a QIVICON Home Base, compatible components and a partner company’s app in order to control the devices. The QIVICON Home Base receives orders via the app and sends them wirelessly to Smart Home devices such as the central heating thermostat, camera, washing machine or lighting.

Partners can formulate their own business model, address their own customer groups, and in all other respects operate entirely independently in the market. Since summer 2015 the Austrian eww Group has been the first international partner to use this to offer its end customers a Smart Home system with its own brand name. “ As if all this wasn’t a daunting enough environment to enter, there’s then also the hugely important issue of interface design, essential to make all these connected devices as easy to use as possible if ‘ordinary’ people are to happily coexist with – to us now – extraordinary living spaces. Anyone of a certain age will remember the old joke of the 1980s and 1990s – “How do you tell if there isn’t a teenager in a household? – The clock

on the video recorder is still blinking at zero.”

Luigi Mantellassi, CMO of innovative interface platform company dizmo Inc., formed specifically to address the problem of orchestrating human control of multiple complex devices and services through intuitive screens and interactions, sets the scene: “Linking the physical world and the digital world in a consumer’s mind isn’t easy. It’s not just about overlaying old technologies or concepts likes files and databases that people might already be familiar with, or simply making a move to touchscreens. If we carry on the way we have done in the past, we’ll end up with domestic controls that are more reminiscent of an aeroplane cockpit than something that people want to share their intimate lives with. We’ve been working closely with academia to better understand the human factors needed to create from scratch what’s effectively a ‘white space’ that can be populated with ‘objects’ in any way that a developer wants, but in ergonomically and cognitively elegant ways.”

Given the complexity of the whole connected home – and its inevitable potential for going wrong – perhaps we’ll soon see a whole new generation of horror films where it’s the gateway that’s haunted and no longer the house – so enter the digital poltergeist and, even perhaps, the digital exorcist!

Holger Knopke, Deutsche Telekom

Luigi Mantellassi, dizmo

Frost & Sullivan - Top recommendations for firms seeking to gain a share of the Smart Home spoils: Focus on your core: Concentrate on your specific expertise and offer single service solutions. For now, customers prefer professionally installed solutions. While demand for integrated solutions is expected to grow, the current situation demands experts in each area to demonstrate the value of their solutions.

Education is essential: Education about the benefits of specific solutions is still required, most notably about home healthcare solutions where interest is low among the demographic that would benefit most. Simplicity is essential; plug and play is the key, despite convenience not being an important issue now.

Look to the cloud: The penetration of cloud services is low and there’s a potential market to develop this beyond the current entertainment offerings. However, in order to exploit other smart home areas – particularly surveillance – perceptions need to change and security concerns need to be overcome.

Help consumers over the tipping point: Adoption has been slow due to high costs and limited benefit awareness. As respondents are generally happy to pay monthly, service providers can offer initially free installation and hardware, supported by monthly payments.

Plan for the future: Although demand for integrated solutions is weak today, this will change. When smart home solutions are more commonplace, consumers will want to bring them together to derive greater value and improve usability and an open approach to smart home development will pay dividends by allowing functionalities to be augmented over time.

Collaboration and ecosystem development will be key.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015

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PLATFORMS REPORT INTERVIEW Ayla Networks CEO Dave Friedman on agile platforms and fast transformation

PLUS - INSIGHTS INTO PLATFORM STRATEGIES FROM: Beecham Research, Aeris, Numerex, Stream Technologies, Telit and AT&T T H E

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S O U R C E

INTERVIEW

Agile platforms for fast and truly global business transformation While the IoT sector’s never been short of visions, turning those dreams into a working – and profitable - reality can still be problematic. When it comes to choosing an appropriate IoT strategy and the right partner to support them, companies are faced with a potentially bewildering array of different vendor solutions – all currently described under the convenient, if maddeningly imprecise, generic term of a ‘platform’.

It’s against this backdrop that M2M Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, recently sat down with Dave Friedman, co-founder and CEO of relatively new on the scene company Ayla Networks to talk about his company’s approach to resolving the ‘platform’ conundrum. The focus for Ayla is on helping their manufacturer customers make the right choice of platform to enable rapid product and service innovation - not limit it.

M2M Now: Dave, in our initial conversation, you flagged up how inappropriate and imprecise terms and definitions were hampering our sector’s progress and the wider adoption of IoT strategies. Can you expand on this a little?

DF: We all have a natural tendency to draw on the past to explain and interpret the present – and predict the future. This tendency also applies equally to what you might call the institutional memory of companies. As the IoT landscape has expanded rapidly over just the last few years, creating a huge variety of different vendors, old and new, any analysis of their solutions soon shows that they reflect the heritage of both the companies concerned and the executives running those companies.

In the context of the IoT, this presents some serious problems.

For a start and at the most basic level, one primary challenge involves our industry’s use of the word ‘Things’. There’s the dictionary definition of the word – but then your individual definition of ‘thing’ in an IoT setting is going to depend on what industry sector you’re in, what product or service strategy you’re trying to drive for your company, what relationships you want with your own customers and users and so on.

Similar issues apply to the word ‘platform’. For some vendors this automatically implies that there’s some form of controlling or filtering physical gateway sitting out in the

network. For others, it implies that there’s going to be one single, all-encompassing operating system, tying everything together into some seamless utopian vision – and we all know how successful Microsoft has been using this strategy in the mobile sector.

Now, myself and my co-founders are just as guilty as anyone else of drawing on previous experience –though in our case I’d argue that that’s turned out to be serious advantage – especially if you look at our current customer base. We are fortunate to work with the leading manufacturers of everything from home appliances, fans, and fire and safety products to water heaters, water softeners, boilers, and HVAC systems.

M2M Now: So what insights has this previous experience given you?

DF: I think one vital differentiator here is that I and a number of my close colleagues started literally from the ground up – which in our industry starts with the silicon and actual chips that make up the building blocks of today’s connected civilization, rather than from imposing some top-down systems perspective. That’s meant that we’ve seen no need to reinvent or reuse the middleware sort of concepts used by many ‘platform’ focused players and instead looked to link chips directly with the cloud in the most elegant and efficient ways possible. In most cases in the IoT world, you’re not having to deal with huge amounts of data coming in from each individual device and these days we have cloud-based architectures that are implicitly able to handle scalability issues in secure and cost-efficient ways that weren’t there even just a few years ago.

By putting Ayla-enabled ‘hooks’ into a wide range of chips, which then in turn can be easily integrated with an almost infinite range of systems and devices, we’re able to put control of their own destiny back into the hands of product development engineers. For example, in the first days of the company, we met with many leading WiFi chip set manufacturers – Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell and others – who quickly saw what we were trying to do and wanted to work with us. Since then, we’re continuing to broaden our range of connectivity options and now also have added Bluetooth to our portfolio. One early endorsement of our strategy came from Cisco who quickly understood what we trying to achieve and they became an early investor in us. ▼

While clarity is slowly starting to emerge in terms of a more standardised lexicon of functionalities and features, many of the proposed platform solutions currently out there carry with them the individual baggage of each of their vendor owners’ pasts. In practice, this translates into platform development strategies that exploit the vendor’s historic investments in technology and try to adapt them to the needs of present day customers. The end result is all too often a system that’s not truly designed for the environment that it’s going to end up being used in.

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

Your individual definition of ‘thing’ in an IoT setting is going to depend on what industry sector you’re in, what product or service strategy you’re trying to drive for your company and what relationships you want with your own customers and users

DF: At the risk of adding another key differentiator to our list, I’d like to suggest once again that it was our heritage in being closely involved with innovative engineering principles across a number of different sectors that’s also aided us. While there’s a huge amount of hot air expended about strategies to handle disruption and innovation, we clearly saw our role as helping large manufacturers get connected without having to reinvent the wheel each time themselves - so we’ve typically been targeting Fortune 100 type companies – with significant success, as I said earlier.

Every major manufacturer on this planet now recognizes the need for an IoT strategy – the question now lies in how best to implement it.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Everyone who’s ever worked for or with a big corporation knows what a minefield any big shift in strategy creates. Budgets, headcounts and even executive parking spaces all get fought for during the associated disruption and political uncertainty and the end results are often commercially and technologically underwhelming.

A number of our big manufacturing customers did start off by trying to set up IoT teams and departments themselves, but soon found that the skills required were in short supply and the investments and long pay-off periods involved would quickly impact their core focus and their own product R&D. Indeed, in a few cases we did actually go through a ‘bake-off’ with internally developed products – and I’m pleased to say that Ayla won against the incumbent teams, to the longer term good of the customer.

After putting a toe in the water, so to speak, before rapidly pulling it out, manufacturers realise

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M2M Now: Insights like those might be theoretically elegant in engineering terms, but how do they translate into actual practice for your own customers and who are your target markets?

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INTERVIEW

David Friedman, CEO and cofounder of Ayla Networks

that our approach seemed to make obvious sense as an alternative strategy, especially since we’re able to draw on our existing close relationships with the chip manufacturers and deep understanding of their domain. Using our Ayla Embedded Agents, product development teams have access to a fully optimised network stack with the additional protocols needed to connect their devices to Ayla Cloud Services.

Time and cost to market gets cut and, with the ability to ‘hook’ any device, sensor or control interface into the Cloud environment, a customer’s engineers can get on with adding value to their own product portfolio.

M2M Now: So what’s your strategy for application development and integration?

DF: That control side is also obviously important, so complementing our Agents and Cloud are our Application Libraries. Just as our Agents simplify the integration of connectivity with devices, our Application Libraries do exactly the same for those interfaces where the IoT meets its human controllers – via smartphones, tablets or the Web, through both Android and iOS devices.

By putting Aylaenabled ‘hooks’ into a wide range of chips, which then in turn can be easily integrated with an almost infinite range of systems and devices, we’re able to put control of their own destiny back into the hands of product development engineers

We’ve also taken the control aspect one step further, with our Agile Mobile Application Platform (AMAP). Built upon Ayla’s mobile software libraries, AMAP provides pre-made, pretested software code that supports the main features that users expect from mobile app control of a connected device. That includes things like sign-in, registration, device setup and control, password recovery, wireless setup, schedule creation and management, support for push notification and timer setup. It also includes robust security features. Manufacturers of connected products can license AMAP and have around 85% of their mobile app coding and development work already done. All they need to do is specify the 15% of functionality that personalises and differentiates their products and allows them to “skin” the app with their company branding.

AMAP exemplifies Ayla’s fundamental understanding that, sure, a manufacturer could hire teams of engineers and buy tons of equipment and do their own cloud connectivity and some of the bigger manufacturers do just that. But, for the vast majority of manufacturers of the variety of ‘things’ connecting to the IoT, it makes much more sense — from a financial, time and quality standpoint — to focus on the core capabilities of their products and leave the connectivity details to experts like us.

