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.