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

 

 

Since telecommunication providers have already connected most of the people in the world, to continue growing they now need to connect products or "things." This new market, also called M2M, will eventually have many more connections than there are people in the world, so the opportunity is huge. Sprint recognizes this, and we announced an alliance with them recently to make it easy for our customers to quickly build and deploy connected products.

By connected products, we mean things like e-readers, utility meters, cars, TV's, appliances, health monitors, you name it. As Eric Schmidt CEO of Google said recently, "A device that is not connected is not interesting; it is literally lonely. An application that does not leverage the cloud isn't going to wow anybody." With Axeda, devices never need to be lonely.

Emily Green, the CEO of Yankee Group is publishing a new book called "Anywhere". What does she mean by Anywhere? Well, the subtitle is "How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business". I can get behind that, sounds like what we have been saying here at Axeda for years. You can download a sample chapter and learn more about the book at http://anywhere.yankeegroup.com/. She claims that the Anywhere revolution will be bigger than the Internet revolution.

The book will be out in January, and I'll blog more about it once I've read the whole book. The chapter posted is about determining if your company is ready to be an Anywhere company, and there is good advice about how to get started. Worth a read.

The current makeup of data sources for the digital universe is primarily created by humans. IDC estimates that in 2008, individuals created ~70% of the information in the digital universe, comprising phone calls, emails, photos, online banking transactions, and postings on social networking sites, including Twitter.

What happens when everything connects?

In 2005, the International Telecommunication Union issued a research report called "The Internet of Things." The article addresses the next step in "always-on" communications, in which new technologies like smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices. As a result, a new era will be created, one in which today's Internet gives way to tomorrow's Internet of Things.

IDC forecasts that the size of the digital universe will double in size every 18 months for the next five years. The primary driver behind this explosion in the digital universe is -- you guessed it -- The Internet of Things!

 

According to IDC:

"The growth of the numbers and types of devices that aren't the traditional enterprise PCs, servers, storage systems, and network equipment, will drive changes in network and data center architecture and management. Where today, most corporate computing traffic on networks is from the server to client, more and more devices reporting in from the network edge will be reversing that trend. They will also be sending in much more diverse signal voice packets, minutes of video surveillance, and sensor signals that need to be dealt with immediately. All, of course, need security, management, and storage, at least for a period of time."

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, IDC 2009

Birth of the M2M platform market

We are living on the bleeding edge of a new generation of the digital universe that will consist mainly of data passed from machine-to-machine. What has emerged from this explosive growth is the demand for ways to manage, store, and secure this new type of information -- enter the M2M platform.

What makes a true M2M platform different from a standard middleware platform is its ability to handle all types of non-standard and specialized information from any device and any connection. The value of the platform also comes from the ability to transform complex data into an object model that can then have processing, rules, and security applied to it. For small amounts of data, this may seem like a possible do-it-yourself task, but looking at the overall scale may make you consider outside assistance. Axeda has been doing this for years now and we'd like the opportunity to talk to you about how you can capitalize on the Internet of Things Economy.

For more information on the essential elements of an M2M platform, see our:

• Axeda SmartLink Platform White Paper 
• Axeda SmartLink Platform Overview Video

Michele Pelino at Forrester Research recently wrote a blog article on the rise of M2M opportunities, entitled "Vendors: Prepare For The Rise Of Machine To Machine (M2M) Opportunities". Roughly eight years ago, Forrester introduced the concept of the X Internet, made up of Smart sensors, Smart objects connected to Smart services. They had it right, but it just took a while!

Back in 2001, the economics were not right. Wireless data communication was very expensive. And the technology was in its infancy -- we had just introduced the 1.0 version of our product.

Now, with the emergence of platforms for building M2M applications, such as the Axeda SmartLink Platform, Forrester's vision eight years ago is now becoming a reality.

There was a time when Information Technology mostly meant printing reams of tractor-feed paper each day, with human analysts poring over the faint dot-matrix print, looking to yank out some intelligence from the sea of data. My first programming job was for a manufacturing company, in the "data processing" department. The data processing model was a pipeline that took 24 hours to get through a cycle. Collect, process, plan, lather, rinse, repeat.

I spent the summer close-down week toiling away in the factory, wiring the serial-bus readers to a hub that fed into our server. The factory was suddenly "wired." Instead of work-in-progress information being tabulated by supervisors at the end of a shift, management had real-time access to daily factory output. Over several months, the suite of apps that we built to visualize, react to, and filter this incredible treasure of telemetry absolutely transformed our company's approach to production. The CEO made a statement that always stuck with me, "It's tactile to me now, in my hands, I can do something with this information."

Suddenly information didn't come in a lump at the end of the day, but instead streamed through the nervous system of the enterprise, affecting lead times given to customers, dynamically changing shipping pick lists, and dozens of other ways that I'm sure that company is still discovering, 12 years later. All this, from a single source of information.

Sometimes what you need has a hard-line to your network. Sometimes it doesn't. You may be wondering if your transpacific shipment is still in one peice and whether it is going to arrive on time. You may be worried about corrosion on your remote pipeline. The information collected won't do you any good tomorrow. Anything, anytime, and anywhere means getting tactile - in your hands, today.

  

Wireless connectivity to devices lets you hurdle over the constraints you can sometimes face with category 5 cable. GSM or CDMA modems with GPS receivers can cheaply and easily be deployed to monitor assets in remote locations where no wire can reach. Satellite connectivity can reach the most remote locations. OEM equipment can embed sensors and telematics modules to give your customers and your business a zero-configuration solution to remote intelligence. Relocating a wireless, telematics-enabled device is simple a matter of finding a power source, and you can even track it while it moves to its new home!

Smart asset intelligence is not about wireless sensors and GSM modems. It's also not about the Internet. It's about getting devices to be participants in your information universe - in your hands, today.

 

I'm at the M2M Connected World show this week, which is focused on wireless solutions. This year the user presentations have been very impressive, showing how the market is maturing. One of the presentations I sat in on was from AGCO, an $8B manufacturer of agricultural equipment. They did an excellent analysis of all the constituents that will benefit from making their products "Smart".  Here are some examples:

• Customers can track which fields have been treated, schedules for service based on usage, and reports on equipment productivity.
• Dealers are able to provide proactive service, and condition based maintenance, with current location information so they know exactly where the equipment is when service is require.
• AGCO engineers can do remote diagnostics to troubleshoot problems and understand usage patterns to improve product reliability.
• AGCO sales gets information on demo unit usage to help dealers sell the product more effectively.
• AGCO finance uses geofences to be notified when equipment leaves the area where it was leased, indicating a possible theft.
  

Wireless connectivity opens up new categories of products to Smart Services - who would have thought a farm tractor would become a Smart Product?