I am part of the M2M global solutions team at a multinational Telecom company and one of our main goal is to follow the trends and make sure that the whole company is moving to the right directions. Being a Telecom company the first thing we want to win is of course the connectivity and also the device platform services. In 2011, 80% of M2M connections were over mobile networks – primarily 2G and 3G –and this percentage will increase to 93% by 2021, because the ongoing costs associated with M2M over mobile networks are generally less expensive than fixed networks. This obviously represents a huge opportunity for Telcos.
However, being a very much sales/customer focused person, I am seriously worried about the usability of todays M2M solutions. This is how an M2M solution -in an ideal world- should create value; capturing data around us via the connected “things”, filtering them to information then analyzing them to create knowledge, so that at the end we will have contextualized wisdom. I think at “creating the wisdom” and “usability” points we are transitioning from M2M to the area of internet of things (IoT). From my perspective the biggest difference between M2M and the IoT is the usability and the contextualized data that can be used to take an action. Have a look at to the video that my project team developed during my master studies at KTH some years ago. This was an excellent M2M project with a very limited usability. So at the end, we got a greatly engineered product with a poor usability. I hope that IoT will drive people/businesses to innovate and create revenue-generating wisdom. Today, many M2M solutions are focused on reducing an enterprise’s costs. But I think in the future, we will see embedded connectivity driving more product and service innovation.
IT - Telecom Business 
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