M2M Now: ISSN 2046-5882
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THE ‘OTHER’ VITAL SAAS – SIMPLICITY AS A SERVICE A view from Wyless Smart Cities Untangling the strategies behind the urban future
SMART ENERGY
INDUSTRIAL IoT
TELEMATICS
mHEALTH
THE BLACK BOOK
Creating the utilities and grids of tomorrow. Our Exclusive Analyst Report in the September/October issue.
The new interconnected manufacturing environment. See our Analyst Report at: www.m2mnow.biz
Connected Cars and logistics across the new delivery chains. See our Analyst Report at: www.m2mnow.biz
How M2M is improving healthcare efficiency See Our Analysts’ Report at: www.m2mnow.biz
Independent analysis of IoT in 5 Key Industries Read our Analysts’ Report at: www.m2mnow.biz
PLUS: SMART CITIES: Analyst report Inside ! • IoT M&A reaches $14.8 billion in six months • Huawei and Volkswagen collaboration • Telensa on Low Power Smart City infrastructure • The future of analytics • New IoT Threat Map from Beecham Research • Arkessa on Smart City Building Blocks • AT&T on Smart Energy and the Utilities • www.m2mnow.biz
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CONTENTS
22 13 TALKING HEADS
44 LOW POWER RADIO AND THE SMART CITY
IN THIS ISSUE
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EDITOR’S COMMENT Boundaries of all kinds are eroding and a new universe of data’s emerging – so how do we respond?
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MARKET NEWS Huge rise in IoT M&A activity this year; New IoT threat map now available; Connected Cars could cause mobile network traffic jams
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COMPANY NEWS SIGFOX continues expansion; Telecom Personal and Jasper target Argentina; Huawei and Volkswagen collaborate on connecting cars and smartphones
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CONTRACT NEWS & HOT LIST The latest deals for Cyan, ORBCOMM and many more
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PEOPLE NEWS New names at Cambridge Wireless, Kapsch, Masternaut and ZigBee
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PRODUCT NEWS Antenova launches smallest antenna; Samsung announces new IoT modules; Healthtracking merged with glasses
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TALKING HEADS Is Simplicity as a Service the alternative meaning of SaaS? Mike Coffey, CEO of Wyless, talks to M2M Now
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SMART CITIES What are best strategies for bringing intelligence and connectivity to urban spaces?
20 COMPANY PROFILE Farah Saeed of Frost & Sullivan looks at AT&T’s work in the U.S. utility sector
22 EXPERT OPINION Reclaiming the Smart City agenda to create fairer human outcomes - A personal perspective from Dr Rick Robinson, IT director for Smart Data and Technology at Amey 24 FEATURE Infographic on AT&T’s support for next generation utilities 27 M2M NOW ANALYST REPORT – SMART CITIES VS SMART SILOS In this edition’s independent Analyst Report, James Brehm, founder and chief technology evangelist at James Brehm Associates, looks at the current state of this sector 42 EXPERT OPINION Defining the Smart City and developing a deployment plan 44 INTERVIEW Andrew Brown from Strategy Analytics speaks with Will Gibson, CEO of Telensa, about using low-power radio to create smarter cities 48 EXPERT OPINION Andrew Orrock, CEO of Arkessa, explains that the ecosystem required to create smart cities is already largely here 53 CASE STUDY Rally drivers in Tunisia race turn to satellite M2M for safety and tracking in the North African dunes 58 BACK PAGE An editor’s perspective on some of the human issues facing our sector
Cover Sponsor: Wyless is a leading global M2M managed services provider. Its platform, delivered in partnership with the world’s largest network operators, provides secure, reliable communications with wireless devices in over 120 countries. Powerful management tools offer real-time reporting and control over all devices connected to our network. Wyless delivers a comprehensive suite of managed services with unrivalled expertise, professional support and competitive pricing. Wyless enables its customers and partners to deploy M2M applications and services faster, cheaper and more effectively. www.wyless.com
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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COMMENT
The rise of the Digital Doppelganger? …. and no, this isn’t a casting call for Arnie to rise yet again ….. The theme of this issue’s comment page struck me while I was attending PTC’s excellent and thought provoking LiveWorx event in Boston in May. With a heavy focus on the virtuous use that can be made of live data streaming back in from sensors to products that themselves were first born in the digital realm though CAD/CAM, some presenters spoke of the ‘digital twins’ that now bridged the physical and virtual realms. As we move deeper into the IoT era, the role of this ‘Alice Through the Interface’ world can only rise in importance – and its impact will resonate through our lives, both individual and social. Already, Alun Lewis, most of the ‘things’ that editor, M2M surround us also have a Now Magazine presence on the other side of the dark mirror of our computer screens. Anyone who’s recently had an X-Ray, CT or MRI scan will already have a simulacrum of their physical selves lurking somewhere on a server or, more nebulously, in the growing planetary cloud domain. How these digital versions of ourselves and our wider environment – and the analytic tools we use to peer into the Looking Glass – will play out is an implicit theme of this issue’s focus on smart – or possibly not so smart –
cities. In this context, we’re lucky to have a contribution from Amey’s Dr Rick Robinson, a well known thinker and writer in this area, sharing his thoughts on how to reclaim the smart city agenda to create fairer human outcomes. Adding to the debate are pieces from Telensa and Arkessa, while Wyless’s CEO, Mike Coffey, explores the wider and more generic need for simplicity in our M2M/IoT offerings. Finally, we’ve also taken a quick look at what’s underway in the U.S. in our supplement as editions of M2M Now will be distributed at the two major shows – IoT Evolution and the CTIA’s Super Mobility event – with both happening in Las Vegas, slightly later this year. Alun Lewis, editor, M2M Now Magazine
EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Olivier Beaujard, vice-president Market Development, Sierra Wireless
Erik Brenneis, head of Vodafone M2M
Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit
Robin DukeWoolley, CEO, Beecham Research
Andrew Parker, project marketing director, Connected Living, GSMA
Contributors in this issue of M2M Now We are always proud to bring you the best writers and commentators in M2M and IoT. In this issue they include: Farah Saeed principal consultant with Frost & Sullivan’s North America Energy and Power Systems
EDITOR Alun Lewis Tel: +44 (0) 1296 660423 alun@m2mnow.biz EDITORIAL DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Jeremy Cowan Tel: +44 (0) 1420 588638 jc@m2mnow.biz DIGITAL SERVICES DIRECTOR Nathalie Bisnar Tel: +44 (0) 1732 808690 n.bisnar@m2mnow.biz
Andrew Brown executive director of enterprise and IoT research at Strategy Analytics
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cherisse Jameson Tel: +44 (0) 1732 807410 c.jameson@m2mnow.biz
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Dr Rick Robinson IT director for Big Data and smart cities for Amey and UK Government Smart Cities Forum member
Gert Pauwels, M2M marketing director, Orange Business
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, stored, published or © WeKnow Media Ltd 2015 in any way reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher. M2M Now: ISSN 2046-5882
Bill Zujewski, SVP, IoT Marketing & Strategy, PTC
M2M Now - July / August 2015
MARKET NEWS
IoT-related M&A so far this year eclipses all of 2014 According to 451 Research, IoT mergers and acquisitions continue to shatter records with buyers so far this year spending $14.8bn to purchase 39 IoT-related companies, surpassing the $14.3bn spent for 62 such companies in all of 2014. SemiconductorBrian Partridge, related acquisitions have driven the bulk of spending so far in 2015 with ARM, Intel and 451 Research NXP each announcing two or more deals. The largest, NXP’s $11.8bn acquisition of Freescale Semiconductor, was positioned as a consolidation of
leaders that will focus its scale and reach on key IoT growth markets led by connected cars. Other acquirers announcing acquisitions in 2015 include Amazon, ARM, Brocade, PTC, Silver Spring Networks and British Gas. ”While the Internet of Things is still in its infancy in terms of industry adoption, the deal-making accelerates unabated, and we see no end in sight. The IT service and infrastructure leaders of the future will require broad and deep competencies in IoT and those bets are being made now," said Brian Partridge, Vice President at 451 Research.
TWO NEW REPORTS FROM BERG INSIGHT
NEWS IN BRIEF
Wireless IoT devices in Industrial Automation reached 10.3 million in 2014
‘Synched’ lifestyles drive wearables say consumers
According to analyst firm Berg Insight, wireless IoT devices in automation networks will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.2% to reach 43.5 million by 2020. 802.15.4 based standards such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a suit field level in process automation networks while Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the most widespread in factory automation,
with cellular connectivity used for remote monitoring and backhaul communication between plants. The increasing popularity of Ethernet based networks here is one of the key drivers for the popularity of WiFi in such applications. Increased usage of tablets and smartphones in mobile HMI solutions is also an important driver, as well as Bluetooth in automation equipment.
IoT platform revenues will grow to € 2.4 billion worldwide in 2020 Third party IoT platforms will show solid growth in the next few years, with total revenues forecast to grow at a André Malm, CAGR of 32.2% from Berg € 450 million in 2014 to € 2.4 billion in 2020. “These solutions normally required long development cycles and high cost,
with little scalability and flexibility to handle a growing number of devices and evolving functional requirements. Awareness of the product category is increasing at the same time as companies are realising the value of using a third party platform rather than re-invent the functionality in-house,” said André Malm, Senior Analyst at Berg.
Connected cars to cause mobile network traffic jams Machina Research, in a report commissioned by network assurance and analytics company TEOCO, suggests that rush hours could push certain cells to experience a 97% increase in data traffic over the next ten years. Connected cars will be the key driver of this sharp increase in network usage. “Connected cars, as with other M2M devices, don’t behave like smartphones,” says Matt Hatton, founder and CEO at Machina Research. “They represent a very diverse set of challenges to operators through highly varying network traffic patterns at different times of the day.” The report outlines a number of areas that operators must prioritise to cope with the uptake in M2M connections.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Consumers see fitness tracking and faster payments as the most important uses for wearables says new research from WPP media agency Mindshare and Goldsmiths, University of London. Almost a third of respondents were interested in wearables to order goods in advance to save queuing; 38% saw wearables changing heating or lighting preferences on entering a room; and 29% wanted to use wearables to open car doors. Fitness trackers have improved the lives of 76% of current users according to the research, with 50% of smartphone users interested in the prospect of wearables measuring and analysing sleep patterns.
New IoT Threat Map shows extent of challenges The latest IoT Security Threat Map from Beecham Jon Howes, Research is now Beecham available, highlighting the key areas where attacks might originate and where the industry needs to provide better security. The Map was unveiled at an IoT Security Summit run by the NMI (National Microelectronics Institute) at Bletchley Park, home of UK WW2 codebreaking. “Wherever there is a new interface between devices, networks, platforms and users, there is the potential for a new weak link. For example, using Differential Power Analysis (DPA) to ‘listen to’ very small changes in power consumption when different calculations are performed in a chip, it’s possible to work out an encryption key,” says Professor Jon Howes, Technology Director at Beecham.
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COMPANY NEWS NEWS IN BRIEF Arkessa and Nwave partner to make connecting to the IoT easy M2M and IoT managed services company Arkessa is partnering with Jonathan Wiggin, Nwave Technologies, the Managing low power, wide area director, EMEA, (LPWA) wireless network Nwave solutions provider. “We are able to rapidly deploy LPWA networks and solutions, and are excited to partner with Arkessa on projects as diverse as smart agriculture, smart parking, environmental monitoring, social housing and enabling the smart city,” said Jonathan Wiggin, managing director, EMEA, Nwave.
IoT specialist Actility gets $25 million funding led by Ginko Ventures, KPN, Orange, Swisscom and Foxconn The investment will allow Actility to accelerate its go-to-market strategy for ThingPark, its open standard IoT network solution. ThingPark is a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) radio network Olivier Hersent, built on the LoRaWAN Founder, CEO standard. “ThingPark and CTO, Actility provides the technology to connect both long range and low power sensors over unlicensed ISM band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of IoT networks for a wide range of IoT applications,” said Olivier Hersent, founder, CEO and CTO, Actility.
Telecom Personal and Jasper announce availability of IoT in Argentina Telecom Personal, the largest mobile communications company in Argentina and Jasper, the global IoT platform company, have announced a combined solution to deploy, manage and
Sierra Wireless and L&T Technology Services join forces for IoT L&T Technology Services will establish a Legato Lab, a centre of excellence designed to support customers worldwide in developing their IoT applications with the Legato opensource embedded platform built on
Director of KORE Asia Pacific, Thomas Mooney said the partnership will promote the growth of Active Telematics tracking products into new South East Asian markets: “Our global connectivity and experience in fleet tracking has KORE positioned as a world leader. Working with growing companies such as Active Telematics means that we can help locally-based businesses expand their footprints and offerings to meet the growing demands of M2M”.
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Linux from Sierra Wireless. The two companies will jointly market their respective products and services to customers in the automotive, transportation, and industrial markets.