M2M Now: The term ‘cloud’ is another very loosely used word that covers a multiplicity of different flavours and approaches. What role is

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it playing for you and what’s your take on its evolution?

DF: There’s certainly a tendency to resolve every IT issue by saying, “We’ll do that in the cloud” and while that’s true to a certain extent, certain caveats apply – and we’ve taken those caveats into account in developing our own solution.

Most importantly, while the cloud idea sounds nicely global and is often explained that way, it is in fact intensely regional and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a long time yet for some very good political, social and economic reasons – at least by those who decide these things.

When it comes to supporting manufacturers, wherever their HQ is based, Ayla has a probably unique advantage in having our cloud environment operating in multiple regions including China, where we’ve already got over 30 people working. If you’re a Chinese manufacturer looking to enable connectivity to the rest of the world or a Western manufacturer looking to simplify R&D with a partner of manufacturing resource in that country, we can provide a seamless domain.

In Europe, which again for historic geopolitical reasons has a very strict regulatory regime concerning cross-border data transfers, we’re about to launch a dedicated cloud service there this autumn. Once again this simplifies R&D and product testing and verification and enables our customers to build B2C relationships in costeffective and secure ways across an entire continent.

Agility, time to market, risk reduction and simplifying integration and product management from a global perspective are just some of the key criteria for any platform that’s going to be fit for purpose in this second decade of the 21st century. We’d like to think that we fulfill all these needs – and enhance them further through our close links with key industry players like Cisco.

David Friedman is the CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks. Prior to founding Ayla Networks, David served as VP, business development for ZeroG Wireless, a company providing low-power Wi-Fi products to the embedded space. Prior to ZeroG, David was an early employee at Matrix Semiconductor, serving in various sales and marketing roles before Matrix was acquired by SanDisk. In earlier roles, David helped drive pricing strategy at Intel, and was an analyst in the mergers and acquisitions group at Chase Bank.

David has an MBA from the University of Michigan and a BA from Colgate University; he holds five US Patents.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

Connectivity Analytics: more valuable than application analytics?

To say that application or sensor data analytics is a key focus right now in the M2M/IoT market is a statement of the obvious. Everyone – it seems – is focused on the value that can be created by gathering enormous amounts of application and sensor-related data. To be sure, making the most of this requires an in-depth understanding of the individual applications that these streams of data relate to. In other words, to make most sense of the data captured from applications – which will increasingly need to be processed in real time – requires specialist knowledge in that vertical application. What is required in one vertical sector is going to increasingly diverge from requirements in any other vertical.

As a leading connectivity provider in the M2M/IoT market, operating throughout North America and now increasingly in Europe, Aeris has been researching this for some time. They have examined closely the real opportunities for creating new value for their customers from more detailed connectivity – or network – analytics. Their response to this is a new analytics platform called AerVoyance and it offers intriguing new ways of utilising connectivity data.

Connectivity for IoT is not a done deal Those who focus on application data analytics tend to assume that the connectivity is a done deal, that it all works and is

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already a hundred percent reliable, and that the story has moved on to creating value from the applications. Are they building on solid ground though? “Wireless” is not as predictable as “wired” and for the IoT environment that we all envisage, with billions of connections, the vast majority will be wireless connections, not wired. Not all of these will be cellular of course – not by a long way – but wireless nevertheless. The connectivity platform is by no means a done deal for the numbers of connections envisaged and if the connectivity is not stable for millions of devices, then the application data will not be complete and therefore not reliable.

There are many different potential problems that can occur with remote connected devices. If it’s a cellular connection, it might be because the device itself has developed a fault, or maybe its battery is going flat faster than expected. Why would that happen? Maybe the battery needs replacing, or maybe it is getting a weaker signal than it used to get so ▼

So where does that leave connectivity providers, who support all applications from a horizontal perspective but typically do not have the detailed knowledge of operating in any one vertical?

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Aeris passed the point of five million devices connected to its platform earlier this year. That is already a large operation to keep track of but, with the current growth prospects in the M2M/IoT market, that base is expected to double within the next 18 months or so. The company already collects huge amounts of data on a daily

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Aeris passed the point of five million devices connected to its platform earlier this year

What Connectivity Analytics offers Source: Based on Gartner Analytics Framework

Then again, when it comes to individual customers managing their population of connected devices in the field, it is no problem at all when you have just 500 such devices. If one of them stops working suddenly, it is not too difficult to find the time to investigate manually what went wrong and correct it. It gets rather more difficult to do that manually when you have 5,000 such devices and virtually impossible for 50,000. Nevertheless, with the way these applications are now developing and the expectations for the M2M/IoT market generally, the prospect of having to manage 500,000 devices or more is fast approaching. How do you manage that many devices, making sure that problems are diagnosed quickly and dealt with rapidly? It is not remotely realistic to do this manually. It has to be automated both for speed and for cost, but how do you automate that sort of process?

basis on the connectivity events that happen in supporting those connected devices so connectivity analytics – in the shape of the AerVoyance Analytics Suite – is their response to the challenge of providing a rapid and appropriate response when things go wrong.

Figure 1: Deeper Analytics Provides Increasing Value

Figure 1 shows typical differences between Connectivity Analytics, on the left, and Application Analytics, on the right. As this shows, the data required on the right is application specific. It is not useful to collect the same data for each application – it needs to be focused on where the value for the customer is and that tends to be very different for each. On the other hand, the data required on the left for connectivity is common for all applications.

To get a sense of the amount of data available in this category, the Aeris connectivity platform currently collects about one billion connectivityrelated events per day, covering such details as signal strength at any time for each connected device, which cell tower connected to, network

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needs to use more amplification and therefore more power. Alternatively, it might be moving out of range of network coverage completely. If it’s a 2G device, that may be due to the Mobile Operator switching off a particular cell tower that was working fine just yesterday as part of its declared 2G sun-setting. Maybe the data plan being used for the device in its particular location is not appropriate and needs to be revised.

Maybe the particular network the device is assigned to does not have the coverage needed.

Maybe roaming is required, maybe a change to another network. It may be a whole host of things. In all, there are very many different reasons why the connectivity for any one particular device might fail.

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ANALYST REPORT

Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO, Beecham Research

Beecham Research Limited (BRL) is a leading technology market research, analysis and consulting firm established in 1991,specialising in the development of the rapidly-growing M2M and IoT market worldwide since 2001. BRL clients come from all parts of the value chain including components and hardware, networks and connectivity (cellular, fixed, satellite, short/long range), system integration, application development, distribution and enterprise adoption in both B2B and B2C markets.

In general terms type, device type, device location, time of failure, downtime, and so forth. However, while this data Beecham Research’s is common to all connections and all applications, own findings in a some of the detail is more important and relevant for some applications than others. What is variety of recent needed is an analytics engine able to sift through surveys indicate that this huge amount of data to determine where the value lies for any particular user. For Aeris, this is there is an increasing the AerVoyance Analytics Suite. trend towards M2M/IoT solutions Where’s the Value? that involve using larger numbers of connected devices and that these are becoming more mission critical

Figure 2: Connectivity versus Application Analytics

Figure 2 shows a schema for increasing value from connectivity analytics. At the basic level, if something goes wrong then straightforward Descriptive Analytics can report this and present it in the most usable form. Getting to why it happened with Diagnostic Analytics is clearly more valuable and if this can be provided straight away then remedial action can reduce any downtime. This highlights the value of Predictive Analytics – aiming to avoid downtime completely by assessing what is likely to happen. However the greatest value comes from Prescriptive Analytics – how to prevent things from potentially going wrong at all. The figure also shows examples of connectivity issues for each of these stages. This is a move away from the traditional break/fix model of M2M towards an optimisation model of improving efficiency and

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effectiveness of operations – precisely where the IoT aims to go.

There is a clear relationship to value and potential pricing for each of these stages. In the case of Aeris AerVoyance, a freemium model has been adopted where the first stage is free and subsequent stages provide progressively more value at higher prices. The key question is then – what value does reducing the prospect of downtime represent? Ultimately this depends on how critical the application is to the customer.

In general terms Beecham Research’s own findings in a variety of recent surveys indicate that there is an increasing trend towards M2M/IoT solutions that involve using larger numbers of connected devices and that these are becoming more mission critical. Such solutions are moving away from being the closed domain of just the service department and more towards enterprise-wide usage, typically with the application data captured being used for different purposes. Further than that, though, such solutions are becoming more central to revenue generation, not just cost reduction. For most applications, revenue generation is much closer to being mission critical. Downtime, or indeed inefficient operation, will become increasingly costly.

The connectivity of the IoT solution needs to be viewed as part of that, and indeed just as likely to have a problem as any other part, particularly at scale and particularly where higher data speeds are required for real time operations. Aeris Communications is a major connectivity provider in the rapidly-growing M2M/IoT market. The company’s expertise is in connectivity, not in the detail of all the different applications they enable through that connectivity. To deal with that effectively, the company already collects vast amounts of connectivity event data on a daily basis. Using the AerVoyance Analytics Suite then makes sense of that data for its customers, and provides the basis for a whole new revenue stream.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

BEECHAM RESEARCH REPORT –

SMART CITY PLATFORMS: THE INTELLIGENT CORE OF SMART CITIES RIGHT FROM THE START, DEBATE ON SMART CITIES HAS VEERED BETWEEN A VERTICAL SECTOR APPROACH AND A HOLISTIC ONE. THE VERTICAL APPROACH LOOKS AT THE SMART CITY PROJECT WITH A FOCUS ON SOLVING SPECIFIC URBAN PROBLEMS SUCH AS TRAFFIC AND POLLUTION. THESE REFLECT AN M2M-ORIENTED PERSPECTIVE TO PROBLEM SOLVING, DEALING WITH SPECIFIC SETS OF DATA.

As the wider industry itself moves from a vertical to a more horizontal approach, Smart City projects based on the vertical approach are also tending towards the horizontal. In the course of this trend, the need for middleware enabled platforms is becoming greater. Whilst specific M2M service enablement platforms are appropriate for specific applications, adopting a more holistic approach to the Smart City requires an IoT platform that’s able to manage different technologies and devices, so enabling a raft of applications and services for the different systems that make up a city.

A Smart City aims to provide a unified platform for city operations and services. We call this platform ‘The Smart City Platform’. The Internet of Things will be central to this structure, being made up of a

multiplicity of diverse use case applications. In contrast with industrial M2M projects, smart city projects have a far broader range of requirements and application types. This raises new challenges in terms of resources, skill sets and system design approaches.

There is no fully Smart City yet in existence, though there are several projects in progress worldwide. Ultimately, a Smart City will be like an organism sensing all environmental inputs with the ability to connect all these up and produce a response. This response will take the form of delivering up to the minute information and services that citizens need, based on the input received. This in turn allows the city to optimise its resources in a truly holistic manner across various operations such as smart parking, traffic management, and lighting.

