There's a new Forrester report out about the next cycle of innovation, which Forrester dubs "Smart Computing". In the abstract of the report, I keyed in on an interesting statement:
 
the problems faced by business have very strong vertical industry dimensions, leading to much greater demand for highly verticalized IT solutions... Horizontal technologies -- which today represent about 95% of all technology purchases -- will continue to dominate the technology market... but vertical technology solutions will expand their market share to 25% or so by 2016.

We can expect to see an avalanche of generic and mediocre (generically mediocre?) track-and-trace and asset management apps to try to fill this expanding space. They will be horizontal, meaning that the vendors will try to sell it to you whether you are monitoring wind turbine output or your rental car customers. This is fine if you just want to get the lowest common denominator, generic experience. If you are looking to build an innovative, game-changing solution in your industry, you need a platform that offers a technology stack that is flexible enough to let you focus on your solution's unique value, while launching your development progress forward past the details of connectivity, workflow processing, scalability and security.

The enterprise software community is waking up to the importance of realtime data access, APIs and Web-Oriented Architectures.

2010 should be an exciting year for Axeda.

As I posted earlier this month, we are creating a series of videos on the Axeda Platform.  See the latest editions below:

Integrating Axeda Platform with Oracle & SAP

Axeda Platform - Axeda Wireless Technologies

Axeda Platform - Connecting to Existing Wireless Assets with Custom Codecs

Do you like videos as a way to learn about products, or do you prefer written materials? Let us know!

What is Axeda Connexion 2010? It's the place where you can connect with the community of people using Axeda products to create smart service programs and build new M2M applications. It's also an opportunity to share your success stories with your peers, and learn about how the latest features in Axeda products can make you even more successful. The conference is open to all: customers, partners, press, analysts and people interested in becoming customers.

This year the conference will be in Miami, April 12-14, which will be especially welcoming to those of us coming from northern latitudes. Yesterday was the first day of winter, so I can't wait! Look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

It's been written about before, but it bears repeating: it seems that suddenly every computing product calls itself a platform. In the early days of computing we made programs (when was the last time you met someone that called themselves a programmer?), then at some point that didn't sound good enough, so they became systems, but that started to imply green-screen terminals, so the new object oriented kidz started calling stuff frameworks. More recently, the SOA crowd got us calling stuff services. Now platform has become the term du jour, with everyone from chip makers to graphics designers jumping on the bandwagon.

That's the way it goes, I suppose. It's really hard to summarize in a sound-byte definition, but I'll make a stab:

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is an offering that provides solution developers the necessary services to implement solid applications, where the application execution environment, development and testing tools, administration and configuration, and runtime monitoring are provisioned in the cloud.

Here are some corollaries to that definition:

A PaaS should:

• enable rapid time-to-market for solutions
• massively scale
• provide high availability and fault tolerance
• provide a standard security model
• abstract the physical infrastructure completely from the application
• provide standard services that are tailored to the general domain (i.e. a PaaS for remote asset intelligence should provide strong support for Assets and Communications as first-class concepts)
• provide an integrated model for the application lifecycle: develop, test, deploy, maintain, end-of-life
• have a comprehensive and open API that is consumable by the widest possible set of technologies

That's a really, really high bar. To me, calling something a platform implies an absolute commitment to addressing the above list. That's what it takes to walk the walk.

We have posted a new video on the Axeda Platform, this one is about building applications. Check it out. Instead of a whiteboard, this time we used a screencast to show screens from the demo application and the rules builder. We will be putting out a steady stream of videos covering all aspects of the platform. Bookmark http://www.axeda.com/videos to follow our progress!

Listened to Akamai, EMC, Microsoft (Azure), Iron Mountain, and a few other New England area startups. The most interesting part, for me, was the freeform discussion between a panel and the audience.

To summarize, here were my key takeaways

• Virtualization of computing resources: applications, platforms, middleware, and hardware - will be a juggernaut IT theme for 2010.
• SaaS and IaaS has wide applicability for IT in general.
• Major concerns are, in order: Security of data, availability, performance, compliance. All of those concerns, however, exist no matter where resources are hosted.
• Why trust Amazon to secure your app? Because they are better at it than you
• Why trust SaaS and PaaS offerings to offer high availability, scalability, and security: because deep understanding of the domain and focus on operations makes those vendors the best in the world at hosting their solution.
• The concept of SaaS is well established and no longer a point of debate. I was surprised that there was not more discussion about the economics of SaaS, particularly CMRR and CAC.
• Some discussion around CAPEX for startups - entrepreneurs want low up-front expense and rapid time to market - PaaS brings both of those.
• Concern around vendor lock-in, how to get data out of a system - "Data has gravity".
• Consensus that PaaS is all about APIs and application execution environment, not virtualized hardware.
• Some discussion about whether a startup's choice of cloud vendor could affect their M&A. (would Google want you if you were on MS Azure?).
• Compliance: Microsoft says, "lets just make the agencies that legislate compliance lean about cloud and change their policy".
• The real savings when you move to cloud is on staff.

The ZeitGeist is that cloud computing is the beginning of a fundamental shift in approaching computing resources, and while it may be true that some aspects are not wholly new (SaaS is a lot like the ASPs of the late 90's), the collective mass of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS changes the economics of applications, what applications are, and how collaborating business partners and consumers take advantage of each other's services.

Exciting times.

Agilent Technologies was recently highlighted in Integrated Solutions Magazine for its advanced Smart Service solution - "Agilent Remote Advisor". Agilent is a pioneer in this area, and has done a great job of marketing their solution - as an early adopter of M2M technology, they had few examples to follow. The commercialization of Agilent Remote Advisor has played a significant role in the deployment and subsequent success of the program. Check out this article, and join us for a web seminar (today at noon) featuring Scott Marshall, the Remote Advisor product manager. This is a great opportunity to learn from his experience, and ask him your questions.

When people think of M2M communication, they generally think of cellular networks. It is true that the majority of M2M applications use cellular networks, but even though coverage continues to expand, we all know too well that you cell phone does not work everywhere. For vehicles that move in urban areas, or on major highways, cellular coverage is usually good enough, but what about construction equipment at remote locations, agricultural equipment, or ships?

That's where satellite communication comes into play. Satellites cover the entire globe, so you don't have to worry about a coverage map. For highly remote applications, you can be sure your data will get through. So why don't all M2M applications use satellites? Two issues: speed and cost. Although satellites can transmit large amounts of data - like direct TV, that's primarily one-way and to a large antenna. Two-way transmission to a small antenna has a much lower bandwidth capability than cellular communication. And cost per byte of satellite communication is much more expensive.

But if you have an application with small data requirements, and broad coverage needs, satellite pricing can be very competitive. Another option is dual-mode edge devices. This combines satellite and cellular in a single edge device, giving you the best of both worlds. The Axeda SmartLink platform is designed to handle dual-mode communication, handling the logic to switch between the communication modes based on price and urgency. Basic status information can be saved locally, and then sent when a cellular connection is available, but an emergency condition could be sent immediately by the most economic means available.

Last week, we announced a partnership with ORBCOMM to provide M2M solutions with satellite communications. ORBCOMM also supports dual-mode communication through partnerships with cellular network providers.