SIGFOX expands its global footprint
Daniel Bachman, CEO, IoT Denmark
KORE partners with Active Telematics to expand into Asian M2M market The partnership will help facilitate connectivity to both satellite and cellular networks on Active Telematics’ GPS tracking devices between Singapore and Thailand, with expansion into other Thomas Mooney, parts of Asia forecast for Director, KORE the future. Asia Pacific
monetise IoT services. Jasper partners with 25 mobile operator groups, so Argentinian business can grow their IoT services beyond Argentina, or foreign businesses can expand into Argentina.
Harri Rautio, CEO of Bttn
Cofely Services, a subsidiary of ENGIE, one of the world’s largest energy providers, is integrating a SIGFOX solution to expand the energy efficiency and metering services it provides for buildings. It plans to connect at least 100,000 objects in France within three years. SIGFOX and IoT Denmark have announced plans to roll out the SIGFOX network in Denmark with network deployment expected to be completed by May 2016. Daniel Bachman, IoT Denmark’s CEO, said, “Demand for SIGFOX’s
low-cost, energy-efficient connectivity is very strong in Denmark, and we are in discussions with several future partners who are eager to begin using the network”. T-Mobile, Blue Cell Network and SIGFOX are bringing an IoT network to the Czech Republic. After a pilot project, the three partners will decide whether to roll out a SIGFOX network across the entire Czech Republic. Bttn Inc. has chosen SIGFOX to expand the reach of its internet buttons, supplementing past GPRS and WiFi technologies. “SIGFOX’s network allows us to build buttons that have better battery lifetime and a much lower cost,” said Harri Rautio, CEO of Bttn. “SIGFOX also has a strong presence in countries like Spain and France, where we already have transportation, elderly care, security and manufacturing customers.”
Huawei and Volkswagen collaborate to connect cars and smartphones Huawei and Volkswagen plan to cooperate on car connectivity, integrating smartphone functions with vehicle-mounted systems to allow drivers to use those functions safely while driving. At the International Consumer Electronics Show Asia in Shanghai, the companies jointly demonstrated a series of apps that allow drivers to use GPS navigation systems, play music, send and receive messages, and make phone calls while behind the wheel. The apps support MirrorLink, an open
technology standard designed to maximise interoperability between smartphones and vehicle-mounted systems. They cover multiple services including phone calls, SMS, navigation, multimedia, and payment that are all centred on smartphones. The first locally produced Volkswagen model equipped with MirrorLink is the Lamando, followed by the also locally produced Golf 7. More models will follow. All imported Volkswagen products from the model year 2016 will be equipped with MirrorLink.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Enabling Global IoT Connectivity
CONNECTING THE SMART CITY SECURE ENTERPRISE CONNECTIVITY GLOBAL COVERAGE LOW POWER WIDE AREA MOBILE BROADBAND 4G, 3G, 2G SATELITTE
hello@arkessa.com • +44 1279 799270
arkessa.com
CONTRACT NEWS
Cyan broadens South African horizons with Adenco Cyan, specialists in delivering mesh-based flexible wireless solutions, has been selected by Adenco Construction, the electrical construction John Cronin, company, as preferred EC, Cyan supplier for smart metering, lighting solutions and emerging, related IoT
applications in South Africa. The companies will collaborate to deliver smart energy solutions that enable the measurement and control of energy consumption, helping to increase energy security and reduce supply costs in the country. John Cronin, Cyan’s executive chairman, said, “The US Trade & Development Agency has forecast
that South African utilities will spend $11 billion on grid modernisation over the next decade. Cyan is focused on delivering smart metering and lighting technology to next generation economies, providing energy companies with the technology to support demand management, as well as enabling consumers to manage their energy consumption effectively.”
Global satellite connectivity for LBX from ORBCOMM ORBCOMM Inc., global M2M satellite solutions provider, has been chosen by LBX Company, the maker of Link-Belt hydraulic excavators, to provide Marc Eisenberg, satellite data CEO, communications for its ORBCOMM Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) telematics application. LBX will use ORBCOMM’s satellite network to enable its
customers to track and monitor their heavy machinery worldwide through its RemoteCARE equipment management tool. “LBX’s selection of ORBCOMM for satellite connectivity affirms our position as the network of choice for heavy equipment telematics,” said Marc Eisenberg, ORBCOMM’s CEO. “LBX joins other major global heavy equipment OEMs already using ORBCOMM throughout the world
that are unlocking significant value when they equip their assets with our M2M network.” “With ORBCOMM’s reliable global satellite coverage, our customers can obtain mission-critical data from their Link-Belt excavators, while operating nearly anywhere in the world, providing real and immediate RoI savings,” said Rod Boyer, vice president of Customer Support for LBX.
THE CONTRACT HOT LIST M2M Now July/August 2015 It's free to be included in The Contract Hot List, which shows the companies announcing recent contract wins, acquisitions or deployments. Email your contract details to us now, marked "Hot List" at <news@m2mnow.biz> Vendor/Partners Aidon Avago B+B SmartWorx Brightstar Cobham SATCOM Concirrus CSR Cyan Econais Ericsson Ericsson Eurotech Globalstar HortonWorks IFAST Ikanos Communications Jasper Kamstrup KORE KORE Masternaut Masternaut Microlise Microlise NEXT Biometrics Group ASA NEXT Biometrics Group ASA ORBCOMM Quake Global Samsung Sierra Wireless Sierra Wireless Sierra Wireless SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX SIGFOX Telensa Telit
Client, Country Skagerak Nett, Norway Broadcom, USA Novotech, USA Kii, China Inmarsat ServicePower Technologies, UK Jasco/GE Adenco, South Africa Cybervision, USA Korea Telecom Volvo Bus Latin America iNebula, Italy FAGOR Electrónica, Spain Harman, USA TIA, USA D-Link, Taiwan Telecom Personal, Argentina KIB-TEK, Northern Cyprus Active Telematics, Malaysia RevX Systems, USA Price and Fretwell, UK Highland Council, Scotland Maritime Transport, UK Tesco, UK Confidential WPG Korea LBX Company, USA Hitachi Construction Machinery, Japan Mybitat, Israel Peugeot Citroën, Europe Accel Networks, USA L&T Technology Services, India T-Mobile, Blue Cell, Czech Republic Texas Instruments, USA TALIS, France Cofely Services, France Bttn Inc., Finland Gorizont, Russia Agnik
Key: AIS = Automatic Identification System
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EV = Electric Vehicle M2M = Machine-to-Machine
Product / Service (Duration & Value) Smart metering Acquisition Industrial wireless M2M/IoT IoT focused partnership Type approval for terminal Partnership for IoT Smart lighting Smart metering and IoT WiFi for IoT partnership IoT and 5G partnership Intelligent Transport Systems Smart objects platform partnership Satellite tracking Connected car analytics Application Identifying Registry LTE chipsets IoT platform Smart meters Global connectivity services Billing and revenue management partnership Telematics services Telematics services Transport Management System Journey Management System 34,000 fingerprint sensors Supply of fingerprint sensors Satellite IoT connectivity M2M devices Smart homes for elderly Connected car device to cloud modules and services Acquisition Joint centre of excellence IoT connectivity Sub-1 GHz RF transceivers Smart city fire hydrant monitoring Smart building monitoring IoT connectivity Smart parking Connected devices collaboration PaaS = Platform as a Service RFID = Radio Frequency Identification
Awarded 6.2015 5.2015 4.2015 5.2015 4.2015 5.2015 5.2015 5.2015 5.2015 6.2015 6.2015 4.2015 4.2015 6.2015 6.2015 5.2015 6.2015 5.2015 6.2015 5.2015 5.2015 5.2015 6.2015 5.2015 5.2015 6.2015 5.2015 5.2015 5.2015 6.2105 5.2015 4.2015 6.2015 5.2015 4.2015 5.2015 5.2015 5.2015 6.2015
SIM = Subscriber Identity Module TTM = Time-to-Market
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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enquiries@telensa.c enquiries@telensa.com om • telensa.c telensa.com om
PEOPLE NEWS
Cambridge Wireless elections: Two new board members added Stephen Unger and Graham Pink
Stephen Unger, Ofcom
They’ll be joining Peter Whale, director of product marketing at Iotic Labs, who was re-elected for a further three years, along with William Webb, CEO of the Weightless SIG and current president of the IET; John Haine, innovation coordinator of Wireless Technology at u-blox AG; Paul Ceely, head of Network Strategy for EE; and Raj Gawera, VP head of the Samsung Cambridge Solution Centre. The Board is chaired by CW founding director, Dr David Cleevely CBE. Steve Unger has been with Ofcom, the UK’s regulatory body, since its inception and has held a variety of senior roles, including Ofcom’s chief technology officer. Prior to joining Ofcom, Unger
worked for several Cambridge-based start-ups and has a Physics MA from Cambridge University and a PhD in Astrophysics from Jodrell Bank. As well as his CEO role at Orbitil, Graham Pink is also vice chair of the UKESF Strategic Advisory Board and was a co-founder of CSR. He has a degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University. Over the last eight years, CW has grown from 70 to over 400 members from all over the world and runs some 19 industry driven Special Interest Groups (SIGs) covering almost every aspect of communications related technologies and their applications as well as supporting areas like academia and big data.
David Brandauer appointed VP Public Transit Kapsch CarrierCom North America
David Brandauer, Kapsch CarrierCom North America
Kapsch CarrierCom has appointed David Brandauer as VP Public Transit CarrierCom North America. Based in Austria, Kapsch delivers intelligent transportation systems and telecommunication networks for rail operators worldwide and has hired Mr Brandauer, who has more than 25 years of experience in public transportation, to develop business in the public transit sector in North America.
Mr Brandauer was most recently COO at BLIC Inc., a leading intelligent transportation systems consulting firm focused on public transportation, and is active in several industry associations, including APTA (American Public Transportation Association), CUTA (Canadian Urban Transit Association) and ITS America (Intelligent Transportation Society of America).
Druv S. Prakash joins Masternaut as CEO
Druv S. Prakash, Masternaut
Masternaut, a pan-European provider of fleet telematics solutions, has appointed Dhruv S. Prakash as CEO. He joins Masternaut from Capstone, a group of executives that works closely with portfolio companies of Private Equity firm KKR & Co., and will focus on leveraging Masternaut’s Connect technology platform to bring innovation and value to the commercial fleet market through the adoption of telematics. Commenting on the opportunity, Mr Prakash said, “The telematics industry is in the early stages of a major trend in connected vehicles and Masternaut
is uniquely positioned to lead the market in technology and service innovation. The Masternaut team and our 24×7 mission critical product support play an important social and environmental role in helping our clients achieve their social responsibility goals. Improving driver and road safety as well as minimising fuel waste and emissions are core to our mission.” He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering, as well as a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering, all from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mark Walters named ZigBee Alliance’s VP of Strategic Development
Mark Walters, ZigBee Alliance
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Ex-chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance, Mark Walters, has been appointed as ZigBee Alliance’s VP of Strategic Development Mark Walters. Walters plans to develop the current branding and standards to increase awareness and understanding of ZigBee technology, focusing strongly on the approaching launch of ZigBee 3.0, a release that aims to help reduce market fragmentation and further promote the suitability
of ZigBee standards for the IoT. In addition, he will craft partnerships and agreements with other organisations to increase interoperability across the IoT. The ZigBee Alliance says that Walters’ extensive experience working in a standards organisation from inception to market adoption makes him the ideal candidate to help guide the continued adoption of ZigBee standards across the IoT industry.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
PRODUCT NEWS The smallest in the world ? New 2.4GHz antenna for consumer apps Antenova Ltd, a UK-based manufacturer of antenna modules for M2M, has announced the Weii, a new ceramic antenna for 2.4GHz, Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee and ISM. Designed specifically for the IoT and M2M markets, and measuring just 1.00mm x 0.5mm x 0.5mm, the company believes it could be the smallest antenna in the world.
The Weii is an omni-directional, SMD mounted dielectric antenna that adds wireless connectivity to small devices such as wearables, headsets, medical devices, PNDs, dongles and sensors and has been optimised to perform well when close to the human body. Antenova is to release three entirely new families of antennas for the growing M2M and IoT markets during 2015.
Eyeware and healthtracking combined VSP Global has announced the development of the first wearable tech prototype to integrate health-tracking technology into a pair of glasses. It features sensor technology housed within a pair of frames that tracks
steps, calories burned, activity time and distance travelled. The device syncs via Bluetooth to a custom application which the wearer can use to monitor their activity in real time. The company is currently working with major academic institutions and is open to partnerships with other companies and start-ups inside and outside the industry. Additional testing and development is already underway, with newer versions of the prototype including more frame designs and additional sensors.
Samsung launches ARTIK – a new open module platform for the IoT The ARTIK platform initially offers three types of modules for companies building connected devices from wearables to industrial applications. The smallest module, ARTIK 1, measures 12mm by 12mm and uses Bluetooth LE connectivity plus a nine-axis sensor for low power connectivity. The ARTIK 5 has a 1GHz dual-core processor, on-board DRAM and flash memory to connect home hubs, luxury wearables and drones. Finally, the high-end ARTIK 10 has an eight-core processor, full 1080p video decoding and encoding, 5.1 audio, 2GB DRAM with 16GB flash memory and connects using WiFi, Bluetooth LE and ZigBee.