As a result - and in contrast to simple M2M implementations - the Smart City infrastructure, powered by a Smart City platform, will bring together a range of applications under the same umbrella into what can be called ‘Smart City spaces’. These ‘spaces’ will be orders of magnitude more complex than simple M2M implementations, and tend towards multiservice environments. They must be of industrial strength,

secure, and able to scale not only to accommodate more data of the same type but also data of different types that come from a variety of sources.

This latest study explores the evolution of smart city projects, their complexity, the success factors involved and the increasing role of Smart City Platforms as essential building blocks that support systemic approaches towards creating intelligent cities.

Source: Beecham Research

By contrast, the holistic or horizontal approach looks at the city as a system of systems, applying instead an Internet of Things (IoT) vision. Here, the city is composed of different systems – transport, waste management, water management and so on. Each system produces different sources of data, sources which can be integrated to create a systemic view of the city, allowing a more broadly systemic approach to city problem solving.

THE SMART CITY PLATFORM

More information about this study from www.beechamresearch.com M2M Now - September / October 2015

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ADVERTISING FEATURE

Supporting the Industrial Internet of Things vision A perspective from Numerex All the current available research indicates that the potential of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is going to be huge. With a vision that encompasses the entire extraction, supply, manufacturing and distribution chain for products and services, the possibility of shaving even just one or two percentage points off costs soon adds up to substantial figures. But how should companies look to exploit this and what product and service building blocks will they need ?

M2M Now recently spoke with Scott Wiley, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Numerex, to discuss how his company’s new nxFAST platform is helping companies achieve even greater efficiencies.

tested, building blocks. That means the customisation required to meet a company’s specific IoT needs is minimised.

This paves the way for rapid deployment — that saves significant time and money.

M2M Now: What are the key building blocks of the Numerex nxFAST platform?

With our 20-year track record of success, Numerex is uniquely positioned in the marketplace to deliver vertically — focused solutions to enterprise customers eager to create enhanced value through IIoT deployments.

The nxFAST IIoT platform includes multiple capabilities, devices and services as its building blocks, including: • nxLINK™, a compact, industrial-grade, ‘intelligent sensor interface’ that harvests data from sensors and wirelessly transmits the data either to a cellular (or satellite) communicator, or to a local, smart, control-panel • nxLOCATE™, an intelligent device which provides enhanced asset ID and tracking of fixed and mobile assets • nxDIRECTOR™, a ruggedised, cloud-ready, industrial, cellular-enabled router/gateway that provides intelligent data-routing and processing at the edge of the network • nxCLOUDCONNECT™, a service that removes data 'chokepoints' and ensures that data from up to 100,000+ devices is aggregated and translated in a common format through a single, seamless, and secure connection using a standard interface M2M Now: Is the platform vertical-agnostic? That is, can the platform be deployed across multiple vertical markets?

SW: Yes, our technology and services, delivered through the integrated, highly-scalable, nxFAST industrial IoT platform, are inherently flexible. Our services and solutions are typically sold on a subscription basis and are in use across more than 50 verticals today. The nxFAST IIoT platform can be easily deployed in manufacturing, materials, and chemical processing settings, or in nearly any other industrial or commercial area of business.

A significant benefit for customers is that the Numerex nxFAST IIoT platform is built upon a set of proven, time-

M2M Now: Can you explain how a horizontal platform like nxFAST makes delivering IIoT solutions easier for Numerex.

What are the benefits to customers?

Most IoT projects are well-suited for a single-source platform or 'Solutions-as-a-Service' approach since a large portion of the development is very similar regardless of the application.

For instance, device management, subscription management, rate plan management, and many other capabilities are foundational requirements for every IIoT solution — regardless of vertical. When we develop an IIoT solution we can use and reuse these foundational capabilities which have been already developed as part of our nxFAST platform. This saves time and money and means that we have a significant portion of the development already “on the shelf” and available to build upon from day one.

With the nxFAST IIoT platform, Numerex can offer a single source for companies seeking the quick deployment of a robust, end-to-end, IoT solution that addresses their unique and particular needs. Whether a company needs an end-toend solution or assistance with a portion of an Industrial IoT deployment, we can help them achieve their goals.

M2M Now: How does the nxFAST platform enable Industrial Internet of Things solutions in particular?

SW: With deep competencies in all three components of IoT solutions: Device, Network and Application, what we call “NumerexDNA®,” we are uniquely positioned in the marketplace to deliver enterprise-class solutions to industrial and commercial customers eager to create enhanced value through IIoT deployments.

Focusing for a moment, on the “D” or “Device” portion of the NumerexDNA equation, every IoT solution requires the capturing of critical data from the equipment being monitored. Numerex has developed a number of purposebuilt devices that can be deployed to facilitate the efficient

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SW: nxFAST™ is an extended, end-to-end platform specifically designed for rapidly building and deploying secure, flexible, and scalable Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions for enterprise-class businesses. Our nxFAST IIoT platform delivers actionable and secure “Smart Data” to customers. This, in turn, enables them to make better decisions, produce new revenue streams, and create operating efficiencies — all of which improve profitability.

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

and effective capturing of critical sensor data.

One such device is the nxLINK. This new device is highly water and dust-resistant for harsh manufacturing and remote monitoring environments. The nxLINK can be attached to equipment to wirelessly send sensor data to a local point for transport either via satellite or cellular network connection for collection, processing, analysis, or input into an application.

Fully programmed and configured to meet user requirements and ready for installation, nxLINK is capable of handling up to four digital or analog sensors simultaneously.

Another useful device is the nxLOCATE. This device features tilt-and-tamper sensors which making it significantly more sophisticated than the average ‘dots on a map’ asset tracking devices currently available. The nxLOCATE incorporates FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) capabilities for remote configuration, and can report information over a cellular network and needs only two commonly-available, AA lithium batteries for twice-per-day reporting for up to four years.

Another device, the nxDIRECTOR, is a ruggedised, cloud-ready, industrial cellular router/gateway featuring a flexible hardware architecture and operating system to provide a solid and intelligent platform for enterprisegrade, user-specific applications while supporting multiple carriers across 3G, 4G and LTE networks.

The wide capabilities of this workhorse-device mean it can be deployed in many different environments and serve a multitude of needs.

Lastly, nxCLOUDCONNECT, which is a data aggregation and translation service, allowing data from many sources to be received and normalised in a way that the data can be easily consumed by other services, dashboards, or applications. This service supports various communication protocols including the Numerexdeveloped, open-source, “Pistachio” protocol as well as MQTT and COAP, a burgeoning standard in the EU. In addition, nxCLOUDCONNECT serves as a plug-and-play subscription management centre for services such as geofencing, reverse geocoding, cell ID, weather, thresholding, pattern matching, blacklisting, two-way voice, tamper detection and more.

As the sensor data is collected and aggregated, companies face the issue of how to best analyse it in order to extract maximum business value.

The nxFAST solution supports multiple “industry standard” tools of ‘Big Data’ analytics including Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, and Amazon Web

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Services. These tools enable companies to store, process and find value from large data sets and, in turn, to make informed, real-time decisions that increase revenues, maximise efficiencies, and reduce costs — ultimately increasing bottom line profits.

M2M Now: How does the nxFAST platform position Numerex for growth and in the future to satisfy customer demand?

SW: The industrial marketplace is ripe with opportunities to create efficiencies and to enable new revenue streams for customers. Many companies realise today that they need an Industrial Internet of Things strategy but really don’t know where to start. Furthermore, the deployment of even a modest IIoT solution is a daunting task for any company — regardless of its level of technical sophistication. Most businesses quickly come to the realisation that they lack the deep IIoT domain-knowledge necessary for success. That’s where Numerex can provide extremely valuable assistance.

With the nxFAST IIoT platform, Numerex can offer a single source for companies seeking the quick deployment of a robust, end-to-end, IoT solution that addresses their unique and particular needs

Numerex’s end-to-end capabilities and the nxFAST platform position us extremely well as companies seek relevant, impactful IIoT solutions.

In particular, the nxFAST platform components make it quick and simple for Numerex to deploy an end-to-end IIoT solution that addresses a company’s evolving needs. Our “one-stop shop” approach and our deep understanding of each of the components of IIoT innovation — Device, Network, and Application — sets us apart. With our open Platform-as-a-Service architecture, we can deliver technology to solve technical problems and break down cost barriers to deployment.

Whether it’s on the factory floor, in the warehouse, at the register, or beyond, our IIoT solutions allow companies to produce new revenue streams and to create operating efficiencies — significantly increasing overall profitability. That capability will always be in great demand.

Scott Wiley, senior VP, marketing and product management, Numerex

Scott Wiley is the senior VP of marketing and product management at Numerex and has been with the company since June 2013. He is responsible for leading the team that manages all of Numerex’s product lines and service offerings and also leads the corporate and product marketing organizations. Before that, Wiley served as director, global product management for UTC Climate, Controls & Security. Wiley also held positions in Product Marketing at GE Security and held multiple key leadership and staff-level positions at both UTC and GE.

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CASE STUDY

iManage™ from Numerex - delivering cost savings to a large manufacturer via a supply chain optimisation solution Numerex’s supply chain optimisation solution, iManage, built on the nxFAST® platform, held the answer

The challenge

The solution

An industry leading manufacturing company with annual revenues in excess of US$37bn uses multiple suppliers to regularly ship containers to various manufacturing locations and to multiple supplier locations. To ensure the manufacturing supply chain process is not interrupted, containers are often required to be shipped at short notice. To keep these high-value assets safe while in transit, the company uses specialised containers to ship parts.

Numerex’s supply chain optimisation solution, iManage, built on the nxFAST® platform, held the answer. Including tracking devices, wireless network connectivity, and a cloud-based application, iManage enables location reporting for the shipping containers and then leverages that information to provide advanced data analytics.

The solution is configured to collect data from the tracking devices on a regular basis and deliver reports, alerts and notifications as appropriate.

Additionally, iManage also provides visibility into SLA compliance and performance against defined business rules and metrics. By employing this approach, the company can better allocate resources, increase production efficiency and prevent the unnecessary acquisition of inventory, carrying costs, and expediting expenses.

The numbers of these containers are limited and so require constant monitoring by plant managers, logistics coordinators and inventory supervisors to ensure their steady availability. If containers are not available, then the supply chain is delayed. Finished product shipments are impacted, causing significant operational and production costs, so reducing margins and revenues. On top of this, tracking containers manually is a time consuming and labourintensive process. The manufacturing company therefore needed greater visibility of the actual activity underway to be able to balance planned activity against real time operational decisions.

The company therefore approached Numerex to find a solution that could maximise their operational efficiency.

