Machine to Machine : When M2M becomes a must !

The ongoing success of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technologies for the last 10 years, the experts' consensus on today's maturity of these technologies and—on a far more humble scale—the success of our own last year's MtoM trade fair, first edition to be clearly identified as fully M2M, make this technological area completely unavoidable for any organization who's seeking productivity.

Mobile phone operators literally rushed on this very juicy market, that has been estimated at about 200 billion Euros in three years from now by IDATE (Institut de l'Audiovisuel et des Télécommunications en Europe). Telcos are obviously involved in most M2M projects, as wireless communications—ie contact free—are the transportation mean of choice for M2M solutions.

But Telcos are not the only ones: M2M projects also bring in a whole range of different players, from hosting services providers to ISVs, distributors, hardware manufacturers and of course consultants and integrators. However, the market tends to structure itself and the definition of open standards, the ongoing implementation and usage costs cutting, the emergence of more efficient development and integration platforms helped broaden M2M adoption.

Not the least important is the emerging adoption of consumer technologies such as RFID, that eventually will make M2M commonplace and ubiquitous. ABI Research assesses the number of communicating objects globally in use in three years from now at 100 billion.

With this dramatic spreading, a whole lot of fellow-citizen already use M2M technologies without even knowing it. There's plenty of applications of these technologies. Among the ones ordinary people are most likely to come in contact with, we'll find remote maintenance and remote metering. In the latter case, one can measure water, gas, electricity or fuel consumptions and do a whole lot of other things, such assess the air quality or remotely supervise buildings. Urban areas are actually filled with all kinds of sensors. And the purpose of M2M is to link these to a central processing unit in order to consolidate the data or to trigger the ad hoc reaction. Car drivers subscribing to electronic toll collection systems use an M2M solution without even realizing it. The same happens to hands-free parking lots traffic subscribers. On the remote maintenance side, your boiler is maybe doing some M2M and you don't even know about it. The same happens with your printer or your xerox machine. Manufacturers register a much better after-sales reactivity thanks to this kind of solutions, when compared with the traditional manual calls handling, hence a substantial rise in service quality and subsequently in customer satisfaction.

In the B2B applications area, let's talk about fleet management to regulate vehicle flows or remotely meter mileages, goods tracking and delivery itinerary optimization, ongoing medical remote monitoring of patients to avoid having them constantly in a hospital bed or the business domotics, aka immotics.

Beyond the technological innovation, productivity growth, comfort enhancement, customer satisfaction rise and substantial costs reduction are common denominators to every M2M project.
With communicating objects such as RFID tags becoming commonplace, it won't be an overstatement to claim that M2M is about to invade both people's private and professional life.