3D magnetic sensing from Infineon Infineon Technologies has announced its 3D magnetic sensor TLV493D-A1B6, featuring highly accurate threedimensional sensing with extremely low power consumption in a small 6-pin TSOP package. Magnetic field detection in x, y, and z directions allow the sensor
OPINION
to reliably measure three-dimensional, linear and rotation movements and is aimed at applications like joysticks, control elements used for white goods and multi-function knobs, and electric meters where the 3D magnetic sensor protects against tampering.
SPONSORED COLUMN
The Path to LTE machine type communications LTE represents the future for MNOs and this versatile technology has the potential to deliver significant benefits for the Internet of Things. The efficient use of spectrum reduces the cost of delivering services and LTE future-proofs solutions against earlier generation networks being discontinued. LTE MTC defines a new, low-complexity user equipment category. The only downside is the higher cost of the modules, which is the inevitable result of the cost and complexity of the chipsets.
Alexander Bufalino, CMO, Telit
Vendors will continue to focus on the consumer market, but the announcement that LTE Category 0 has become a 3GPP standard changes the equation. This low data-rate category looks set to create a significant market opportunity for chipset vendors, helped by the fact that the design is significantly simpler, as are other elements of the module. It will be some time before the new chipsets and modules are certified and devices are ready for
M2M Now - July / August 2015
deployment, but Telit is tracking this development very closely and the company is ideally placed to leverage the Cat 0 opportunity. In the meantime, the company has introduced a flat-price, pan-European connectivity service that provides seamless roaming across Europe for a monthly fee of €28. In addition there is a comprehensive range of value-added services. The low fee removes a historic barrier for SMEs. It’s a cost-effective way to enter the market and the functionality of the full service offer will allow them to compete on a much bigger stage. That’s good for the economy — and Telit.
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TALKING HEADS
Mike Coffey, Wyless’ CEO
The ‘other’ vital SaaS – Simplicity as a Service A view from Wyless
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There’s always a danger when you get too closely involved in any new technology movement that you can be accused of ‘having drunk too deeply of the Kool Aid’. For the IoT sector of sectors – an accurate term given its huge and continually growing diversity – those early visions are now turning into commercial reality at a rate that’s startling even to industry veterans. But, as we move out of that early adopter phase and begin to extend the reach and depth of IoT-supported insights, applications and business models, we ourselves need to develop new ways of doing business and new products and services if we’re to help our customers achieve their own ends.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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TALKING HEADS
Mike Coffey joined Wyless in August of 2014 as president and COO and was later made CEO. He began his career as a technologist with hands on roles spanning software development and networks then spent the last decade in executive management roles in technology-enabled companies. His experience includes start-up to high revenue to public companies spanning SaaS, online technology, and niche business models.
Finding ways of doing this was a recurring theme when M2M Now’s Alun Lewis recently sat down to talk with Mike Coffey who took on the role of president and CEO at Wyless towards the end of 2014. M2M Now: Mike, before we go on to talk technology and your own aims and ambitions for Wyless, you mentioned the need for the IoT sector to recognise the substantial changes that were underway in the marketplace itself and adapt accordingly. MC: Indeed. We’re all familiar with the inevitable hype cycles that have infested each new technological revolution – but with the IoT we’re trying to be subtly different. Yes, there is hype, but it’s our collective job to try and cut through that and come up with solutions that really do solve the customer’s problems in appropriate and cost-effective ways – and not just deploy technology because it’s there and it’s on their strategic checklist. In this context, it’s been interesting to see how the market’s been settling out from our perspective over the last year or so. If you take the standard marketing pyramid, with the Fortune 2000 at the top with mid-size companies and then SMEs underneath, it’s already clear that those at the top are mostly of a size and scale to be able to implement IoT initiatives themselves - with appropriate support from various vendors and integrators. Once you move down to second tier however and beyond, you’re now talking about a vast population of enterprises who might be keen to take advantage of IoT for an equally vast set of diverse reasons, but lack the internal resources to achieve this. To reflect this, we at Wyless have been undertaking a bit of a development effort ourselves, focusing our product development on identifying horizontal and common cross-market functionalities that all these types of company will require – down to devices and up to common application layers themselves – and then packaging our products, services and support to align with this. What are the commonalities we find? While there’s obviously the standard mix of data
connectivity using different wireless technologies – including the exciting new area of Low Power Long Range, the newer variants of WiFi and LTE now emerging - as well as device support and management - plus all the other implicit aspects of an IoT platform and infrastructure that can be used in a business setting. These include some of the commonalities around IoT data – such as the common elements of the ‘what happens’ when an IoT device collects data – from managing messaging, awareness, events, data analytics, and even unique storage. Sometimes this is on a massive scale – and it’s all about helping customers and even their customers exploit these to create better products and services and new business models. On top also obviously comes the question of pricing for different levels of support and connectivity. The central theme driving Wyless now is making our customers’ business use of IoT as simple as possible – hence my theme of ‘Simplicity as a Service’ in IoT. Customers in these two lower tiers don’t necessarily want to know the granular details of the underlying system architectures, what radio frequencies we’ll be using or what our prices are per megabyte of data shifted– they want a solution with straightforward service level agreements (SLAs) and management screens understandable by a non-expert and a service provided with transparent and predictable bills each month. And, ultimately, they want this simplicity delivered across whatever array of technologies their business requires. M2M Now: While some of the more basic elements of connectivity are increasingly being seen as commodities, attention now is shifting much more to the helping companies use the massive data generated by IoT systems through analytic tools. How do you see this affecting your plans for Wyless? MC: It’s important here to differentiate between the internal data that we generate ourselves that keep our networks, the devices we support, our Porthos™ platform and all our back office systems operating smoothly and efficiently – and our customers’ data – which they own and control. Also, it’s important to note that, irrespective of whatever data we’re talking, that security is front of mind for us. For example, more than 90% of our traffic flows through a private network. ▼
The central theme driving Wyless now is making our customers’ business use of IoT as simple as possible – hence my theme of ‘Simplicity as a Service’ in IoT
IN ASSOCIATION WITH WYLESS 14
M2M Now - July / August 2015
On the external data side, a huge variety of analytic tools and methods are available to our customers, with some specifically developed for their sectors. Our approach therefore involves making it as simple as possible to integrate incoming data with their applications through appropriate, standard and open APIs. It’s important to realise though in this context that while the individual data units from devices themselves be small with a low overhead, collectively they can soon add up to startling size – and this can cause problems for some analytic tools. We can help here by advising on ways to carry out a triage process on the data transmitted, either at the device level or at a higher level in the network. Similarly, when it comes to extracting meaningful information from that data, then context is king. If you’re looking at a cardiac monitoring device that some of our customers have, for example, then some anomalies are going to set off alerts for immediate intervention, while others may stay within boundaries that just involve that data being added to patient records for the next medical appointment. And did I mention security yet? The security requirements in this patient setting are very real – think about patient privacy or the cost of calling the ambulance incorrectly for example. This issue of occasional criticality also extends to other areas beyond health and, in turn, affects the way that we’ve designed our infrastructure. There have been cases recently when, after a major power outage, hundreds of thousands of smart meters supported by Wyless suddenly turned back on at the same time. Our focus on simplicity - and the managed services this entails - means that our customers who deploy smart meters are promised a seamless solution. In this case we handled the spike and underlying issues it caused on their behalf. Delivering simplicity also means implementing innovative technologies to drive that customer simplicity. Our 2014 acquisition of ASPIDER gave us ownership of their unique M2M technology which we’ve been integrating and adding to. This acquisition has allowed us to proceed on an important development here — the evolution of SIMs to become open through the embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC) standard, allowing us to partner with carriers to enable smarter SIMS with redundancy, failover, and intelligence built to support network selection and change with no manual intervention. Through this kind of software solution, we were able to partner with a carrier, use our unique technology, and generate a €25 million total cost of ownership reduction for one major European energy utility. The introduction of eUICC is yet another example of how software and not hardware is becoming the defining added value issue in our industry – just as has happened in numerous other convergence sectors in the last decade or two. That’s why my current management ‘rebooting’ of Wyless is reflecting this change to a much more virtualised and distributed operating environment. This in turn brings potentially huge benefits to our customers through greatly enhanced scalability and time to market, while simultaneously protecting them from the underlying complexities. M2M Now: You’ve already touched on security and there are also its close relatives – identity and
M2M Now - April July //August May 2015 2015
privacy – now to consider in the IoT space as well, particularly as wearables become adopted by the mass population and smart and connected devices enter our cars and homes. What are your thoughts on this area? MC: Sadly – and I’m talking here about our entire civilisation and culture, not specifically the IoT space – people usually have to get bitten before they take personal information security seriously. Very often, if you try and flag things up, you can be accused of crying wolf. That said, security – and indeed the wider issue of trust – is an implicit part of the IoT story. The devices might seem to be working fine; the network might also seem to be fine – but can you actually trust the data that’s coming into your management systems and on which major commercial decisions may be based?
Delivering simplicity also means implementing innovative technologies to drive that customer simplicity
Security has to be built in right from the first device, network or systems designs. That’s often involved applying appropriate cryptographic techniques; securing the silicon at the lowest level from being hijacked; and helping the customer protect their data in a truly end to end way, right through into their secure clouds or databases and management systems. In an increasing number of cases, such as with the retail PoS terminals that we support for a number of customers, the proliferation of huge numbers of complex end points into possibly insecure spaces – shops, in this example – exponentially increases the exposure to risk. At least it does in theory…. The same thinking applies when we build appropriate levels of redundancy and protection into our connectivity solutions. For many of our customers – such as the PoS sector, I mentioned earlier – any failure here translates instantly into lost and unrecoverable revenue. Being able to include backhaul diversity on both wired and wireless links with near instant failover is a powerful proposition for the retail market. With our deep understanding of how risks change in different environments and the effects of poorly synchronised technology/product lifecycles on vulnerabilities, we aim to both predict and protect. Our CTO’s office, for example, has recently invested in a security function skilled in all the many aspects of both risk management and mitigation. M2M Now: Finally, you also raised your plans for geographic expansion of the Wyless footprint. Could you expand on these? MC: We’ve been very successful so far in the Americas and EMEA in a broad fashion – but those geographies themselves have plenty of room for continued expansion and also let’s not forget the Asian region which is at the centre of a number of megatrends. While I won’t promise a timeline for our expansion there – what we’ve clearly seen is a shift in almost tectonic ways around manufacturing and industrialisation as well as the population dynamics creating a demand for all sorts of new solutions in our industry. We’re also seeing expansion in our international Fortune 500 customer base and as they expand we will as well. Combine that with Asian companies looking to move up the value-chain and we’re keen to support them in their growth models as well – all the while, of course, keeping it as simple as possible.
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SMART CITIES
Building the YouTopia – after all, it’s where most of us will end up living Funny things, cities. After wandering out of Africa around one hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors seem to have been perfectly happy existing in hunter-gatherer communities until something like 7000 years ago, writes M2M Now’s Alun Lewis. Then, something happened to draw us – at least some of us – together more permanently, firstly in ritual-focused sites like Çatalhöyük in today’s Turkey and, shortly later, into what we can formally class as proper cities in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. While cities have risen – and equally regularly fallen – over the succeeding millennia, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve reached a critical tipping point in the human story. Last year, the United Nations announced that 54% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and that figure’s expected to increase to 66% by 2050, with nearly 90% of that rise concentrated in Asia and Africa. This shift in population densities is going to only exacerbate the already huge pressure on
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infrastructure and resources in developing countries as these mega cities and their inevitable slums continue to expand. Indeed, this year’s Global Risk report from the World Economic Forum in Davos identifies that rapid and unplanned urbanisation in developing countries is one of the biggest destabilising factors facing us, creating situations for social unrest or disease epidemics that can then quickly spread. Developed countries too face their own problems as urban economies react to globalisation through the offshoring of large industries, so leading to ‘rustbelt’ conditions, while environmental changes will threaten cities built – as so many were – close to rivers and seas. On top of this, even developed economies aren’t protected from shifts in the availability of basic
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Developed countries too face their own problems as urban economies react to globalisation through the offshoring of large industries
M2M Now - July / August 2015
necessities like water as many states and cities in the US are already finding out.
implications for security in horizontal projects compared to vertical ones.
As many high tech marketeers have already recognised – and their adverts have been appearing for a good few years now in the world’s business, science and technology press - Smart City techniques could mitigate these problems. Or can they?
He continues, “Then there are open versus controlled approaches though the distinction becomes more political than technical, revolving around data ownership and data usage. Projects such as Bristol is Open, and other European ones are open-based. Smart Dubai by contrast is based around the control of data. Finally, there’s the issue of new cities versus transformational approaches. South Korea’s Songdo is the largest new city designed with a horizontal approach to become a fully connected and intelligent environment. By contrast, the large majority of smart city projects in Europe revolves around the idea of adding a digital layer to existing ones.”