The solution was deployed across multiple product lines at the customer’s manufacturing facilities and at key vendor locations.

Notifications via email and SMS text inform stakeholders of critical changes that may require immediate attention. The customer has access to tools that support long-life device management and a flexible system configuration to match their enterprise business rules, metrics and operational processes. Battery life is also managed efficiently based on individual device load.

Results Numerex has enabled the manufacturing company to dramatically increase visibility across its supply chain by identifying optimal product deployment strategies and tactics. iManage has empowered the customer to: • Reduce purchases of new containers • Realise cost savings in resource allocation • Minimise the transportation of components in unauthorised containers • Achieve better asset protection and loss control • Reduce overall operational and transportation costs

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

PLATFORMS

A Platform, by any other name….. such as a Unicorn !

Tricky things, words and phrases. Just as an errant bit of software code can get a computer looping the digital loop, so to speak, so too can inaccurate words cause waste and loss where human minds are involved, writes M2M Now’s Alun Lewis. There will always be problems with finding the right vocabulary where new technologies are concerned, with different companies and communities trying to stamp their conceptual ownership onto these emergent spaces.

In an attempt to try and clarify things, M2M Now asked a number of industry experts to share their own insights into this slough of meaning

Attend any IoT event and you’ll be assailed by corporate signage and collateral, much of it mentioning ‘platforms’. Dig a little closer and it soon becomes apparent that not only does each company have different definitions of this one-size-fits-all-situations word, but even individuals within the same company come up with different interpretations. The OSS/BSS sector in the late 1990s suffered from the same problems and one of the invaluable contributions that the TM Forum made then was helping define a standard lexicon for vendors and customers to use.

In an attempt to try and clarify things, M2M Now asked a number of industry experts to share their own insights into this slough of meaning….

Isabel Chapman, Machina Research

According to Isabel Chapman, principal analyst at Machina Research, “Scratch beneath the surface of the term “IoT Platform” and you’ll find a type of IoT platform - but never a true end-to-end platform as people assume. Companies will offer something like a device management platform, or an analytics platform, or more often, something in the more amorphous middleware category, having to do with applications enablement. I’d like to think of the term ‘IoT platform’ as a continuum of sub-platforms designed to run crucial IoT elements, be it connectivity, devices, applications, analytics or services. A platform provider can offer one or a mix of these, but to date, no one company on its own offers the whole continuum of platforms, or ‘super platform’.”

Mike Bradshaw, ThingWorx

M2M Now - September / October 2015

That use of terms from linguistics – lexicon – and from biology – taxonomy, shows how useful it can sometimes be look at your own speciality with a fresh pair of eyes.

It’s also significant that the British Standards Institute in its work on Smart Cities has

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She adds, "In terms of a definition of the IoT platform, or, as I’ve previously indicated, the continuum of platforms, we at Machina Research have developed a taxonomy, which breaks down different types of platforms, such as: connectivity support, connectivity, device management, service enablement, application enablement and application, analytics, and services platforms.”

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PLATFORMS

We at Machina Research have developed a taxonomy, which breaks down different types of platforms

Michael Chase, Wyless

Iain Davidson, Arkessa

Matt McPherson, Wireless Logic

Guy Kaplinsky, IQP

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actually produced a freely downloadable standardised vocabulary to define that environment for all the different parties who will be involved in this emerging sector, each with their own historic definitions of things – connected or not. Interestingly, the text is also available in Mandarin…

Some of Chapman’s measured scepticism is echoed by other industry players. Mike Bradshaw, EMEA partner director at ThingWorx adds, “As the IoT hits the top of the Gartner ‘hype curve’, more and more vendors are claiming to have an IoT Platform - but not all is what is seems and not all is equal. The term platform is very generic and used to define a base on which others can build solutions. To add to the confusion, some companies refer to a platform when they actually have an application.”

He continues: “A true platform should provide the fundamental building blocks required to build an application, such as low-level services around security, database schemas for time-series, structured and unstructured data, application logic, user experience, event processing and data connectivity to the devices/things. We believe that application enablement platforms such as ThingWorx fit this description.”

But realising this kind of definition in practice can often be difficult for companies whose heritage has only involved one small aspect of the overall whole required today. As Michael Chase EVP global products at Wyless observes, “Most commonly in the IoT space, a Platform is defined as a combination of computer hardware and operating systems with which applications must be compatible. By this broad definition, every IoT company has a ‘platform’ and their platform is of course the best! Our opinion is that in the world of IoT almost everything is fragmented - including all of these platforms, with selection of the ‘best’ platform being as subjective as the best coffee, laptop, or colour of the rainbow.

“That’s why we’re trying to change the definition by looking at it in a modular way, making a platform that can be truly be agnostic to hardware, operators and vertical markets,” concludes Chase. “The recipe for such a defragmented platform includes best in breed offthe-shelf business tools that are used across multiple disciplines like ticketing or CRM, gently folded into a bed of IoT specific billing, reporting, and carrier management tools – along with a healthy dose of vertical-specific functions.”

Iain Davidson, product marketing at Arkessa, takes the original, everyday meaning as his starting point: “If you leave the dictionary aside and try to describe what the word platform means then a great many of us would jot down ‘a base to build on, ‘something to bridge to’ or ‘a vantage point to view from - or some variation. At Arkessa we talk of our M2M Connectivity Management platform and, with only a slight abstraction from the literal meaning, it’s a justified expression. It’s a cloud-based platform which serves as a bridge between the enterprise

business systems and networking domains where physical IoT devices reside; a portal through which IoT connections are monitored, managed and controlled; and a solution which IoT device companies or large enterprise clients can build a secure and resilient IoT strategy around.”

Focusing on one essential IoT building block – connectivity - Matt McPherson, director of strategic partnerships, Wireless Logic, comments: “For IoT/M2M devices that are connected via cellular, the role of a management platform is key.

With some SIM-based estates running into hundreds of thousands of units, keeping a watchful eye on activity, performance and granular costings is vital. When all of a user’s SIMs are on one mobile network and using their management platform, control is relatively easy.

But, when multiple network SIMs are spread across several management platforms, things become more complicated.”

McPherson adds, “It’s highly unlikely that mobile networks will develop a ‘one platform fits all SIMs’ protocol. That’s a key benefit of working with M2M Managed Services Providers who can bridge multiple network platforms, bringing all management into one window. And, as SIMs become more data hungry as IoT applications seek to send/receive more data, the role of ‘one window to multiple platform’ solutions will become even more essential.”

Guy Kaplinsky, CEO at IQP considers yet another issue – how developers and users will create new solutions on these platforms. “Platforms on the market today often need third-party integrations to provide full functionality. Programming skills are required to build complex IoT applications and the coding process can take weeks. Another major weakness with today’s platforms is that they monitor and control data, but can’t factor in human interactions - such as user data input - to integrate with sensors in the app. Additionally, the typical application builder platform doesn’t support Big Data applications that can run on both PCs and mobiles.”

He adds, “That’s why our vision for a platform allows administrators and end users to easily gather, control and monitor sensor data and then create dynamic database tables that include valuable data from human-sensor interaction, monitoring both in an event engine. This approach also makes it easy to design app support for Big Data to run on a PC and also design a lighter mobile version. It also enables anyone to rapidly build code-free mobile, tablet and PC applications, reducing development times by more than 90%.

Machina Research’s Isabel Chapman sums things up from her perspective: “What we’re trying to say is that the Unicorn that is the comprehensive IoT platform doesn’t yet exist as a single, stand-alone offering, but there are many ways that you can carve up offerings that are out there in the platforms ecosystem, and new players and partnerships are being created all the time - which is why it’s such an interesting space in the IoT."

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

Saverio Romeo, Principal Analyst, Beecham Research

Saverio runs research in the areas of M2M, Internet of Things, wearable technologies and smart solutions for vertical sectors. During the last six years, Saverio has focused his technology and market research on the evolution of the mobile industry, primarily looking at European mobile network operators. He has done extensive research and published in areas such as mobile healthcare, smart cities, mobile and wireless innovative services, data analytics in the mobile industry, wearable technologies, smart farming and M2M/IoT in technical and market terms.

The IoT Platform landscape â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 10 ideas to watch

The Early Days of M2M Platforms The early days of the M2M platform market, at the start of the new century, was a limited affair. It was a mainly niche market made up of a few innovators, who were looking ahead believing that the real value of M2M went well beyond basic connectivity and into services and applications able to run on the connected devices.

However, in order to develop those services and applications a middleware platform or Service Enablement Service platform - as defined by Beecham Research, was necessary. The beliefs of these few innovators later became a largely common consensus as M2M adopters began to appreciate the value of connecting assets and then using the data gathered to improve operations, reduce costs, and even identify new business opportunities. Consequently, the number of platforms available in the market increased, rising up the value stack towards data management services and application development suites.

The Current Fragmented IoT Platform Landscape

Evolution of the M2M/IoT Platform Landscape

â&#x2013;ź

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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Source: Beecham Research

As the Internet of Things becomes more real and, with it, the increasing need to monitor different devices that deal with different sources and types of data, so too have platforms continued their evolution. That evolution is now also reflected in a plethora of solutions available in the market, making the overall landscape extremely fragmented. As a result, numbers have grown to more than 200 platforms in the market place in 2015, as shown in the chart below.

Number of M2M/IoT Platforms

250

150 100 50 0

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Year

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ANALYST REPORT There is a vertical-centric group that believes that platforms have to be designed around specific sector and application needs

This rich and complex M2M/IoT platform landscape reflects the different schools of thought that exist on how platforms should evolve in order to support the increasing number of connected devices. These schools of thoughts come from different angles and can be organised into three main groups: the vertical-centric group, the traditional M2M group and the emerging solution group.

Vertical-centric IoT Platforms There is a vertical-centric group that believes that platforms have to be designed around specific sector and application needs. This school revolves around concepts such as smart cities and smart homes. And, in this stream, we can find innovative players such as Living PlanIT. The Industrial Internet movement can also be included in this vertical-centric approach. Platforms in industrial environments are moving from in-house solutions, often unable to properly scale in the wider market, towards industrial platforms such as Predix by GE.

Emerging Views on IoT Platforms There is also an emerging number of platforms coming from a data management and networking system approach. From this perspective, data is at the centre and is exchanged through networking systems and used on edge devices.

Therefore, these platforms put their emphasis on data management services and those services then become the core business. Companies such as Davra Networks, Prismtech, Carriots, Cumulocity, ParStream, Virdata and PubNub are part of this school of thought. They tend to be sector-agnostic, but, most often, with some strong sector specialisation.

Moving up the platform stack, there is an increasing focus on application development platforms offering services and SDKs for developing applications on devices. There are then companies looking at devices and applications in enterprise environments such as BulbThings and, in small-medium sized manufacturing environments, suppliers such as Solair.

