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.

Last week I attended the WaveForum user conference put on by Digi, our partner for wireless connectivity. I have been following the wireless "M2M" (Machine-to-Machine) market for years, and it always seems to be a year away from really taking off. Back in 2002 we did a demo with Nokia - connecting a printer using a cellular modem. At that time the modem was really expensive, around $200 I think, and the connection was slow and expensive as well.

All of our customers to date have used a wired connection for remote service. The advantage over wireless is that it is essentially free, and the technology is simple and straightforward - TCP/IP over the Internet. To move to a wireless connection, you need to add to your ROI calculation the cost of the modem, the cost of connection, and the cost of complexity.

Thanks to Moore's Law, semiconductors continue to get cheaper and faster which makes the modem and cost of connection cheaper and faster. Digi brings together the hardware along with software works with the Python scripts to help solve the cost of complexity. Axeda Agent technology works with the Python in the Digi ConnectPort Gateways to make connection of assets easy like a wired connection.

Given the decreasing price points and simplicity, M2M wireless connectivity is enabling all sorts of new and interesting applications. At the user conference, I talked to people that were using or planning to use wireless to monitor vending machines, traffic lights, pottery kilns, remote ATM's, Oil production equipment and many others. Some of our current customers are also looking to M2M technology to connect to additional product lines, or to locations where a wired connection is not practical or possible.

So is M2M for remote service still a year away? I'd say it's ready now, and I expect by next year it will have really arrived - you heard it here first!