It’s an obvious truism that our buildings and public spaces reflect our local cultural and political values, down to the shape and size of family units and notions of privacy and individuality. As a result of this, there’s been a long running debate in the smart city community about taking either topdown or bottom-up initiatives – or finding some mix of strategies appropriate to each urban setting. After all, there are numerous urban hellholes scattered around the world that have equally resulted from both socialist centralised planning and from unfettered free market principles. So how do you start defining something as amorphous, alive and implicitly perverse and varied as its own human inhabitants ? Saverio Romeo, principal analyst, Beecham Research, sees three main ways to classify smart city projects: “Firstly, you can generally contrast vertical versus horizontal approaches. A typical vertical projects focuses on a specific city system such as smart parking. Then there are horizontal projects where the entire city is seen as a system of systems where the role of IoT platform as urban OS or intelligence backbone is fundamental. These definitions are blurring however, with some projects becoming multi-vertical across different systems such as smart lighting, surveillance and pollution monitoring all done together. You can imagine a continuum from pure vertical to pure horizontal - with the complexity of the project increasing along the continuum. This has obvious
M2M Now - July / August 2015
These perspectives are echoed by Upendra Dharmadhikary, VP of Global Transformations at Tech Mahindra, a company currently involved in many smart city projects around the world. “Neither approach if executed in isolation will succeed on its own. A top-down approach typically relies on a network of sensors feeding into a central grid so that key decision makers – civil servants and administrators - can create projects. However, this fails to address the inclusivity of the citizens and local businesses and what they are willing to adopt. “There are however,” he adds, “also risks with a completely bottom up approach. Relying on citizens and citizen forums to identify key challenges and communicate with authorities through social media and other means could pose challenges for city planning as there would be no control on aligning these projects with the wider vision - or the resource constraints that confront most cities.” For Dr Jon Lewis, director of strategy at Telensa, both approaches have their advantages – and caveats: “While Telensa’s involved in projects of both types, the majority of Smart City ones tend to be more at the pilot stage, while specific ones - such as working with municipal parking or
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Machines for living in ?
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SMART CITIES
Standards for – not of - living Brandon Davito, Silver Spring
Dr John Lewis, Telensa
Gadi Lenz, AGT
Graham Colclough, Urban DNA
And it’s around standards – a much abused and ill-defined word - where some of the headaches are already emerging with a veritable alphabet soup of initiatives, frameworks, platforms, partnerships and councils all already slopping around the foundations of the digital building site. Some such as HyperCat – already being adopted outside the UK – are essentially catalogues that allow data, devices and applications to find one another; while oneM2M looks more like a more traditional standard, based on the historic connectivity lineage of its founders. The ITU has also recently added its voice to the debate, pushing its potential role in this. On top of these could also be added the smart cities work being done by the British Standards Institute in defining a common lexicon and framework for the smart city operating environment, similar in many ways to the groundbreaking work done by the TM Forum in OSS/BSS some years ago. In fact, the latter comparison is an apt mirror. Telcos at that time were trying to merge radically different business and technology silos to cut costs and add new functionalities – and faced extreme internal competition for resources and strategic power. You might not be able to fight City Hall, as the American saying goes, but there’s often more than enough blood spilt inside them in the fight for power and voter trust. Graham Colclough, partner at UrbanDNA, a smart cities consultancy, gives an overview of some of these issues: “As almost any ‘smart’ strategy is almost inevitably going to involve bashing silo heads together – amongst many other things potentially subversive for the municipal status quo – the absence of any top down steerage can lead to some very messy outcomes indeed. There are many once frontrunner cities who now realise they’ve been experimenting with ‘pilots’ positioned by - and often funded by - big industry that are now wondering what to do with the unwieldy Frankenstein monsters that they’ve created! The whole market is going through a continued transformation, so not only is the agenda working across silos, it’s also changing the value equation too. Leadership is thus vital, as is standardisation and demand aggregation involving collaboration and joint working. As Colclough observes, “What leaders need – particularly given the multiple pressures they’re under – are some very clearly evidenced gains to convince them and de-risk often ill-defined propositions, plus some practical ‘how to’ guides on what to do. More fundamentally, they need to think through what exactly ‘smart’ means in their particular context. For a start, the pooling and sharing of data is indeed a real challenge, but there are a few things afoot to help with this such as the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) on
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Smart Cities and Communities. The EIP recently launched a demand-side survey to ask cities if they had an ‘urban platform’ and if so what was their experience – and if they didn’t have one, then why not? Funding constraints, lack of capability and the challenges of crossdepartmental working were frequent barriers to progress - perhaps a reason why more than 70% of the responder cities had not put in place a city-data platform. To support the take up of urban platforms, we recently signed an MoU, together with an initial group of around 15 industry players and Commissioner Oettinger.”
Creating the digital Agora for the community’s data Here, Tech Mahindra’s Dharmadhikary suggests: “A shared Data Hub is essential for collecting and managing data from a variety of sources. The sources of data include historical and real time transport traffic data, energy usage, satellite data, water usage, river level, security data and video surveillance of the city. A user-profile driven analytics engine, which focuses on use cases relevant to the different stakeholders, forms the backbone of this integrated dashboard. One interesting example of a unified smart city command centre is Tech Mahindra’s implementation at Mahindra World City Jaipur, India, which not only provides a unified view of the smart city components but also delivers important insights relevant to city planners and to local businesses and citizens. He adds, “The MK Smart initiative in Milton Keynes in the UK is another important example of how data analytics can be used to meet urban challenges, using insights from a ‘mash up’ of traffic monitoring and surveillance data such as: road traffic, pollution and road conditions, electricity demand and supply and the impact of electric cars; parking space management and waste management to reduce truck rolls.” Before you can pull this information together however, the data needs to be captured and different perspectives exist on how this is best achieved. Brandon Davito, Silver Spring Networks’ VP of Smart Cities, suggests, “In any city infrastructure upgrade, the goal is to cause the least amount of disruption as possible – and a horizontal, outdoor ‘network canopy’ that can link to any critical infrastructure device or asset can alleviate that pressure. This is especially important as city procurement processes generally require multiple vendors. By choosing a single, open platform capable of supporting multiple smart city applications, cities gain immediate benefits and build a path toward future energy and operational savings. Furthermore, a multiapplication network such as Silver Spring’s enables the network operator to not only connect the street lights, but also establish a network canopy upon which additional smart city services can be deployed over time, such as smart parking, electric vehicle chargers, weather and air quality monitoring, digital signage, energy metering, smart water, and more.” The city of Paris is currently implementing Silver Spring’s IPv6 network to connect street lights and traffic controls across the city to help reduce
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lighting departments - are seeing commercial deployments at scale. However - they must use open industry agreed standards as it’s only through the adoption of standards that the industry can effectively scale, rather than fall into the trap of having a range of competing proprietary technologies.”
M2M Now - July / August 2015
public lighting energy consumption by 30% over the next ten years. Copenhagen, often regarded as the world's most sustainable city, is also looking to Silver Spring to deploy a citywide canopy network to connect more than 20,000 street lights and create a platform for future smart city services.
Extracting usable information AGT International is one company that’s been deeply involved in the Smart Cities space for a number of years and has recently joined one EU Smart City project, providing advanced IoT Analytics for Cologne as part of the wider five year GrowSmarter sustainable cities project. This aims to achieve a 60% saving in primary energy consumption costs, a similar reduction in emissions from buildings and traffic and increase the proportion of renewable energy supplied to 60% by 2020. Participation in this project follows the key role AGT played in the recently completed PeerEnergyCloud initiative, a smart grid project supported by the Federal German government. Gadi Lenz, AGT’s Chief Scientist, observes, “Smart Cities is an overloaded term – and so often is analytics as this can range from anything from presenting simple pie chart displays to the kinds of advanced anomaly detection systems that we deploy with some of our client cities to spot emerging traffic patterns that will lead to congestion.
One problem however that often happens with Smart City projects is that they involve highly siloed departments and functions where tenders are issued by each in turn. There’s definitely a need for a kind of canonical architectural framework such as Europe’s FIWARE that’s able to unite these disparate sources and systems and make it simpler to extract actionable information more quickly and dynamically.” Europe certainly seems well advanced in a global context with the FIWARE initiative as Beecham’s Romeo explains: “Europe’s moving from a government-centric approach towards a more public-private partnership one and the EU FP7 ‘Smart City and Communities’ and now the Horizon 2020 ‘Smart City and Communities’ have done a good job. The idea of a Digital Officer in a local authority is not a niche idea anymore - or that they should be an expert in the field and not simply appointed by the political class.” As these digital urban visions of the last few years start to be realised, it’s perhaps good to remember that the very word Utopia – invented almost exactly five hundred years ago by scholar Thomas More as the title for a social satire he’d written – is actually a pun in Ancient Greek. Rather than eu-topos – meaning good place – he used ou-topos, meaning no place. Perhaps it’s an inescapable part of the human condition to always be seeking a perfect place to live?
Saverio Romeo, Beecham Research
Upendra Dharmadhikary, Tech Mahindra
FIWARE The Open and Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative, signed earlier this year by 31 cities from Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Brazil, aims to kickstart the use of FIWARE standards in smart city applications and solutions. They’ll be adopting an open-licensed standard API implemented in FIWARE that provides a lightweight means to gather, publish, query and subscribe to context information describing what happens in the city at any time. They’re also collaborating in the definition of common standard open data models with the first set of these being based on the results of the CitySDK project developed in Europe. Telefónica, Orange, Engineering and Atos have agreed to join forces towards the adoption of FIWARE standards for Smart Cities, while Korean operator KT Corporation will also be using it.
HyperCat HyperCat is an open, lightweight JSON-based hypermedia catalogue format for exposing IoT assets over the web. Using HTTPS, REST and JSON, each HyperCat catalogue may expose any number of URIs, each with any number of resource description framework-like (RDF-like) triple statements about it. There are already over 70 strategic partners in the HyperCatCity project including: Accenture, Arkessa, ARM, Arqiva, Arup, BAE Systems, BIS, Bristol is Open, BSI, BT, FlexEye, Fujitsu, Future Cities Catapult, Huawei, IBM, InnovateUK, Gartner, KPMG, Milton Keynes, NESTA, Neul, Rolls Royce, Symantec, techUK, the University of Surrey, the UKTI and Verisign.
Tools to view the City The City Performance Tool (CyPT) from Siemens is a dynamic simulation tool which is designed to reduce the environmental impact of urban activities, covering greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and transport, as well as air pollutants such as particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). It also looks at the creation of new local jobs to install, operate and maintain city solutions. The model calculates the environmental and economic impacts of individual technologies at different implementation levels.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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COMPANY PROFILE
AT&T and the Utilities - An insight into best practice enablers in the U.S. utility sector Without any action to modernise the U.S. electricity grid, the ability to obtain true sustainability in the longer term is at risk, reports Farah Saeed, principal consultant for energy and environment at Frost & Sullivan.
To counteract the immense amount of investment required to replace aged infrastructure, significant emphasis has been placed on embedding efficiencies by deploying smarter digital technology that can improve communication among devices as well as increase visualisation across the grid. As a result, modernisation is occurring across transmission, distribution, and to the edge of the home, all the while remaining conservative, partly because of rate increase constraints.
Smart meters and more
One of the more successful approaches to date has been to implement power curtailment measures by modernising the existing metering infrastructure
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One of the more successful approaches to date has been to implement power curtailment measures by modernising the existing metering infrastructure. Frost & Sullivan’s upcoming market analysis on global advanced metering infrastructure shows that between 2011 and 2014, approximately 37 million smart meters were shipped in the U.S. and approximately 5 million in Canada1. Unlike traditional meters, smart meters have the ability to send and receive data from the utility as well as offer added features such as tamper detection, accurate meter reading, power quality monitoring, and remote switch off/on. This instant access to messaging and signaling is critical to enabling power curtailment programs, such as demand response and prepayment programs. Investment in smart meters has produced a lucrative market for promoting sustainability initiatives in which companies such as AT&T are playing an important role as an enabler through its wireless offerings.
The list of AT&T’s accomplishments in the utility space is long. Over the past few years, AT&T has taken important steps to align its business for the next generation of utility services based on its core competences in wireless and wireline technology. The company is respected for its rigorous approach to innovation, uptime, and customer satisfaction and, as far back as 2008, the company formed a division specifically dedicated to emerging devices such as smart grid technology. The Mobile Broadband Accelerator Program certifies each device deployed on the network to ensure maximum functionality and uptime. The company currently supports data from 16 million meters daily in the U.S. using its cellular service. Overall, AT&T’s utility strategy targets four specific areas: Rationalising a Data Plan for Smart Grid Meters
Reducing Complexity to Implement Smart Grid
Capitalising on Changes to the Existing Meter Infrastructure
Developing Cellular Reference Design for Internet of Things
Rationalising a data plan for smart grid meters One of the important steps that AT&T took was to rationalise the data plan. Earlier, a data plan could be as much as $7 to $10 a month per 1 megabyte of data. Today, the data plan is $0.50 a month per megabyte of data, making the wireless network a better option for data transmission and for developing point-to-point offerings for smart meters. The transition from 3G to LTE has been a major enabler for other smart grid functionalities in addition to meters. Low latency is critical for rolling out fast-reacting control devices for Volt/VAR systems for reducing voltage variance and producing demand reduction.