Some other platforms look at the value of data and data analytics in order to understand modes of usage and consumption of connected devices in order to provide actionable data analysis. Companies like myDevices and Arraynet are looking in that direction.

Strong attention is also given to single board computers and open source microcontrollers. The increasing growth of IoT developer communities around solutions such as Raspberry PI, Arduino, Black Beagle Board, Banana Pi and others have motivated a number of platform providers to offer services and development kits. Several organisations, coming from different angles, are looking to target those communities such as: Xively, Thingworx, myDevices, theThings.io, and Particle.io.

The Evolution of Traditional M2M Platforms This fragmented landscape is completed by the continued evolution of traditional M2M platforms. These are moving from their traditional offerings designed around connectivity and device management towards the top of the IoT platform stack by also offering data management services and application enablement services. Relevant examples of that move are: Telit IoT Portal, Sierra Wireless AirVantage and Legato, and Aeris with AerVoyance. It is also important to highlight the increasing role of M2M managed service providers in the platform space such as Wireless Logic with SIMPro and KORE with PrismPro.

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10 Platform Ideas to Watch The IoT Platform space is living through a very hectic period and is rich with different offers. At this stage it is difficult, and maybe premature, to predict which approach will prevail.

Probably, there will be coexistence of different platform models reflecting the specific features of sectors and applications. This dynamism can create confusion in the market place, but at the same time, there are several ideas to pay attention to. We have identified 10 platforms that, we believe, imply some interesting directions to watch in the continued evolution of the Internet of Things.

AerVoyance (Aeris): Aeris is a long-term player in the M2M space exploring with AerVoyance offering sophisticated data analytics solutions addressing connectivity management. myDevices (myDevices): myDevices focuses on the analysis of usage of devices by end users providing actionable data in order to enrich marketing activities. It is device-agnostic and with a strong focus on IoT developer communities.

ParStream (ParStream): ParStream is an interesting example of a platform strongly focused on data analytics services.

Particle.io (formerly Spark): A strong example of a platform targeting IoT developer communities, helping them to move from prototyping to the development of scalable IoT devices.

Predix (GE): The result of a substantial investment and longterm research, Predix has changed the pace of the industrial internet market. It will define the future of the industrial internet platform space.

PubNub (PubNub): PubNub translated the concept of content delivery networks into managing IoT devices, supported by strong data management capabilities and attention to IoT developer communities.

Solair (Solair): Solair is an industrial internet platform for small-medium sized enterprises.

UrbanOS (Living PlanIT): Living PlanIT has been working on smart city projects for a long time, offering a holistic approach to smart cities through their horizontal platform called UrbanOS. Telit IoT Portal (Telit): This represents the evolution of traditional M2M platforms towards new services, primarily data management and application development, in order to deal with the complexity of the IoT. Vortex (PrismTech): From a strong distributed network background, Vortex is a solid “data sharing platform” with successful applications in smart city and industrial environments.

Conclusion This article represents only a very short introduction to the broad world of IoT platforms. There are related topics – such as the role of IoT security in the evolution of the IoT platforms – that will require another similar article. IoT Platforms and IoT security are major topics of research for Beecham Research. The third edition of our study on Service Enablement Service platforms will be available soon, including a detailed analysis of the expected further evolution of IoT platforms. We are in the early years, years still rich with enthusiasm, of solutions that will define the future of the Internet of Things and its transformative power across multiple sectors and industries.

For more details on this study please email: ses@beechamresearch.com

M2M Now - September / October 2015

INTERVIEW Alan Tait, CTO, Stream Technologies

Platforms for profitable partnering: the perspective from Stream Amongst the noise and bustle of the recent CTIA show in Las Vegas, Robin DukeWoolley, CEO of Beecham Research, sat down with Stream Technologies’ CTO Alan Tait and CMO Lawrence Latham to get an update on how one of the pioneers of the IoT is now supporting a fast changing and ever more multifaceted marketplace.

LL: The company originally began back in 2000 providing data MVNO services for machines. Now we have become a leader in IoT connectivity across the world, as we expand away from just cellular to include Satellite, Low Power Radio (LPWA), WiFi Unlicensed Short Range (USR), ZigBee, Bluetooth, and 6LoWPAN. In this context, the fact that we actually started with a Software Defined Network (SDN) strategy back in 2005 - a while before other players had really considered this architecture’s potential for M2M and IoT - has become an increasingly

M2M Now - September / October 2015

important asset to both us and our customers.

This is where we’re totally different from other major players – we’re not worried about the telco hardware side and are able to treat network issues as software issues. It’s a journey the whole networking industry’s been making and we were there from the start. The model is much more like an Amazon Web Services approach to IoT connectivity: it’s scalable and plays to our core competencies in network integration and, ultimately, is all about getting networked services up and working quickly and efficiently.

RDW: So what does Stream Technologies actually sell? ▼

RDW: Where is Stream headed right now?

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INTERVIEW

Stream Technologies booth at IoT Evolution, Las Vegas

network operators, solutions providers, enterprises and government, most of who wish to remain anonymous for various reasons

LL: It’s a Platform-as-a-Service - that’s our typical business model. Some bigger operators want this residing in their own cloud and we’re happy to support that, but our preferred business model is PaaS. At the end of the day, we’re ultimately a data routing and transit company – that’s essentially what we do. So it’s all about getting the information from the device to the enterprise, whether that involves an application, a data store or some type of IT service.

AT: We’ve done over 25 different integrations for cellular, plus we’re working with three satellite network operators and a number of mobile radio ones today - to us it’s all just subscriber data coming from a device and going to somewhere in the IoT. While our heritage is in connectivity, we’ve used that to build integration data services and routing capabilities, offering either a model based on Stream directly supporting our connectivity and enterprise customers or, via a carrier such as Digicel, for example, delivering it to their customers, fully supported by us.

RDW: Who are your customers and what can you say about them?

LL: Our customers are network operators, solutions providers, enterprises and government,

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most of who wish to remain anonymous for various reasons. There is however one operator deal we can discuss – that’s the Digicel Group, over 30 companies in all, each operated independently. We did an integration project with Digicel for their cellular network - and competed successfully against Jasper Wireless and Ericsson.

The plan was to do one integration in Jamaica and roll it out this year.

That roll-out went so well we’ve already done two more for the Group and there are more to come.

It’s a very fast process and very easy for us to do, leveraging our existing investment in the right technologies, tools, people, skills and project management disciplines.

RDW: You’re using this CTIA event to promote your IoT-X™ offering – what’s that about?

LL: Essentially we have three key products.

There’s the platform, which we call IoT Xtend.

Then we have our global wireless connectivity offering, which we call IoT Xpand. And, finally, we then have our ecosystem, which is IoT Xlerate.

The IoT Xtend platform is a Connected Device platform which monitors, manages and monetises device endpoints. It includes subscriber ▼

Our customers are

M2M Now - September / October 2015

IoT Xpand enables organisations to expand their global IoT footprint. We have data plans for Cellular, Low Power Radio and Satellite, with WiFi coming soon.

IoT Xlerate is our eco-system for accelerating IoT business rollouts with full-stack end-to-end IoT solutions. This provides certified and preintegrated best of breed solutions with ready-togo integrated monetisable solutions that reduce time to market and particularly shorten time to revenue.

RDW: Can you give me a practical example of what you can do with IoT Xtend that’s unique to Stream?

AT: We can create carrier data network capabilities to extend networks that include other network technologies. For carriers that already have a cellular platform, we can extend that to include additional Cellular, Satellite, Low Power and soon WiFi as well. This avoids having to replace historic investments in current platforms as you can simply use IoT-X to extend platform capabilities. For those networks that do not have carrier facilities such as an OSS/BSS system, we can also provide that, effectively turning us into the enterprise layer that supports all these new technologies.

LL: Let me give you an example - which unfortunately has to remain anonymous for the time being. One of our customers connects gas meters and they’ve built their own private network to do just that. We’re in the process of working with them to convert that to a public network, where they’re the anchor tenant. They then have a number of other companies that have noncompeting applications who also want to use the network. We’re helping that customer commercialise their data network, using IoT-X to do the customer segregation, subscriber management, billing and data routing to make sure that all the customer data for each of those companies goes exactly where it needs to go.

RDW: What are you doing with Low Power networks?

AT: There are two sides to this. There’s connectivity as a service where we may at some point take that service from an existing Low Power network and sell it to an enterprise - but that isn’t really our main focus for the technology.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

What we can provide them with is a platform that can do subscriber management, rating and charging so instead we sell them a service which allows them to commercialise their network. That can be done as a revenue share, an opex or other monetising method.

RDW: So who do you compete with for this?

LL: Stream started out just being a service for MVNOs. But now the platform has become a business on its own that has real value over and above the value of that initial MVNO business. As a result, we compete against market players like Jasper Wireless and Ericsson as mentioned above.

But we don’t only have cellular, we also have satellite, Low Power radio and WiFi, which we’re going to focus on next year.

We can create carrier data network capabilities to extend networks that include other network technologies

RDW: Can you say more about your billing capabilities?

AT: We provide itemised billing, all the way down to an individual message and then any form of billing, abstract and so on. When we started as an MVNO, we couldn’t get the billing from carriers itemised to the level we needed, so we had to build that capability ourselves. We went back to first principles and said: “What do we need to be able to serve our customers?” So we built a provisioning system and a billing and rating engine to deliver precisely what’s required in M2M and IoT. We then built those capabilities up over time to create a highly scalable billing engine. We currently bill Call Detail Records (CDRs) for over 30 different operators, all with very different types of CDR. RDW: How many records would that be on a monthly basis, do you think?

Alan: More than 100 million records per month.

That’s easy enough for us to process and it’s across all the various different networks.

RDW: What happens when connectivity issues occur? What do you do when things go wrong?

AT: We have a trouble ticketing system for managing our own connectivity around that – we inform our customers of any known issues that we have and then at bill time, to confirm that we are actually billing correctly, we look at any specific issues that month that either increase or decrease our subscriber counts at particular points. We’re then able to ascertain whether or not we’re seeing device populations that are working correctly. We are a data driven company, so all our trending and forecasting is done on historical information and

▼

management, billing and data routing and it has a multi-network capability in a single, comprehensive platform.

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We want to make everything simple, with the minimum number of interfaces.

We can take any network, write an interface to it and then present a common way for the customer to interface with that on the other side

known trends. We deal with data and that’s where we’ve always been.

RDW: Say a device stops working – can you identify why it’s stopped working?

AT: Usually yes. It depends on the rules integration that we have with each carrier, but we can if we have access to their engineering information. We can check locations to see if the cell in that area is working and we can check where the last feed was connected to. If we have good enough access to the HLR (Home Location Register), we can see what the actual state of the device is.

RDW: That’s for cellular - what about other technologies?

