Let's put it on the table - disconnected products are lame! THEY ARE A PAIN!

They require me to do the heavy lifting. I have to understand their every need, to learn arcane ways to interact with them, and heaven forbid if they have a flaw - I will have to live with it until the end of time.  A prime example: my high-end HD TV that chooses to lose its noodle every time the game get's close! How does it know?

Disconnected products are all little islands - they barely interact with me and hardly ever with each other. I want to corral them, to organize them, to turn them into an army that works with relentless efficiency, doing the things that I want them to do - when I want them to do them...I WANT MY PRODUCTS TO BE CONNECTED!

To be fair, today's products do amazing things, but the avalanche of complexity has caused a great disconnect between the user and the maker of the product. Users want a better product experience. Makers want to differentiate themselves from their competition and sell more product. So, where do we meet?

We meet in the cloud! I want to utilize the infinite possibilities of the cloud to teach my products new tricks! To teach them my likes and dislikes... to get them to play well with others... to evolve...

Instead of putting more complexity into my product - into a platform that can't handle and organize it - utilize connectivity to leverage capability in the cloud and give me the reigns! And here is the amazing thing: I, the consumer, will actually pay for you to give me the reigns! If it creates value, makes my product better, makes it more useful, solves problems for me, I will gladly pay. The iPhone is a perfect example of this. Today, this platform has more than 200,000 applications and has sold more than 1 billion devices. It has changed the game.

Your product, too, can become a cloud-based platform. Medical devices? Yes. Industrial machines? Yes. Consumer products? Definitely yes.  Join me on my crusade. Let's rid the world of lame disconnected products! Connect them today! http://developer.axeda.com.

Dale

A common request we hear is the need for vertical market M2M applications. The thought is, what if there were applications for healthcare, energy, transportation, industrial etc? That would make rolling out M2M applications much faster. The problem is, due to the wide range of application requirements and lack of standards, this is not practical today. Take healthcare for example, what's the commonality between an application for home glucose monitoring and hospital respirators? Or for transportation, can you create a single application for school bus monitoring and a pay as you drive insurance program?

Although you can't create vertical applications for these markets, you can build applications much faster by starting with a platform that takes care of the issues that are common such as managing connectivity, modeling assets, location based services, business rules, and business system integration. Emily Green from Yankee wrote a great blog post about this titled "Opportunities and risks in M2M's maturation"

Connected Products are inherently unique, companies want to create specific applications to differentiate themselves in the market. Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook are both e-book readers, but the applications are unique based on the hardware and the services that each company offers. There are areas were a general purpose application can work across multiple products such as Axeda ServiceLink which is a remote service solution for wired assets, and fleet management applications for some types of vehicles. But in general, the world of M2M applications is very diverse, and is better served by an M2M platform vs. lightweight vertical applications that don't really solve a problem.

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.

Platform pedantry aside, it follows from the above statement that "smart computing" (which is probably best interpreted as a superset of M2M, ubiquitous computing, sentient computing, and next-generation Enterprise Integration), will need a horizontally applicable set of foundational technology that can be used to build vertical applications that are crafted to solve a domain problem.

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!

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!