Reduce complexity to implement smart grids A healthy competitive environment has kept the industry attentive when it comes to developing
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Today, 70% of the country’s power transmission system is more than 25 years old and the average age of large power transformers is 40 years, making the grid more vulnerable to losses and inefficiencies. Improved efficiencies could eventually lead to reductions in harmful emissions produced by the current main source of electricity: coal. Though declining, this fuel still accounts for one-third of electricity produced. The grid is also, at the moment, racing to accommodate state-level mandates to integrate renewable and distributed power by adding new infrastructure.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
improved offerings. Rapid industry changes are driven by the influx of data coming from meters and other automation systems. This data influx has created a demand in the industry for information and processes to create useful analysis and output. AT&T has identified cooperatives and municipals as a customer category that could significantly benefit from a bundled advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) solution that is managed in the cloud. This includes meters, head-end servers, and meter data management (MDM). This was considered an ideal target market for these kinds of solutions because smaller utilities do not necessarily have in-house capabilities. There are approximately 2,100 municipals present in the U.S., and MDM is an essential tool for data processing, analysing, and reporting trends and helping utilities to forecast failures, rather than just respond to them.
Capitalising on changes to the existing meter infrastructure AT&T identified an untapped opportunity for prepaid electricity. Smart meters with disconnect switches make it easier to offer prepaid electricity services. This practice is already well adopted in Europe where over 18% of households are on prepaid plans. In North America, the number is closer to 1%. AT&T sees this as an untapped opportunity. There are currently 140 million meters and around 6 to 10 million are replaced every year. Approximately 90% of devices deployed have disconnect switches. Utilities lose between one-half and 1% of revenue to unpaid bills that are typically written off. This translates to $1 billion. When taking operational costs into consideration, the loss increases to $3 billion. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 8.2% of residents did not have a bank account in 20122. This translates roughly to 10 million households. Typically, these households are living paycheck to paycheck and therefore cannot meet minimum balance requirements. Non-salaried workers who are paid hourly would be another target segment. AT&T believes a combined 20% of households would be a great target market for prepay programs. Nevada Energy has had some success with
this type of program as a way to improve customer satisfaction. Other utilities with the program include the Salt River Project, Georgia Power, Detroit Edison, APS, and, most recently, another very large utility in the southeast U.S. The offering is a cloud-based solution that interacts with meters to better manage consumption. At the moment, AT&T has an exclusive deal with PayGo.
A healthy competitive environment has kept the industry attentive when it comes to developing improved offerings
Developing cellular reference designs for the Internet of Things An area that AT&T has excelled in is developing cellular reference designs for smart grid devices. AT&T formed a global partnership with GE in 2013 that led to the development of these for smart meters and other IoT devices for smart city applications. A reference design took two years to develop and required a significant investment to produce. This has allowed GE to expand its advanced meter offering beyond just the meter. The LED lighting solution will allow cities to remotely monitor and control lighting on public roads and the two companies are now working on proof of concepts at the AT&T Internet of Things Foundry, located in Texas. To make it easy to support prepaid energy, AT&T's Cellular Reference Design for GE residential electric meters means that they are already prepay enabled. M2X is another example of enabling of future technologies consisting of a managed service for developers aimed at advancing IoT applications. As described by AT&T, â&#x20AC;&#x153;This cloud-based data store lets enterprises collect, analyse, and share data that can be tracked over a period of time from connected devices.â&#x20AC;? Early outputs have led to partnerships with Rockwell Automation and Emerson and could be an important tool for enhancing edge computing to the grid, allowing for the decentralised rectification of issues around outage management. Combined utilities generate approximately $370 billion in annual sales3, making it a highly valuable industry for companies such as AT&T to invest in as a vertical market, particularly due to the changes occurring. Bringing the industry into the 21st century is essential, making AT&T an important enabler.
1 Frost & Sullivan: Global Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) Market #MA51-14 2 http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/pf/fdic-bank-accounts/index.html 3 http://www.eei.org/resourcesandmedia/industrydataanalysis/industrydata/Pages/default.aspx
Farah Saeed is principal consultant with Frost & Sullivanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s North America Energy and Power Systems Practice. Her primary areas of research and management are uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), DC power systems and alternative energy storage solutions including flywheel, rotary, ultracapacitors and fuel cell based UPSs.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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OPINION
Reclaiming the Smart City agenda to create fairer human outcomes A personal perspective from Dr Rick Robinson, currently IT Director for Smart Data and Technology for Amey, one of the UK’s largest engineering and infrastructure services companies. Previously, Dr Robinson was IBM UK’s executive architect for Smarter Cities.
Dr Rick Robinson, Amey
If we’re to do this, we must reclaim the ‘Smart’ concept from the technology world, returning it instead to its original and more human-centric meaning: the ability for people to have more control over their lives, work and communities through the intelligent use of internet-based communications and applications. Are Smart City initiatives currently being driven largely by technology - or by a real desire to create a better future? If one truth does emerge from these debates, it’s clearly that anything termed ‘Smart’ must involve a subtle harmonisation of both these forces and, more specifically, break free from the futile and unsophisticated arguments that rage on about
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whether Smart Cities should be created by ‘topdown’ or ‘bottom-up’ approaches. Taken in isolation, technology itself is amoral and frequently banal in its results. On the other hand, desiring a better future without a practical strategy to achieve it is futile. Surely, using the phenomenally powerful technologies only recently available to us to make the world a better place, rather than just making money, is an idea worthy of the label ‘Smart’?
Technology’s not Smart unless it’s used to create human value It was in a workshop with social scientists at the University of Durham that I first became aware that ‘Smart’ concepts originated in social science in the 1990s, pre-dating the famous early largescale technology infrastructure projects in planned cities like Masdar in Abu Dhabi and Songdo in South Korea. Originally coined to describe the potential for new forms of governance, citizen engagement, collective intelligence and stakeholder collaboration that could be enabled by internet technologies, it was
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For the last five years or so, I’ve been using my personal blog – www.theurbantechnologist.com to explore what a ‘Smart City’ really is. The theme that’s dominated my thinking is the need to synthesise all the very different – and often conflicting - human, urban, commercial and technological perspectives on cities that currently exist.
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hoped that these emerging relationships could better deliver the outcomes we all want – personal and social health, happiness and fulfilment. It’s no surprise that technology companies such as Cisco, Siemens and my former employer IBM came to similar realisations about the potential of digital technology to address social as well as business challenges - so what’s the problem? Large technology corporations are often criticised for their size, profitability and ‘top-down’ approaches – and local authorities are often criticised too. The key question we should be asking is more subtle and more important: what happens to the social elements of an idea once it becomes apparent to businesses of any size that they can make money by selling the technologies that enable it? The scientists, engineers and creatives who are engaged in Smart Cities initiatives are almost universally extremely bright, well intentioned and humane, and talk with passion about the social and environmental value of their work. ‘Top-down’ is at best a gross simplification of the projects that they carry out, and at worst a gross misrepresentation. Their views dominated the early years of the Smart Cities market as it developed. However, as the market has matured and grown, the focus on research, exploration and development has switched to the marketing and selling of products and services. With the need to promote those offerings to potential customers, it’s all too easy for the social, economic, and environmental issues to become submerged. A technology company once asserted that Smart Cities would create ‘autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits’ – blissfully ignoring the fact that such perfection is scientifically and philosophically impossible, not to mention inhuman and undesirable. Unless we reclaim the word ‘Smart’ to emphasise human outcomes, the market will inevitably drive energy and resources towards narrower financial interests. Financial efficiency and resilience are not the same as health, happiness and opportunity for every citizen.
Can responsible business create a better world? Some corporate behaviours promote these positive, human outcomes and are in turn driven by the voting and buying powers of citizens and consumers. Working for Amey, for example, my customers are usually government organisations who serve an electorate; or private sector companies who are regulated by government bodies. In both cases, there is a direct chain of influence leading from individual citizen needs and perceptions through to how we operate. If we don’t engage with, respect and meet those needs and expectations, we will not be successful But, in general, business investors are still strongly focused on financial performance, rewarding businesses that make the most money. As a consequence, many social enterprises have difficulty scaling up and many ‘sharing economy’ businesses have nothing at all to do with sharing value and resources, but are really profit-seeking transaction brokers.
Policy, legislation and regulation One highly relevant quote here comes from Jane Jacobs, the influential writer and urban activist: ‘private investment shapes cities, but social ideas - and laws - shape private investment’. It’s therefore a source of frustration to me that much activity in the Smart Cities community overlooks that fundamental principle.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Milton Keynes for example is a UK city that has many interesting Smart City projects underway, and is often cited as an exemplar for other cities to follow. But its initiatives are funded by central government departments, research or innovation bodies, and the research departments of technology companies, not by re-usable business cases. By contrast, policy, legislation and regulation are far more effective tools for enabling widespread change, and are what we should instead be focusing our energy and attention on. The recent Social Value Act in the UK requires that public authorities - who collectively spend nearly £200 billion (€282 billion) annually on private sector goods and services procure those services in a way that creates social value, such as requiring that service providers engage local small businesses in their supply chains. Given that companies are already themselves investing in digital technology on the basis of the efficiencies it creates, surely local authorities should fulfil their Social Value Act obligations by using procurement criteria to ensure that those companies employ those digital tools in a way that creates social and environmental improvements? Similarly, if planning and development frameworks oblige property developers to describe and quantify the social value that will be created by their developments and how they will use technology do so – as the British Standards Institute has recently recommended – then the enormous level of private sector investment in this sector can also deliver technologies for public benefit. This strategy is exemplified by the London Olympic Legacy Development Corporation as part of the wider Smart London plan. They’re securing private sector investment to deploy technology not only to redevelop the Olympic park using smart infrastructure, but also to ensure that investment benefits the existing communities and businesses in neighbouring areas.
A Smart manifesto for human outcomes - enabled by technology These business models, policy measures and procurement approaches are bold and difficult measures to enact. They’re not as sexy as self-driving cars, but they’re much more important in achieving positive human outcomes. Citizen understanding is going to be critical if businesses, local governments and national governments are to adopt them. If definitions of smart people, places, communities, businesses and governments make sense to everyone who votes, works, stands for election, runs for business or buys things - and include the objective of using modern technologies to make the world a healthier, happier, fairer, more sustainable place for everyone - then these ideas have a chance of both working and being worthwhile. I’m not sure that’s a perfect definition; but I think it’s a good start! Dr Robinson is a member of the UK Government’s Smart Cities Forum; a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the RSA; and a member of the Academy of Urbanism. In his home city of Birmingham, he’s a founder and the current Chair of the Steering Group for the Birmingham Smart City Alliance and a Director of Innovation Birmingham.
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ANALYST REPORT
SMART CITIES – SMART SILOS Examining the building blocks of the smart city
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In 1950, 750 Million people lived in cities
Today 4 Billion people live in cities
Is your city ready for another 2 Billion*â&#x20AC;Ś?
Smarter cities survive and thrive Smart suppliers help them do that Frost & Sullivan works with both cities and their suppliers to address the challenges of urbanization and create smart and sustainable market growth Roberta Gamble Partner | Energy & Environment Roberta.Gamble@frost.com +1.650.475.4522 *Six billion people are expected to live in urban areas by 2050, per projections by the United Nations and United States Census Bureau
CONTENTS
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ANALYST REPORT
COMPANY PROFILES
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BUILDING SMARTER CITIES WITH LOW POWER RADIO NETWORKS
ANALYST REPORT 30
M2M NOW INSIGHT REPORT Our series of specially commissioned Insight reports continues with James Brehm, founder and chief technology evangelist at James Brehm and Associates, looking at how we can realise the smart city vision by looking first at the roles of the currently separate ‘smart silos’ that are currently evolving. With over half the population of the planet now living in cities – a figure set to increase to 66% by 2050, with nearly 90% of that increase concentrated in Asia and Africa – the problems of how best to manage urban spaces is an increasingly critical one
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COMPANY PROFILES AT&T, Telensa and Aeris offerings in this market are explained
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OPINION Contributions from Digi International and Machina Research examine smart city planning issues
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INTERVIEW Will Gibson, CEO of Telensa, a company at the forefront of using low-power radio in rapidly growing areas such as smart lighting and smart parking, talks about the role his company is playing in creating smarter cities and what the longer term future holds
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ANALYST REPORT
Smart Cities or Smart Silos Towards the end of the last decade, our planet achieved three remarkable feats. First, human population crossed the seven billion mark. Second, over 50% of the world’s population is living in urban areas. And third, there are now more connected devices than humans. Analyst report by James Brehm & Associates. To achieve and sustain this level of growth, to take advantage of the technological infrastructure, and to account for the recent urbanisation and climate-change trends, governments must plan for and manage resources differently. And this is leading us to the advent of smart cities. What is a Smart City? The term Smart City seems to be ambiguous and often times misleading. And it seems that if you ask ten people what the term means, you may get eleven different answers.