AT: We have near real-time monitoring of every component and every active device on our network, irrespective of the underlying connectivity link, so we can tell you typically within 5-10 seconds of the individual packets passing over our network what a device is doing.

You can set a trigger that says this device hasn’t communicated for 30 minutes - while it should be providing data all the time - so we can send an alert to the back-end system.

Robin: So, overall, why is your approach different?

AT: We want to make everything simple, with the minimum number of interfaces. We can take any network, write an interface to it and then present a common way for the customer to interface with that on the other side. We get everything onto a single customised screen, with the same common view, so the customer sees whatever they want.

They don’t have to relearn or retrain if technologies or networks change. This holistic approach to an increasingly heterogeneous network environment makes it homogeneous to the end user – which they like. A customer gets this single screen for their device connectivity and at the end of the day that’s what the customers care about: the usability and economics of getting enough reliable data to make the right business decisions.

RDW: Can you bill application usage as well?

AT: Yes. Our rating engine can handle anything we can enter into it. Here’s one example. There’s a

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very large cash and transit tracking application for which we provide the mapping. We work through distributors to provide the hardware; we have a commission structure back to the hardware manufacturer; and we charge for the application plus hardware and the manufacturer through our billing system; plus the position of where those devices are using GSM. We can actually bill from the number, so we give them a bundle of, let’s say, 1,000 GPS locations per month and, if it exceeds that, we charge them per location and we can make that per activated device or pooled across many devices.

RDW: You use the term ‘IoT-scale’ in your collateral. What do you mean by that?

LL: For us, IoT connectivity is a utility-scale software issue. The cost to us of doing a Cellular, Low Power radio, or Satellite transaction is all the same – it’s like Amazon Web Services - so our charging model is drastically different to others in the market. One of the things that’s held back the market is connectivity cost and that’s one reason why the ‘Things’ are still in the millions and not in the billions yet. People are getting excited about Low Power radio because it’s all to do with cost and, to get the billions, the economics have to work. Cellular is the first place it started because those are usually high value assets. Cellular is never going away and it’s going to grow, but Low Power radio solutions are also going to grow very quickly. There needs to be right-sizing of cost for the IoT to flourish.

RDW: So in a nutshell, what’s it all about for you?

AT: I think it’s about our design philosophy in all this and connecting everything together. We want to build the IoT and see it work successfully and cost effectively. That means catering for diversity – but with low overheads and ensuring that the economics don’t impact on the benefits that the IoT can bring. We want to support and enable these billions of connections - but not from a narrow perspective of extracting the maximum short term profit. Success is going to depend on cooperation on a massive scale and, for that to happen, revenues will have to be shared amongst multiple parties, with each making their own contribution to the wider value chain. We’d like to think that our strategy and systems contribute to this vision of equitable partnering in a pretty unique way.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

INTERVIEW

Platforms – simplifying the infinitely complex It’s all too easy for a rapidly emerging technology sector to get caught up in its own particular world. As companies rush to establish their place in what was once just a blank space on the map, aggressively promoting their own particular visions and product strategies, potential customers can become confused by a blizzard of ill-defined buzzwords and marcom hype.

One company – Telit – has recently stepped away from this semantic muddle and has chosen to

M2M Now - September / October 2015

brand its latest solution as an IoT Portal instead.

To get an insight into how important a single word can be in reflecting a wider strategy of product and service evolution and differentiation, M2M Now’s editor, Alun Lewis sat down with Alon Segal, CTO at Telit IoT Services to talk platforms – sorry – portals…

M2M Now: Alon, there’s a lot of confusion about what exactly an IoT platform is – and what it isn’t. Telit’s new offering – stated as combining connectivity management with application ▼

In the IoT community, nowhere is this blizzard blowing thicker and more strongly than in the area loosely known until now as ‘Platforms’. The functions, features and definitions of each company’s particular platform inevitably reflects their own origins and heritage and the decisions that a company made in its early R&D investment cycle, for better or worse, now have to keep up a fast changing world.

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enablement – is interestingly called ‘a portal’.

What’s the reasoning behind this choice of words as positioning in the marketplace?

AS: The communications sector has long had a problem with its vocabulary – it’s what happens when an industry is moving so quickly and many different players, all with slightly different backgrounds, are all targeting the same, as yet, largely still unmapped terrain. There sometimes seems to be a simultaneous mix of fragmentation and conglomeration, with companies trying to work out which features and functions will play best in their markets. The end result is often companies throwing everything – including the proverbial kitchen sink, though it’s obviously connected now and part of the Smart Home – into their sales proposition.

At Telit, we’ve taken a different kind of strategy and one that’s informed by a perspective that’ll be familiar to anyone who was involved in the evolution of the concept of ‘middleware’, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven by companies like IBM and Oracle/BEA. On one hand, you have a set of key building blocks, while on the other, you have the means to ‘glue’ these into place in infinitely flexible ways, with minimal cost and time overheads. It all depends on what particularly you’re trying to achieve with the end system - and you can then also disassemble and recycle them to create new functioning stacks as situations change.

A lot of our competitors have what might be termed a ‘thin’ vision. What we’ve tried to do, building on our historic foundation as a mainly hardware vendor, is redefine the argument, so we see our Portal as providing an umbrella type approach that’s able to do multiple things simultaneously: connect things, manage those things and the data that they produce, and then integrate that distributed infrastructure and information feeds with the wider world of an enterprise’s own business rules, systems and processes. The boundaries of that enterprise’s world, by the way, are also having to become

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much more porous as much of the value of the IoT will only be realised by working more closely with partners. That involves sharing data and information with third parties appropriately, flexibly and securely - and that in turn means that any platform or portal architecture must be able to act as a springboard to the outside world, just as much as it gathers data from it.

M2M Now: What was Telit hearing from its customers that drove you to adopt this strategy and what specific issues is it designed to address?

AS: While each customer is different in their own ways, one key recurring theme was the need for consolidation. While you’ll find many of the same recurring functions and features are needed by companies looking to exploit M2M and IoT services, how these are mixed and matched can vary hugely between enterprises. It’s very much a Pareto Principle sort of world, familiar to many systems environments where 20% of the functions are used 80% of the time – but what functions make up that 20% can vary greatly and will almost inevitably change over time, especially as a customer changes their own business strategy in response to the potential of the IoT. Being able to guarantee smooth scalability is, for example, a particularly critical aspect during the product and service lifecycle for many enterprises.

Some of our customers spoke to us about how in the past they had ended up having to move from one service provider portal to another to monitor and manage their IoT deployments. This not only led to a waste of valuable management time, but it also meant that errors inevitably crept in, synchronising services and client and account relationships was over complex and the friction involved in moving between and coordinating silos slowed any innovation to a crawl.

With our IoT Portal, it’s now possible to aggregate multiple connected device platforms – both from our own portfolio as well as from other Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) or MVNOs (Mobile ▼

The communications sector has long had a problem with its vocabulary – it’s what happens when an industry is moving so quickly and many different players, all with slightly different backgrounds, are all targeting the same, as yet, largely still unmapped terrain

M2M Now - September / October 2015

One particularly important aspect here concerns the recent emergence of Fog computing concepts from out of the Cloud, allowing for the storage and processing of information much closer to the device and the network’s edge than was previously possible

That philosophy is also why we designed the Telit IoT Portal as a single-sourced solution for end-toend platform services that’s capable of working in the kind of complex multi-point deployments that are now occurring across a wide range of markets and regions. It’s powered by our deviceWISE IoT platform – you can’t get away from using that term, however much you try – and enables you to connect, integrate and manage with visibility, control, interoperability and intelligent across an entire global IoT value chain. In contrast to most other ‘solutions’, Telit’s single portal management environment – offers ‘a la carte’ services that can be selected and configured to suit a customer’s particular needs. Clearly the adoption/use of multiple Telit IoT Portal services allows for tighter integration and that means that it also comes with all the advanced services, resources and tools needed to add even more value and functionality by enabling application control, administration, security, data management, device management, connectivity management and connectivity data planning.

M2M Now: There’s a lot of discussion in the industry about the need for IoT solutions to become much more tightly integrated with other enterprise IT systems, especially as new thinking, new architectures and new services appear on the scene. How have you approached these issues with the Telit IoT Portal?

AS: One particularly important aspect here concerns the recent emergence of Fog computing concepts from out of the Cloud, allowing for the storage and processing of information much closer to the device and the network’s edge than was previously possible. We recognised very early on the huge and multi-faceted benefits this could bring to the IoT environment, triaging data flows, greatly increasing scalability especially in areas where huge numbers of sensors and devices are deployed, such as in Smart Cities. The use of Fog principles also supports true real-time dynamic

M2M Now - September / October 2015

analysis and applications that could run closer to the interface between the device and the real world – be that a human consumer, a production line or a vehicle. Recent announcements from Telit show how we’re already successfully partnering with Google, SAP and Microsoft to support our customers using their own cloud and fog services for the heavy lifting of analytics. We’ve also made it as easy as possible for our customers to write and run applications over this infrastructure and unleash some of its huge potential, pulling information in to populate dashboards and management information systems and then sharing out actions and insights to individuals, teams and business partners via web and mobile applications. Standards-based APIs simplify working with almost any device module or microprocessor out there, our development kits enable rapid prototyping while higher level tools and interfaces allow for the easy drag-and-drop design and creation of logic flows at the edge.

Alon Segal, CTO, Telit IoT Services

M2M Now: While we’re busy creating a world in which everything can potentially talk to everything else, there’s obviously the attendant danger of too much openness leading to security failures. The number of high profile data breaches out there seems to be steadily rising each year, leading to the potentially costly erosion of trust in some brands and substantial fines by governments - even IT security specialists themselves don’t seem immune to attack. How does Telit address security issues in the context of your Portal?

AS: Two main thoughts where security is concerned: first and foremost security at Telit is not an afterthought it is ‘baked’ in at all levels – whereas many of the issues plaguing the industry stem from the rush to innovate and get to market and only then try to retrofit security; and, secondly, we’ve always believed that security in depth is the best strategy, adding accumulative layer upon layer, just as it’s always been since mankind first started building his first forts on hilltops with ditches and palisades.

If we’re to realise the many benefits of connected

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Virtual Network Operators - with our web-based account management tools providing all the functions you need.

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INTERVIEW

It’s certainly true that there’s an incredibly diverse set of standards bodies, working groups, consortia, and horizontal and vertical market communities out there

workplaces, utilities, cities, homes and vehicles, we have to start the very basic building blocks that make up those systems and build security in from the ‘thing’, through the network, platform and ultimately the solution.

From the earliest design stage possible – it’s vital to protect the code on individual chips from being hacked during their design, when their layouts are being sent to offshore fabrication plants, and then when they’re actually installed.