Four thrusts and the problem with smart silos When you speak with mayors, city managers and planners, and CIO/CTOs of cities, the term smart cities should have four main thrusts – one about increasing employee productivity, one geared towards increasing citizen engagement, one focused upon improving quality of living, and finally, one on securing critical infrastructure.
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But today’s focus of smart cities is usually viewed from the perspective of large technology companies as the enablers – as the catalysts for change. And this causes us to view things from the top-down. Technology-enabled change usually comes with a large price tag, often involving forklift-upgrades and centralised, proprietary systems and solutions which are siloed. Some cities are making mistakes by building isolated, siloed applications on a department-bydepartment basis. I recently moderated a panel on Smart Cities at Informa’s M2M World conference in San Francisco. Joining me on the panel were a mixture of vendors, service providers, consultants and even the CTO of Los Angeles. After asking each panelist to introduce themselves and what the theme of the panel Using Big Data and Analytics to Drive the Smart City meant to them, I began the panel with the statement; There is no such thing as a smart city. Cities are inherently
M2M Now - July / August 2015
ANALYST REPORT
stupid. The infrastructure – most of it is old. It was never intended to be networked. And the things that need monitoring the most are dumb.” “There are no smart cities, only Smart Silos.”
Market size of IoT and smart cities The internet of things is a numbers game; predictions on data volume, connected devices, estimated revenue etc. At the end of 2014, we estimated that the total IoT market was 12 billion connected devices. We believe that includes 165m cellular connections, one billion wireline connections, 10 million long range, low power wide area network connections, and four billion industrial short range wireless connections. And when we segment things even further, we estimate that the number of ‘smart cities’ connections could be segmented to include roughly 65% of the market. Because the term Smart City is ambiguous and includes solutions from more than 20 different vertical markets, when you include hardware, connectivity, systems integration, planning, design, savings, analytics, data storage archival and transport, the combined market potential will exceed $1 trillion for just the largest cities by 2020. So where does all this business value come from? To determine that we need to look at challenges in urban areas today. Crime, pollution, traffic, education, healthcare, information sharing, customer service, the food supply/cold chain, supply chain management, resource management, retail services, water shortages, fluctuating energy costs, sustainability initiatives and social responsibility initiatives all take major roles. With respect to smart cities, the challenges are more fundamental than in other markets. For one, all cities are
M2M Now - July / August 2015
different. The population, socio-economic make-up, size, population density, ethnic diversity, weather conditions, number of vehicles, segmentation of businesses, demographics of inhabitants and a host of other factors contribute to the challenges of the market. While some smart city services can be static - and universal to all cities - many services are dependent on these contributing factors. Health care services, for example, are directly tied to the make-up of the population. Early adopters show a clear focus on security, sustainability, traffic reduction, power savings, and efficiency optimisation. But in the US, suburbanisation, urban sprawl and a migrating population outside of “ring roads” means better and more efficient transportation and more efficient commercial services such as waste collection are key. When you combine that with the aging population and water shortages in urban areas, the top four needs are easily seen.
So what are smart silos? We believe that smart cities are a panacea because there are too many challenges precluding them. Most cities have been built. They have existing infrastructure to deal with. This infrastructure is managed by multiple departments within a city and no one has full control. So let’s take a look at some of the Smart Silos driving what many believe are Smart Cities.
Smart grid The smart grid is a modernised electrical grid that combines the use of sensors, networking equipment and communication networks to gather and act on information and automate the process to improve the generation, distribution, and use of electricity.
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ANALYST REPORT
IoT Market Share by Technology
Cellular Unlicensed Short Range Wireline, Metro and Fixed WAN Satellite Low Power WAN (Sigfox, Neul, LoRA, Telensa, etc) Consumer Devices
Hardware, software and analytics are used to improve the efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of the production of electricity, the quality of electricity produced, and the economics and usage of electricity for consumers. While much of the focus on the term smart grid is on changing the technical infrastructure, it really is a fundamental re-engineering of the entire electricity services industry. If Tesla or Edison were to come back to life today, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d still understand the fundamental ways power is distributed today, as not much has changed over the past hundred years. But by moving to a smart grid infrastructure, the change in the distribution and use of power enables smart cities to thrive. Power generation is where everything begins. In the legacy grid, there is no way to store power, so generation needs to equal demand to be optimally efficient. Power is generated in many ways: coal, steam, wind, water, solar and others. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s generators need to better manage the operations of all sources of energy and capacity. They need to use data analytics to improve asset management and optimise resources. Eliminating spikes through efficient transmission and power conditioning improves power quality, reduces strain on electric appliances, increases ecosystem efficiency, and lowers TCO for consumers, while efficient monitoring and the use of real time analytics helps with control of the production and distribution of electricity.
Smart street lights With more than one billion street lights in North America and nearly three billion globally, street lights are ubiquitous in cities today. They light downtowns, parks, public gathering places, industrial centres, residential neighborhoods, highway intersections and even suburban areas.
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Yet the vast majority of the street lights deployed worldwide are low-efficiency sodium or mercury vapor street lights that have been used for decades. But now, municipalities and utilities alike are changing to networked solutions that include lower power Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology. We believe that approximately 10 million of the 3 billion streetlights may be networked today, meaning that tremendous growth exists. And as cities network streetlights, other sensors such as motion, video, noise and air quality can also be included in street light poles, leading us into a smarter society.
Smart transportation As transportation and logistics has become one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest industries, IoT and machineto-machine solutions have been implemented to connect and monitor a wide range of industry segments. Led by an ever-growing global supply chain and increasing customer demands for dependable and efficient distribution of shipments, the transportation and logistics industry is rapidly becoming an interconnected network of machine-to-machine technologies. Whether transporting goods via land, sea, or air, the implementation of M2M solutions lead companies to develop more efficient supply chains, deliver goods safely and on time, and reduce overall operating costs. Transportation is defined as the movement of people, animals, raw materials, or finished goods from one location to another by air, rail, road, water, cable, or pipeline. Logistics incorporates the procedures of planning, implementing, and controlling transportation and storage of goods, services, and information in an effective and efficient manner. As transportation and logistics encompasses the movement, process, and efficiencies of inbound, outbound, internal, and
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ANALYST REPORT
external shipments, M2M advanced technologies offer a breadth of functionality for companies operating within this industry. We estimate that the current transportation and logistics industry is currently worth $4.5 trillion dollars and is rapidly growing. With the increasing number of vehicles on the road, the industry is constantly facing competitive pressures to keep costs down while improving security and efficiency. The rising challenges of fuel price increases, stringent regulations, safety and security, meeting customer expectations, and low productivity are turning companies toward machine-tomachine connectedness to reduce costs, increase revenues, or meet compliance. These solutions offer the necessary visibility required to drive productivity whether tracking containers, fleets, valuable assets, or personal vehicles.
Connected car With the automobile the primary mode of transportation in the US, the personal uses of the connected car include reduced traffic, improved safety and security, information transmission improving the in-vehicle experience, and capabilities to connect car to home and in the future vehicle to vehicle. Many cars are implementing safety features that warn of upcoming traffic hazards, notify drivers of violated safety laws, provide lane merging and lateral collision assistance, and automatically call the nearest emergency center in case of extreme wrecks or injuries. This improves traffic flow and by connection, quality of life. Integrations like OnStar that monitor physical security of the vehicle while enabling hands-free calling, navigation, and automatic contact of emergency centres provide a greater peace of mind and reduce major costs for connected car users. Other benefits of the connected car to the consumer include maintenance updates, mileage tracking, and the ability to connect with the home, saving energy and increasing convenience. By linking a vehicle to a home, systems can be set up to turn off lights, turn off the thermostat, and other electronic devices when the car leaves the premise, and return back to normal functioning upon return to the home.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Imagine a day when sitting in your car in traffic the connected car automatically adjusted your personal appointment calendar and rescheduled appointments for you. Or if your vehicle used crowd-sourced information to select the best time of day or route. These are all benefits coming from the smart city.
Connected fleets Fleet management within the space refers to the management of commercial motor vehicles, cars, planes, ships, vans, trucks and rail cars. Companies in the fleet business are able to utilise IoT solutions to help create strategies that enable them to use vehicles in the most efficient manner. Fleet owners today are utilising fleet management systems to manage vehicle performance and maintenance, optimise route efficiencies, and meet regulation compliance. Fleet owners also benefit from route optimisation solutions which drastically improve transportation time by gathering location data and assigning routes more efficiently. Consolidation of shipments and route optimisation cuts fuel costs, reduces mileage and idling, and maximises vehicle utilisation. This reduces total traffic on roadways and improves quality of life within the smart city. M2M management systems draw on accurate GPS locations, pull IoT data from weather and traffic reports, and even gather crowd-sourced real-time traffic flow information, communicating to the driver the best possible route, taking into account mileage, accessibility of the road, and potential traffic hazards and delays. The implementation of GPS and routing capabilities into the larger supply chain of the company allows the vehicle to make multiple deliveries along the same route. This reduces the number of fleets deployed within the same geographic region, reducing overall costs of fuel, physical assets, and necessary payments to the operator of the vehicle. Improved routing cuts overall costs, maximises the use of vehicle assets, and allows for employees to focus on other projects within the organisation.
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ANALYST REPORT
Bicycle sharing Pollution, traffic, and rising oil costs are just a few of the reasons why urban transportation needs a facelift. Next-generation bicycle sharing systems are alternatives to fossil fuel driven transportation. What are next-generation bike sharing systems? In laymanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s terms there are bicycle stations around the city where you can swipe your credit card, grab a bike, and get to where youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going.
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You pay for the time you used the bike and return it to any sharing station. They use connectivity to process the transaction, location based services to know what stations have inventory needs and analytics to understand where and when services are used.
Public transport By definition, public transportation is a network of shared passenger transport services available
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ANALYST REPORT
for use by the general public. As these services have faced competitive pressure from shared and private services such as Uber and Zipcar, they have had to evolve to meet passenger needs. M2M solutions are fueling this evolution. After public transit authorities recognised how M2M transformed asset tracking and fleet management, they introduced solutions to track public transit timing, monitor routes, and provide connectivity to passengers through public Wi-Fi. Through passenger connectivity, public transport is becoming more versatile, enabling these systems to respond to current competitive pressures. Beyond passenger connectivity, M2M supports the global shift to cashless transport systems. This migration will see cash and paper tickets replaced with smartcards that commuters can link to online accounts or credit cards to improve the fare collection process. Cashless systems eliminate cash handling risks and improve business efficiencies with real time access to customer data. These integrated electronic ticketing systems will require real time connectivity to support their transactions. Once this connectivity is provided, public transport systems can connect multiple devices such as video surveillance cameras, digital display and GPS systems to enable new and innovative services such as passenger Wi-Fi access.
Smart parking According to Streetline, a leader in smart parking, parking is a $25 billion industry. And aside from adding a few spaces for electric vehicle recharging, it has seen little innovation in decades. In the smart city, parking spaces can either communicate with a smartphone application or directly with a vehicleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s navigation system, allowing for a reduction in gridlock, a better use of resources (parking spaces and gas to find them), and higher consumer satisfaction from an improved quality of life.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Many pilots are currently underway. Most notably in Milton Keynes in the UK, where it was found that over 7,000 parking spaces were not being used or underused, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions.
Buildings and homes Building automation is a vital part of many of the use cases related to energy efficiency and smart living in the context of smart cities. But the smart home and smart building are more than just energy efficient. In addition to heating and cooling and power consumption of buildings, security and access control, air quality and ventilation, home automation, remote surveillance, monitoring, and the control of sensors which detect motion, noise, moisture, temperature, humidity, smoke, CO2, and radon/hazardous gas are all important drivers of the space. Yet each of these areas can tie to other areas of the smart city, such as transportation, grid and sustainability.
Environmental sustainability The primary focus of smart city projects moving forward must be on sustainability. Between 2015 and 2050, the number of people living in cities is expected to grow from around 3.5 billion to over 6.25 billion. While the majority of this growth is expected to be in developing countries including India, China, Korea, and others, many of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s major cities including New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Cairo, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Singapore, Dubai, and others have embarked on smart city projects. The rise in the number of people migrating to urban areas is resulting in overpopulation in modern cities, thus, causing social, political, environmental and energy instability.
Water The World Health Organisation reports that for the first time ever, the majority of the world's population lives in a city, and
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ANALYST REPORT
this proportion continues to grow. One of a city's most important pieces of critical infrastructure is its water system. With the population of cities growing at staggering rates, ensuring an adequate water supply is crucial. The term "smart water" points to water and wastewater infrastructure that ensures this precious resource is managed effectively. Today, in the US, nearly one third of all water pumped from wells is lost before it reaches the tap by leaking pipes. It is necessary to install smart meters as a smart water system is designed to gather meaningful and actionable data about the flow, pressure and distribution of a city's water. By using intelligent algorithms and this data, leaks can be pinpointed. This saves both the expense of digging and replacing a water main when a water catastrophe happens and it saves the precious resource itself. Further, it is critical that the consumption and forecasting of water use is accurate.
Waste With the total volume of waste generated globally expected to increase by nearly 50% over the next decade, the adoption of innovative technologies will result in more integrated waste management solutions that move beyond the traditional use of labor, diesel trucks and conventional landfills. Whether it is sensors on dumpsters tied to fleet management systems on refuse trucks, using
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analytics to predict the growth in trash, education on the importance of recycling or using technology to separate mixed plastic into different waste streams, a focus on bringing smart city silos together to solve the sustainability problem is needed.
Air quality What sensors can do for water and waste, they can also do for air quality. Sensors can measure pollution in the air and as seen in pilots in the UK, traffic can be diverted at time to improve air quality and reduced CO2. But as you can see, air quality monitoring directly ties to traffic and smart transportation initiatives.
Final thoughts and conclusions We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the space to delve into education, healthcare, governance or infrastructure, yet we believe this snapshot provides an understanding of many of the challenges in the space today, and why we view the smart city space as smart silos in action. No one has yet figured out a way to bring together the big platforms of the ultra-large technology companies such as IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco with the small internal initiatives being driven by city IT departments, and hence, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve yet to come to a solution for enabling the truly smart city. There are multiple factors driving and inhibiting
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ANALYST REPORT
the market all at the same time. For one, cities have reduced budgets, requiring them to become more efficient, yet lacking the capital to do so. So instead of a full-on smart transportation initiative, fleet management is the first step for many. You now have the ability to track the vehicle, optimise the route and conserve fuel. It's terrific for public works crews and first responders, and the cost savings can be passed on to other initiatives.
City managers and planners will continue to ask questions such as: • How can I deliver enough clean water to my city? • How can I reduce energy use in my city? • How can I accelerate economic development in my city? • How can I make neighbourhoods safer in my city? • How can I reduce congestion and improve mobility in my city?
For another, citizens have new demands – they want information from city government anytime, anywhere, on any device – and since mobile technology is prevalent in every aspect of our life now, the citizen requires immediacy, better service, and taxpayer value from their governments. And this is transforming government and how it delivers services to citizens.
And the interim step is through smart silos. Until we build smart cities from the ground up, the cloud will need to serve as the equaliser, taking politics, budgets and turf wars out of the mix.
The desire for Smart Cities is not a fad that will pass any time soon.
And smart city managers will use open data initiatives to aggregate the siloed data through cloud architectures and “horizontalise” the smart city in the clouds.
James Brehm & Associates is a consulting and market intelligence firm providing project based and retained strategic advisory services to technology companies worldwide. With a firm focus on the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M), and Big Data Analytics, JBA provides actionable insight and definitive direction to a wide range of organisations including communication service providers, hardware manufacturers, software vendors, OEMs, private equity, and venture capital firms. Our projects include determining market size, share trajectory and velocity, competitive intelligence, product development, go-to-market strategy, messaging, and other client-defined consulting services. JBA empowers companies to unlock unforeseen business potential in a hyper-connected world. www.jbrehm.com
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COMPANY PROFILE
Company Summary Enterprises, M2M Integrators, resellers, and MVNOs all require ubiquitous wireless coverage in the markets in which they deploy. By using GSM, the most widely available technology, AT&T customers benefit from a wider range and lower cost of solutions and devices, smoother network migration path, and easier integration with new and emerging technologies from legacy GPRS/EDGE to HSPA/HSPA+ to 4G LTE and beyond. Moreover, AT&T facilitates deployment with easy to understand billing, a single carrier/single SIM solution, and a global service management platform. When it comes to smart cities, AT&Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision is to see every city delivering more value to their residents through highly secure connected and innovative solutions and products. Cities around the world are already realising tremendous cost savings by implementing such solutions, whether it be for improved water management, intelligent street lighting, energy conservation, or enhanced public safety and faster emergency response -- many on AT&Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s network. AT&T is committed to helping savvy city managers prepare for the coming population boom indicated by millenialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preference for urban living. To become a trusted advisor for smart cities, AT&T has developed relationships beyond the network, embracing an end-to-end view of the problem that the customer is trying to solve, and develop ecosystems that engage vendors, including component
manufacturers, network equipment providers, IT infrastructure vendors, BSS/OSS solutions, storage, and application platforms. And because moving from smart connected application sets to truly connected cities is complex, AT&T has put together a team that specialises in assisting customers to pull together the right partners from the AT&T ecosystem to realise new and disruptive solutions -- they have even developed off-the shelf solutions for certain smart city-related applications. For more than ten years, AT&T has developed a set of solution capabilities specifically to serve the needs of M2M customers. By combining their global network, service delivery and application platforms, with networking expertise, industry alliances and professional services capabilities, AT&T has and will continue to deliver best of breed M2M solutions that fit their customers' needs across a wide range of industries.
PREPARED BY JAMES BREHM & ASSOCIATES
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M2M Now - July / August 2015
COMPANY PROFILE
Company Summary Originally founded in 2005, Telensa’s flexible, bi-directional Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) network can be deployed on any scale, ranging from the tens to hundreds of thousands of devices, and can improve a city’s waste disposal and management, security, road and highway repairs, event planning, fleet management, and efficiently heat and cool city buildings. Now, with more than 9 million devices deployed in over 30 countries, Telensa offers customers a series of globally vetted applications, including its PLANet and PARKet solutions. Telensa’s PLANet central management system (CMS) is one of the most widely adopted lighting CMS in the world; a bi-directional radio-enabled system that provides cities with the full ability to control and monitor streetlights across the grid. The ultra-scalable platform can work across multiple networks, both public and private, and is currently being used in more than one million streetlights worldwide. Its PARKet smart parking solution can help drivers find available parking by detecting cars, monitor parking availability in addition to providing drivers with information on how to find available parking in real time. By deploying PARKet, cities can greatly reduce congestion and CO2 emissions due to idling; for instance, Moscow has
rolled out the PARKet system in the world’s largest parking bays and has reduced congestion by more than a quarter since installation. As a leader within the IoT, Telensa’s applications cover a wide area of markets, including asset tracking and recovery, smart metering, and provides cities with improved future planning and CMS capabilities. What sets Telensa apart from other low power wide area networks (LPWANs) is its legacy – together Plextek Ltd. and Telensa have spent the last 18 years pioneering the LPWAN industry to provide proven multi-layered applications to customers, integrating with existing city infrastructure, greatly reducing the cost for smart city deployments.
PREPARED BY JAMES BREHM & ASSOCIATES
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COMPANY PROFILE
Company Summary Aeris Communications, Inc., works in the M2M market, seeing it as an integral part of the wider IoT vision, and is both a technology provider and a cellular network operator delivering comprehensive M2M/IoT services to leading brands on a global basis. Aeris connects M2M/IoT businesses around the world, currently supporting nearly four million devices which record more than eight billion events per day. Ranking in the top 10 worldwide M2M operators, Aeris customers include Hyundai, Acura, Rand McNally, Leica, and Sprint. The global headquarters of Aeris are in Santa Clara, California, while its European headquarters are near London, UK.
Company credentials As a specialist M2M provider, Aeris’ mobile core network is built exclusively for M2M applications. Whether supporting smart meters to distribute water and power more effectively within communities or smart parking solutions that mitigate city congestion, Aeris creates the IoT backbone for connected cities’ technology, using both CDMA and GSM technologies. Customised M2M solutions from Aeris delivers cost savings, improved efficiencies, flexibility, and increased reliability to utilities and business in a rapidly changing environment. Marc Jones, Aeris CEO, explains, “Our part of the industry – the platform and connectivity providers and enablers – has a vitally important role to play in trying to keep some kind of consistency and trust while the wider landscape continues to change. But ultimately, our customers don’t care whether connectivity is done by 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, WiFi, or the newer long-range, low-power options that are now emerging – it could be carrier pigeon, as long as they get the actionable information that they need for their business ends.”
Key differentiators Aeris aims to deliver the lowest cost of ownership to its customers across the whole service lifecycle. This extends to making it easy for customer to integrate their own operations with M2M/IoT deployments, using the Aeris management portal to access and display in flexible ways real-time device information such as provisioning states, billing rate plans, network locations, and other data; plus traffic information on the number of SMSs sent, number of bytes used, and more. With a purpose-built infrastructure, Aeris claims its network provides greater than 99.999% uptime, while
avoiding network congestion and providing rapid alerts in the event of outages or device issues. Complementing this, the company provides 24/7 support on a global basis via its Infinity Support service program. Aeris products and solutions are packaged under a number of different brand names, such as AerConnect, AerCore, Aerport, AerCloud, AerVoyance, AerB/OSS, Aeris GSP, and the recently introduced Neo, a self-service online marketplace for SIMs and connectivity to simplify M2M/IoT adoption by smaller companies.
Competitive pressures According to Jones, “It still takes far too long and is far too difficult for many businesses to get to grips with the complexity of all the options open to them in what we might call first-generation IoT. Right across the value chain – from device enablement and integration issues through connectivity to the management and business process integration areas – these factors have, so far at least, stifled the truly widespread application of IoT innovation.” Combating these difficulties, Aeris is able to provide a complete solution for IoT programmes – from connectivity to application platform. In addition to CDMA, GSM, and LTE networks built for the unique needs of machines, Aeris offers an application enablement platform called AerCloud. The tight integration between AerCloud and the rest of the Aeris stack has proven to reduce development time by 70%. With custom rate plans suited to each business’s needs, Aeris customers report that, on average, their operational costs are $2,000/month less per 10,000 devices deployed. In total, an Aeris customer can realise a 2x reduction in the total cost of their IoT program compared to a similar solution from a mobile network operator.
PREPARED BY M2M NOW
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M2M Now - July / August 2015
OPINION
Will our cities be smart? That depends on what it means to yours There have been impressive efforts in smart city initiatives, but in many circles they are still perceived as merely ‘point solutions’ says Joel Young, senior vice president of research and development and chief technical officer at Digi International. This raises the question of – “When will we see large-scale, multi-disciplinary implementations?” To which I offer the following answer with a further question: Have you been to Singapore? Singapore has a plan to become the world’s first ‘smart nation’. In 2013 Singapore announced an Integrated Infocomm Media Masterplan, with the goal to “establish Singapore as a smart nation that leads the world in tapping the potential of Infocomm and Media (ICM) sectors and that nurtures innovative talent and enterprises”. If you’ve travelled to Singapore, this is evident all around you. The key is that they identified a problem and then went after it. The plan represents a combined effort that spans government, the private sector and academia – and outlines five broad strategies: • Establishing agile ICM infrastructure • Building strategic ICM sectors • Growing and retaining passionate ICM human capital with required skills • Enabling people and businesses to harness the power of ICM • Building an R&D ecosystem that supports ICM innovation and commercialisation. Not only are multi-disciplinary implementations being enacted, there’s actually a blueprint available. They have noticed that becoming a smart city is less about undertaking a massive multi-disciplinary project and more about evaluating what ‘smart’ means to each city. To evaluate a smart city from this perspective, I’d offer the following advice: Don’t look for a checklist of what qualifies as a smart city. Just as each city has its own commercial centre and areas of importance to its citizenry – each should create its own definition of a ‘smart city’ metric. Stop worrying about defining a smart city holistically, and start with one initiative that matters.
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In order to start – each city should evaluate the impact on quality of life and cost. For example, in China one of the main smart city efforts is in telemedicine, while in other cities it may focus on public safety (crime monitoring), or running services at peak efficiencies (i.e. street lighting, traffic control). Each city should make its own determination. To try and put everyone in the same box only delays efforts. Leverage existing standards and move beyond protocol concerns. Get beyond protocol paralysis as it can be addressed fairly easily. It’s more important to define the context within which your smart city initiatives will operate. By answering the questions of what needs to be achieved and why, it becomes much easier to agree on protocols and which security practices and standards you’ll need to adopt. Smart cities will have arrived when we stop talking about them. From my own perspective – smart cities will have truely ‘arrived’ when we don’t even notice them. We’re almost to the point now when we’re surprised by ‘dumb’ locations. Smart cities have moved further ahead than most of us are really aware – and that’s a good thing. To be candid, I loathe these types of proclamations. Innovation happens when we see a problem and apply creative problem solving. It doesn’t happen when we make overarching demands like “give me a smart city strategy”. We need to define the outcome first. Joel Young has more than 29 years of experience in developing and managing data and voice communications. He joined Digi International as vice president of engineering in June 2000 and is currently the senior vice president of research and development and chief technical officer.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
OPINION
To succeed in smart city deployments city managers need a tailored plan One of the key markets that is getting excited about the Internet of Things, and the operational efficiency benefits that can stem from it, is Smart Cities, writes Alex Chau, research director, head of Asia, Machina Research. From metropolis to rural country town, city managers are excited and keen to transform their city to a smart city. Alex Chau
The concept of a ‘Smart’ city is not new, ever since movies like Blade Runner and Minority Report, people have had a vision of what a futuristic city should look like. The numerous smart city applications and services that are available at the moment are steps in the right direction. The problem that city managers face is where to start: there is a lot of difference between having ambitions to be a smart city and the practicalities of achieving it. Machina Research has been delving deeply into numerous deployments around the world, seeking to understand what makes a successful smart city deployment. Some trends have emerged that can help a city manager on how to best proceed.