Following that, you also have to ensure a secure transport layer – whatever the delivery mechanism. Various threats can come here from once again capturing private data and access codes through to initiating Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to overload sites or spoofing traffic to insert erroneous data.

The platform itself must also ensure role based access controls, authentication and authorisation (who can and should be allowed to talk to the ‘thing’), data validation and session management principles as well as auditing and monitoring capabilities - just to name a very few of the functionalities that Telit provides.

Underpinning this is the ability to securely update code and firmware in the field. Due to the often remote or inaccessible nature of IoT deployments and the often vast numbers of devices that will have been deployed, processes that invoke a truck roll and sending a service tech to patch and update are neither viable nor economical. Building a system that is not OTA updatable is like building a bridge to nowhere, so Telit’s device management capabilities ensure that a system’s security features can stay current.

Telit’s comprehensive security ‘toolkit’ is also available to Telit customers – and plays an important aspect in many of the verticals we serve such as security, automotive, healthcare and many others.

M2M Now: The technology environments that IoT platforms are going to be deployed across are of necessity going to be mostly heterogeneous - and easy interoperability

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demands standards. What’s Telit’s take on current progress in this area?

AS: It’s certainly true that there’s an incredibly diverse set of standards bodies, working groups, consortia, and horizontal and vertical market communities out there – and the number seems to continue growing with new bodies seemingly being formed every few months. While that’s a potentially good thing in that it shows how interest in IoT is now starting to accelerate and reach into previously untouched domains, it also means that companies – both vendors and customers – have to be careful and identify exactly where they’ll get the best return on their investments of time, membership fees and project sponsorships.

That said, you can divide the various industry bodies into what you might call de jure and de facto activities. There are the true standards bodies such as the GSMA, 3GPP, TIA, ITU and IEEE who often have IoT-focused offshoots, ETSI’s creation of oneM2M being a good example – plus other equally powerful bodies that exist in specific vertical markets such as automotive or healthcare, for example. Then, there are also various consortia of varying levels of strategic importance and I’d highlight here organisations like the Industrial Internet Consortium who are focused on sharing best practice amongst their sector members.

Telit plays an important role with many of these groups in a range of advisory and contributory ways, helping sometimes to develop standards and other times sharing best practice or alerting communities to important emerging issues.

The ultimate aim of the IoT sector must be to abstract all the underlying complexities involved into simple, secure - yet effective - solutions that fulfil each customer’s specific needs. Those needs might be intensely personal, involving people’s homes, their health or their communities; they might be vital for society and civilisation as in the case of the utilities, public safety or transport; or they could be commercial and industrial.

Whatever the application area, you could possibly describe our aim as being able to deliver a ‘don’t need to know’ principles type of solution – because it just simply works the way that they want it to!

M2M Now - September / October 2015

ANALYST REPORT

James Brehm & Associates is a consulting and market intelligence firm providing project based and retained strategic advisory services to technology companies worldwide. With a firm focus on IoT, M2M and Big Data Analytics, JBA provides actionable insight and definitive direction to a wide range of organisations including communication service providers, hardware manufacturers, software vendors, OEMs, private equity, and venture capital firms.

AT&T – Your platform for the IoT world Today, there are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people in the world. Over the past year or two, there has been much talk and even more speculation as to how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the world around us. Enterprise organisations of all types are transforming their businesses through the use of technology, by delivering a new generation of connected products, through the collection of contextually relevant information from the integration of sensor technology into their daily workflows, and by providing a higher degree of service through these same connected products and solutions. And as a result, enterprises have the opportunity to develop new business models, explore new customer engagement strategies and potentially develop new revenue streams. It could be said that IoT has the ability to change the rules of business.

Regardless of the IoT application, certain concepts remain constant; enabling real-time data communication between remote machines (endpoints) and central management applications to increase the value of the endpoint to its user. And successful M2M/connected device strategies can involve making a multitude of disparate, geographically

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dispersed devices communicate. But that is just the beginning. This new data must be aggregated, often fed into multiple legacy backend systems, analysed, stored, and acted upon. The data is frequently exported as complex time-series data and then must be transformed into meaningful information in order to optimise business processes.

The Power of Platform At a recent IoT conference, during a panel discussion, an analyst mentioned interviewing over 200 platform companies. And in one of the keynotes by a software company, the term “platform” was used 47 times in less than 30 minutes. And at the same conference, nine companies including hardware, software and service providers competed in “The Battle of the Platforms”. That’s a whole lot of confusion around what a platform actually is.

What is necessary A successful IoT strategy includes a maze of challenges and complex decisions for an enterprise. The IoT value chain is highly fragmented and complex, and integration of different products from several suppliers is often

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A successful IoT strategy includes a maze of challenges and complex decisions for an enterprise

M2M Now - September / October 2015

necessary in order to develop an IoT solution. This makes an IoT implementation time consuming, costly and complex, requiring a deep IoT expertise. While the selection of connectivity partners, pricing plans, and hardware seem like the important things for an enterprise, a whole alphabet soup of acronyms of challenges exist, including activation, billing, certification, device management, engineering, form factor, geography, and many others. So, how do you get started?

How AT&T can help AT&T is a leader in assisting its customers to realise the benefits of the IoT and the hyper-connectedness that it provides. For AT&T to act as a trusted advisor for IoT, it has found the need to look beyond the network, take an end-toend view of the challenges that the enterprise is attempting to solve, and develop ecosystems that engage vendors, including OEMs, network equipment providers, silicon providers, component companies, IT infrastructure vendors, systems integrators, BSS/OSS solutions, storage, and application platforms. Because IoT solutions are complex, AT&T has put together a team that specialises in assisting customers to pull together the right partners from the AT&T ecosystem to realise new and disruptive solutions and work with the various internal AT&T teams involved in bringing customer solutions to fruition.

Having a dedicated experienced IoT team eliminates many of the challenges that can arise during the development and deployment process. AT&T provides support, advice and expertise throughout the customer lifecycle. The team can provide all of the necessary resources to manage all the elements of the M2M process, from ideation through design, development, deployment, and support.

AT&T Control Center Deploying and managing IoT solutions of different types may have unique dependencies and require a high degree of automation and integration with customer business processes.

Standard Telco OSS/BSS platforms for mobile handsets and smartphones are not well suited to activation and management of IoT service delivery and billing. And as the industry matured, AT&T recognised the advanced capabilities of the Jasper Wireless platform. Together, AT&T and Jasper created AT&T Control Center, what JBA thinks is a unique service management platform for IoT solutions.

Control Center integrates the Jasper Wireless platform’s key B/OSS processes to support and accelerate the deployment of connected devices on AT&T’s network. This system offers automated operational management capabilities, including device provisioning, activation, and diagnostic tools and detailed usage analytics and billing reports – managed through an online portal or directly through an API exclusively for IoT customers. AT&T Control Center allows a business the flexibility of self-management and control of service to a single device or thousands of devices directly from the secure online portal.

Application Enablement Platforms and M2X Building applications fast, and getting to market quickly, is the imperative for many of today’s IoT customers. With scalability, security and affordability as keys to success, IoT developers and enterprises alike are looking for ways to build applications that drive business transform by leveraging the data being generated by IoT endpoints. This is where the power of the Cloud becomes important – as service development with the Cloud accommodates faster deployment of services at a lower capital cost, and a shorter time to market.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

In order to take advantage of these things, AT&T not only supports outside Application Enablement Platforms like Thingworx, a PTC company, but also has created M2X, a cloud-based fully managed time-series data storage service for network connected M2M devices and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

M2X is a managed service for developers that enables the collection, analysis and sharing of connected device data. The full M2X suite includes developer tools, API access, testing tools SIMs and connectivity to the AT&T network. What’s more, AT&T is offering Flow Designer, a visual drag and drop tool for IoT applications that aids developers in the creation of prototypes, iterate multiple versions and finally deploy IoT applications. Flow Designer offers nodes that are preconfigured to allow access to multiple data sources, cloud services, device profiles, and communication methods. The integrations are already done for developers, so all that is required is wiring the building blocks together to create IoT applications.

With this offering, AT&T customers can focus on building solutions that add business value and provide contextually relevant information and not on the enabling technologies required to create such a solution. It also provides them the ability to develop, test, and deploy new solutions in a fraction of the time previously required with minimal infrastructure costs.

AT&T Global Network Today’s enterprise customers are more demanding than ever.

And with the “global enterprise” commonplace in today’s society, a successful M2M strategy can involve deployments that must be available – even in transit – globally. Enterprises demand ubiquitous wireless coverage in the markets in which they deploy. For this reason, AT&T designed its network on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard.

GSM is the most popular and pervasive wireless phone technology globally, available in over 280 countries and used by more than four billion people worldwide. By using the most widely available technology, AT&T customers benefit from a wider range and lower cost of solutions and devices, global compatibility with more international roaming options, and a smoother network migration path and easier integration with new and emerging technologies from legacy GPRS/EDGE to HSPA/HSPA+ to LTE. Additionally, AT&T facilitates global deployments with easy to understand billing, a single carrier/single SIM solution, and a global service management platform. With global roaming agreements and hundreds of carrier relationships cultivated over years, AT&T’s M2M single SIM solution bundled with the AT&T Control Center service management platform, device manufacturers and integrators have the ability to provide M2M service in over 200 countries worldwide.

Final word They say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And an IoT partner is only as strong as its platform. By combining the concepts outlined above, we believe that AT&T has created the most robust end-to-end IoT platform today.

AT&T has received numerous awards for excellence in IoT and M2M based on criteria including its vision, strategy, leadership, key customers, partnerships, financial metrics and other qualitative factors. And, in a still very fragmented market, AT&T has the ability to function as a single source for high value IoT services, reducing the friction for its clientele normally associated with IoT deployments.

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INTERVIEW

Bringing mission-critical discipline to the world of the IoT Creating appropriate solutions for the developing world’s needs As we watch an entirely new landscape – loosely called the IoT – emerge under our collective feet, it’s fascinating to watch the early colonisers start to move in.

Just as has happened throughout mankind’s history of migration – and new areas of technology are no different – each of those entrants brings with it its own particular baggage, its ways of seeing the world and its own strategies for carving out their own particular niche in the New World.

For others, like WebNMS, the telecoms software part of the Zoho Corporation, it’s about taking historical strengths and experience – in their case developed in the highly demanding and missioncritical world of telecoms and data network management systems – and fitting these into the equally dynamic world of the IoT.

Prabhu Ramachandran, director of WebNMS

Our decision to stay as a product-focused company gives us the freedom to work with what’s the best for each individual customer

M2M Now’s editor, Alun Lewis, took the opportunity of a visit to the recent IoT evolution event in Las Vegas to sit down with the head of Web NMS, Prabhu Ramachandran, to talk through his company’s approach to the industry – an approach that’s already won a number of awards for its applications, its platform and its innovation.

M2M Now: Prabhu, while WebNMS is very well known in the telecoms software space – you seem to have supplied Network Management Systems and Element Management Systems to most of the world’s biggest network equipment vendors and telecom operators over the last twenty years or so - you’re possibly less well known in the M2M/IoT area. Can you talk us through your entry into this market?

PR: It was around seven or eight years ago that we saw how well our core systems and engineering skills could fit with the kinds of demands that were going to be made on the infrastructure that was starting to evolve to support IoT business models. While different connectivity options were starting to evolve – a process that’s still continuing with LTE-M, for example – it was clear that many of the disciplines and system solutions that were going to be needed had a direct counterpart in existing Network Management, Business Support and Operational Support Systems – our historic speciality.

If you’re already developed ways to interrogate, control and manage the huge numbers of

elements, devices and sub-systems that are needed to make up a reliable telecommunications network – and use that data to help customers bill efficiently and drive their businesses more strategically – then it’s more a question of a shift in market focus than a huge solutions reengineering project.

Many of the basic building blocks are very similar, whatever business or industry sector they’re working in. You need to collect data – location, temperature, energy usage or output or whatever – from sensors and devices, expose it to the appropriate applications and systems in appropriate ways and, most crucially, be able to link those inputs and control and management mechanisms with the higher level business logic that each company relies on.

Now, one vital aspect that we recognised in our strategy was to concentrate on what we – and importantly – our customers - knew that we did best and then partner as appropriate with all the other possible players in an IoT ecosystem such as the System Integrators, Application Developers, Device and Sensor Manufacturers and so on. An implicit part of that strategy is that we also test and validate all the components and elements that might be coming from other sources, ensuring that the end customer, irrespective of who actually ‘builds’ the solution, knows that interconnection and integration won’t result in long delays in time to market or high cost overheads. The OSS/BSS sector knows this danger and has indeed coined the term ‘integration tax’ – and that overhead can sometimes end up being much, much more than the actual hardware and software involved.

M2M Now: You touch on important issue there that’s affecting a lot of the IoT space – the blurring of operational, commercial and technological boundaries and responsibilities that happening out there as many players strive to dominate this new and still emerging terrain.

PR: Exactly – and it’s also an issue that has been reflected in the recent – and not so successful past of the telecoms industry. Firstly most operators and many big vendors tried to impose artificial barriers – the ‘walled garden’ in one ▼

With the IoT, it’s already clear that some players are keen to try and take end-to-end ownership of the entire food chain, using existing brand strength to develop their own ecosystem. Others see benefits in specialising in just one segment, application area or industry sector.

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

context – locking users and customers into one closed, semiproprietary ecosystem. Some vendors and system integrators were able to lock in their operator customers for long periods: great news for their own bottom line, but disastrous for an operator desperately trying to innovate and cut costs.

That blurring – again, just as in the telco space – is also reflected in the ill-defined terms that are loosely used in the industry. Take the term ‘platform’ for example. Suddenly everyone’s a platform vendor – even though that term can mean a multitude of different things. As a result, some companies are having to buy into their vendor’s own specific vision, even though the features, functionalities and architectures may not be ideal a little further down the road as the whole market evolves.

Once again that’s why the rich variety of partnerships that we’ve evolved over the years, both with multinational generic system integrators, local or vertical market specialists and a wide range of device and sensor manufacturers are now paying off. Our decision to stay as a product-focused company gives us the freedom to work with what’s the best for each individual customer – and that approach is going to be essential if the huge potential benefits of the IoT are to be shared with the developing world.

M2M Now: On that last point, while WebNMS supports many businesses in the West, your Indian heritage must be giving you experience that could be invaluable in supporting IoT infrastructure and services in other fast-developing countries. What’s been your experience here so far?

PR: This is a fascinating issue and one that we think presents radical opportunities that can change the quality of life for billions of people around the globe – but with some very

important caveats. Take just one example – that of mobile money or cashless transactions in developing countries, applications that have already revolutionised the lives of citizens and migrant workers in Africa, the Middle East and beyond. India, for example is in the process of giving smart cards to millions of people to start to grow an e-economy that will hopefully begin to eliminate some of the corruption. One corollary of that shift is going to be the need to install and operate thousands of new ATMs – across a country with an often extreme climate, prone at times to floods, heatwaves and power cuts.

An IoT solution is an absolute necessity to support and run such a network cost effectively and efficiently and precisely the same principles apply when you look at other developing country infrastructures such as power distribution grids and green generation schemes such as solar power and windmills, road infrastructure, and cold chain supply logistics. Figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, for example, suggest that around 40 % of India’s fresh fruit and vegetables rot before reaching consumers.

The IoT – implemented in the right way and with a complementary understanding of the wider issues involved in each individual solution – could have a huge role in improving the quality of life for many billions of people across the planet.

Prabhu Ramachandran is director of WebNMS, leading the company’s strategic marketing, product management, business development, customer support and professional services. Prabhu has been delivering service provider software solutions for over 14 years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication from Madras University, Chennai, India.

Radical opportunities that can change the quality of life for billions of people around the globe

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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EVENT PREVIEW

European Utility Week Vienna, Austria 3-5 November 2015 European Utility Week is the annual landmark event for the entire smart utility market, bringing together over 10,000 smart energy stakeholders from both across the continent and from other regions keen to learn from Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience.

The exhibition itself reflects the wide breadth of organisations now involved in the utility sector, stretching from transmission right through to the end-user. Multiple industry players have

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been brought together, forming dedicated exhibition zones that focus on Innovation, IoT, Storage, Energy Management, and Transmission and Distribution to help attendees easily target their specific areas of interest.

Recently, RWE Effizienz, Verbund, ENGIE and Wiener Netzecame came on board as Utility Partners, complementing technology giants such as Siemens, Bit Stew, Huawei, Oracle, Cisco, GE Digital Energy, Alstom, Ericsson, Intel and many, many more. â&#x2013;ź

Combining the best of both specialised conference themes and an exhaustive range of exhibits, European Utility Week has grown to become a vital and truly dynamic environment in which attendees can learn from, network amongst and do business with international decision makers - including representatives from more than 400 utility-focused vendors.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

Strategic conference programme In addition to the exhibition is the notable multi-track Strategic Conference Programme where attendees can learn from over 130 highly respected industry speakers who will be coming together to discuss future trends and their implications for the smart energy industry as a whole.

Visionaries, pioneers, strategists and decisionmakers in the utility space have been coming to European Utility Week for over 15 years to find inspiration, discover new products, share thoughts and learn from each other.

The exhibition itself reflects the wide breadth of organisations now involved in the utility sector, stretching from transmission right through to the end-user

The speaker line-up for this segment of the event includes CEOs, CTOs, CIOs and VPs from companies such as: Austrian Power Grid, RWE, EDP Distribuição, Fortum New Business, Aspern Smart City Research, UrbanDNA, ERDF, Verbund Solutions, EASE, ProKlima, Riga Energy Agency, and Vilniaus Energija.

Hub sessions Also unique to the three day event is free content from the conference programme that is shared with the wider exhibition in the form of Hub Sessions. These sessions include 31 dedicated utility project sessions focusing on real life, first hand experiences across a wide range of utility projects and technology innovation and available for free engage in for visitors who are only attending the exhibition.

Featured presentations in this section will be coming from: EDP Distribuição, Vattenfall Electricity Distribution, Iberdrola, ERDF, Alliander, ENEL Green Power, EDF, E.ON Gas Storage, SEAS-NVE, ESB, British Gas, EnBW, Wien Energie, Services Industriels de Genève.

M2M Now - September / October 2015

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EVENTS

IoT Evolution - Las Vegas A worldwide audience of service providers, system integrators, IoT platform and applications companies, as well as enterprise IoT adopters representing nearly every vertical market attended IoT Evolution Expo held last month in Las Vegas

The event featured over 195 speakers and 4 collocated conferences including a Developers Conference, Connected Home and Building Conference, Connected Transportation Conference and a Fog Computing, Analytics and Data Conference. Keynotes were delivered by AT&T, Cisco, Eurotech, IBM, Spireon and others. The famed NFL football coach, Joe Gibbs, delivered an inspirational keynote on developing winning business strategies.

In addition to the 75 breakout sessions and keynotes, special events included the Battle of the Platforms where winners included: Numerex, PubNub, Systech Corporation and KORE. Fast Pitch sponsored by AT&T featured entrepreneurs presenting IoT solutions to a group of AT&T executives. The winner, Bill Powers of PixController, Inc., presented his IoT

product, RemoteMonitorTM CH which offers real-time continuous methane gas monitoring for the oil & gas industry.

“I think the show has come a long way,” said Syed Zaeem Hosain, CTO, Aeris Communications. “I presented at the very first conference that took place years ago and I am impressed by how much it has grown. Back in the early days there were probably 10 or 12, 15 people in each room and now you see hundreds.” Larry J Wall, CEO, Eurotech, added, “I still think it’s the best event focused on IOT. I see increased engagement, attendance, richness in presentations and topics, and some shift to use-case discussions from just technology layer discussions”.

Tom Davis, CEO of Solair said, “Generally speaking, we noticed a more qualified audience in comparison with other shows. We finally met genuinely interested enterprises thinking about how to make the leap to the digital business.”

Event Name

Event Venue

Event Date

IoT Shifts Conference http://www.iotshifts.com/

Barcelona, Spain

19-20 October 2015

TU-Automotive Japan http://www.tu-auto.com/japan/

Japan

20-21 October 2015

Internet of Things Global Summit www.IoTsummit2015.com

Washington, USA

26-27 October 2015

Futurecom http://en.futurecom.com.br/

Sao Paulo, Brazil

26-29 October 2015

TU-Automotive Europe http://www.tu-auto.com/europe/

Stuttgart, Germany

2-3 November 2015

Asia M2M IoT Business Platform http://m2mbusiness-platform.com/

Kuala Lumpa, Malaysia

3-4 November 2015

European Utility Week www.european-utility-week.com/

Vienna

3-5 November 2015

Connected Fleets http://www.tu-auto.com/fleet/

Atlanta, USA

16-17 November 2015

Apps World http://bit.ly/AppsLondon2015

London, UK

18-19 November 2015

IoT World Forum 2015 http://iotinternetofthingsconference.com

London

18-19 November 2015

Austrailian Utility Week http://www.australian-utility-week.com/

Sydney, Australia

24-25 November 2015

Internet of Things Awards www.terrapinn.com/iotas

London

30 November 2015

IoT Slam 2015 Virtual Internet of Things Conference and Exhibition http://iotslam.com

Virtual Event, in the Cloud

9th December 2015

Wearable Device & Technology Expo http://www.wearable-expo.jp/en/

Tokyo, Japan

13-15 January 2015

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M2M Now - September / October 2015

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