Saving on lighting The biggest item on each city’s monthly bill is electricity for street lighting, so it’s logical that ‘Smart Lighting’ is on the top of the wish list for city managers. By just switching to a more energy efficient light bulb it can save up to 30% of the electricity consumption. If the city were to add connected intelligence to the service, where the streetlight can be controlled, adapting to environmental conditions as they change, a further 20-30% saving can be achieved. The beauty of this service is that the saving from it can be invested into other smart projects, making it easier for future services to get off the ground. However, as the saying goes ‘no pain, no gain’. In order to achieve this enormous saving, upfront capital investment is needed, from swapping out HID bulbs for LEDs, to installing new network infrastructure for the added intelligent management. This upfront cost has deterred many from pursuing it. However, the barrier is slowly being lowered as the price of LED light bulbs are dropping due to maturity of the technology. Similarly, the cost of connectivity and the maturity of connectivity solutions are also falling.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Eyes on the street Another application that’s quite popular with the city managers is CCTV. Nobody wants to have it but with terrorism and high crime rates a fact of life for many cities around the world, the service is much needed. Real positive results has been seen in cities with the service: crime rates have dropped by around 20%, increasing business confidence and investment in the city, and attracting new talents and boosting the city’s standing. With wireless and video encoding technologies advancing in recent years, there are many options for city managers to choose from when it comes to implementing the service. For locations that are hard to reach but non-critical, wireless solutions can now cover those blind spots, while bandwidth requirements are lower through improved video compression algorithms. However, the city will still need a heterogeneous solution that includes a robust and high bandwidth infrastructure to handle the numerous video feeds from cameras in mission-critical locations that won’t be affected by the weather. While these two applications alone are seeing increasingly rapid deployments, a one-size-fits-all approach is not the right way to go. Many city managers have fallen into the trap of blindly following the early adopters - often leading to failure because each city is unique, with its own capabilities, problems and vision. City managers need a tailored deployment plan that factors in the idiosyncrasies of their particular scenario, covering their own goals, capabilities, budgets, structures, and the characteristics of that city. Alex Chau has 20 years of experience working across the mobile industry, holding various appointments at Motorola, Sunday Communication Limited, Gartner, UTStarcom, Inc., and IDC. Alex's expertise in the mobile and telecommunication marketplace includes technology planning, technology assessment, business plan development, go to market strategy, network optimisation, implementation of mobile solutions and project management of complex mobile/fixed networks.
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INTERVIEW
Building smarter cities with Low Power radio networks Cities have to be resilient, ever-evolving places for trade and the smart use of IoT technologies can help cities maximise their economies of scale. Urban living may encompass 86% of the developed world, and 64% of the developing world by 2050 and about a million people are added each week to the world’s cities.
Andrew Brown, executive director of Enterprise and IoT Research at Strategy Analytics recently spoke with Will Gibson, CEO of Telensa, a company at the forefront of using low-power radio in rapidly growing areas such as smart lighting and smart parking, about the role his company is playing in creating smarter cities and what the longer term future holds. AB: Will, can you give us an overview of Telensa’s approach to IoT, both in terms of its product portfolio and its wider business strategy? WG: Telensa’s Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) radio system was originally developed 18 years ago and, after several generations of enhancements, has now become one of the most widely adopted technologies for IoT. Radio coverage is similar to cellular, but its network costs are 100 times lower and battery life is measured in years. These make it ideal for many applications in which high numbers of devices over large areas are connected. Over nine million devices using UNB have been shipped for tracking, smart metering, smart lighting and smart parking.
Our business model has a simple, customer orientated goal: ensure that applications can be delivered at the lowest cost, with the highest reliability and with confidence that the network will be available for decades. This involves designing and delivering complete turnkey solutions. So, if a city wants to lower energy costs, we deliver a complete smart lighting control system utilising our lighting controllers, basestations, a hosted cloud service and user interfaces as shown in Figure 1. This approach contrasts with other players who have complicated chains of device manufacturers, network suppliers, network operators, application developers and service providers. Customers are reliant on these value chains staying intact for ongoing support. Who do you turn to for help when a system involving multiple parties goes wrong? Telensa is now the leading provider of smart lighting control systems worldwide, enabling us to expand successfully into new applications, such as our smart parking solution, that are integrated into a single low cost network. Beyond this, we’re also expanding into new consumer-orientated areas with a mix of products that will be sold directly to consumers, as well as innovative services that weren’t envisaged even a few years ago. AB: At Strategy Analytics, we estimate urban ICT revenues for smart cities services could reach almost $1 trillion globally by 2022. How significant is the opportunity for smart cities in your opinion, and how much of that market can you capture?
Figure 1 – Telensa’s smart lighting solution
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Increasingly, smart parking is identified as the
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WG: We agree with your analysis on market size. Within this, most analysts recognise street lighting as the leading early application and, given its distributed physical layout, it’s seen as a key enabler towards further smart city applications. We are already global leaders in this application area with more lights connected to our systems than GE and Philips combined. Our lighting networks span Europe, US, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Will Gibson, CEO, Telensa As a co-founder of Telensa Ltd, a spin off from communications technology company Plextek, Will Gibson has been a key part of the team that has brought Telensa’s street lighting and smart cities solutions from initial concept to marketable systems. Telensa is a further example of Will’s 25 year experience and background in bringing new radio and telecommunications products and services to market. Will is a graduate of Oxford University.
Andrew Brown, executive director, Strategy Analytics Andrew Brown is executive director of Enterprise and IoT Research at Strategy Analytics, leading a team covering cloud computing, mobilising line-of-business applications, enterprise and mobile broadband devices, IoT, and M2M Communications.
next most attractive application and our solution here is being deployed in the world’s largest on-street parking monitoring system in Moscow, and is rapidly expanding to new cities every month.
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However, one barrier to the market reaching its full potential is too many players trying to take money out of the value chain. It’s pretty clear that applications won’t succeed if the price point isn’t right. The solutions to many smart city problem are simple - but are in danger of being strangled by complex value chains. This is why Telensa provides complete end-toend, large scale systems that provide measurable benefits today at a fraction of the cost of traditional networks. The scope of our complete solution is shown in Figure 2. Combined with our commitment to open standards, we aim to maintain our position as one of the leading global players in the market.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Figure 2 – Telensa’s complete IoT solution
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INTERVIEW
Power levels used in UNB are thousands of times lower than cellular, translating directly into low cost and long battery life
AB: Low-power wide area networks are a very hot topic right now as compared to traditional cellular platforms, with costs measured in pounds per year rather than pounds per month. Can you tell us more about your UNB specification? WG: UNB requires complex engineering but achieves something very simple. Sensing and control applications only need to communicate small amounts of data and, by sending these over very low bandwidth channels, we can reduce the power needed for a given range. Figure 3 gives a comparison with other systems.
the reliability and capacity to support millions of devices at low cost that are key. As already mentioned, as a fully bi-directional technology our solution has clear benefits in terms of battery life. For example, a consumer tracking device connected to a Telensa network will have a year’s battery life which is not possible with other systems. We are not a competitor to LoRA as that is a proprietary technology controlled by a single semiconductor company rather than a system solution. They have a complex implementation but have developed a custom IC that is easy to adopt for small scale deployments, so we expect to see a number of vendors adopt their chips. However, spread spectrum, their underlying technology, is recognised to have challenges in terms of its dynamic range and so is not suitable for large scale deployments. SIGFOX is not necessarily a competitor, and in fact we are working with them to standardise narrow band technology. However, SIGFOX is a network operator rather than a complete solution provider like Telensa. In low margin applications, such as smart street lighting, we don’t believe that the value chain supports the extra cost of a network operator layer. In higher value applications such as parking, we believe that the value is in the service that is provided to the end user, rather than in just the connectivity. Time will tell which business model is better, although we expect there to be space for both.
Power levels used in UNB are thousands of times lower than cellular, translating directly into low cost and long battery life. Further battery life enhancements are achieved through an efficient bi-directional protocol. Also, given UNB’s long range, even in an urban context, the actual network infrastructure needed is modest. In Birmingham in the UK, we currently control 100,000 street lights with 33 base stations, each about the size of a laptop so they can be installed on street furniture such as lighting columns easily and quickly. A UNB network for a city of 1 million people costs less than £100,000 and can be installed in one week. AB: How does your UNB technology - pivotal to Telensa’s solution - differ from offerings such as SIGFOX or the LoRa Alliance? WG: We are waiting to see deployments at scale from these newer players, so can’t really comment on them as fully rolled out systems. At a single device level we all achieve similar range as we are bound by the same laws of physics, but it’s
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By providing complete solutions we can cover the lowest margin applications and use the scale of these systems to provide higher value applications at a lower cost than would otherwise be possible. AB: Partnerships are critical to the success of many IoT projects. Can you tell us about your ecosystem partners and what role they play in your offering? WG: Local partners who understand applications and the real needs of the end user are critical. Using partners who simply build out networks and assume that users will follow wouldn’t work. For example, smart parking in Moscow is driven by a need to reduce congestion; in China there is a need to audit parking attendants; whereas in the UK it is simply about cost savings. Local radio network operators would not spend time understanding the implications of these different requirements. Our partners spend their time understanding the real drivers behind each of the application markets, build up local sales channels, and then work with us to develop a business case
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Figure 3 – Characteristics of Telensa’s UNB technology
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Figure 4 – Telensa’s Smart Parking System
for the end customer. We continue the engagement through delivery and afterwards to ensure that the overall solution meets the customer’s needs. Whilst we try and ship standard products, diverse local requirements often lead us to enhance our solutions to meet local needs. This has helped us succeed across a wide set of countries and made sure that our UNB technology is truly global. Telensa’s solution is currently the only low-power wide area technology that can be deployed on a global basis.
integrated systems that can radically change the finances of each application so that a much richer set of systems can be implemented. The value of smart street lighting is well understood and our biggest challenge now is in meeting a rapidly expanding geographical footprint. Smart parking is accelerating and we have developed a number of enhancements which radically change the finances of on-street parking so that the business case for these systems is clear for the first time. An overview of our smart parking system is shown in Figure 4.
AB: What are the greatest barriers to growth for smart city applications and what challenges do you see in areas where you’re highly active - such as smart street lighting and parking?
AB: What are your plans for expansion? Are there other areas that you think may benefit from your approach to the IoT?
WG: We believe that the true potential of smart cities depends on three factors: • Focus on return on investment – we win sales by demonstrating clear cost savings. That is why our deployments are large scale, often running to hundreds of thousands of devices per city. Too many cities are running small scale projects simply to appear “smart”. Governments need to push cities to analyse the real cost savings and demand evidence of the financial benefits. • Development of standards – cities are in danger of being locked into proprietary systems at the IT and network levels. We are working in a number of international standards bodies to drive interoperability between vendors. Examples include ETSI where we’re working with our network competitors to standardise UNB; the TALQ consortium which is developing smart lighting standards and the Cities Standards Institute which is developing a broader set of smart city standards. • Cross-departmental decision making – our individual solutions such as smart lighting and smart parking each make financial sense on their own. However, many smart city applications provide big societal gains but have marginal financial benefits. In these cases it will be necessary for different departments to work together on procurement. Our solution enables cities to implement
WG: We are actively expanding on several fronts and we are recruiting in a number of areas to achieve this. • Geographically - we are expanding our network of direct sales and support staff, for example in the US. We are also growing our set of partners in countries that we do not operate in directly, such as SE Asia and S America. • Smart city applications - we are continuing our success in lighting whilst investing in our parking technology to ensure that it is world class. We are also enhancing our offering in other application areas including smart grid, water metering and traffic management. • B2B applications – UNB based systems can provide massive efficiency savings for companies. We are engaging with businesses that are looking to optimise their operations in areas such as asset management; postal tracking for high value shipments; highways maintenance equipment tracking and stock level monitoring. • Consumer applications – we are developing a number of consumer products that we will launch soon via direct B2C sales channels. However, we are also working with a number of global brands to develop applications that nobody could have dreamed of before IoT was envisaged. It’s early days, but the idea of moving our technology into the mass market and so enabling the true potential of IoT is incredibly exciting.
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EXPERT OPINION
The smart city has already begun Half of all humanity now lives within an urban environment. According to predictions by the United Nations, the number of city dwellers will grow to 60% by 2050 and pressure is building on city authorities to develop more efficient and sustainable strategies in order to cope with the anticipated growth.
There are a number of areas in which Arkessa is already enabling customers to help city authorities, utility companies and other enterprises to make a fast and powerful impact, including: • • • •
De-materialisation and smart logistics City mobilisation and traffic flow Energy supplies Energy efficiency
De-materialisation and smart logistics We've witnessed how online billing, music downloads and TV streaming are replacing their physical predecessors and how this impacts manufacturing and distribution costs. Similarly digitising the Smart City environment would create incredible efficiencies. Smart metering is already bringing IoT connectivity into homes and businesses by tracking utility usage and feeding the data back to the relevant management company. Home delivery of groceries is being optimised by a simple smart change; grocery stores are offering lower delivery charges to customers who select ‘green delivery slots’ which allow local distributions to be combined into the same time slot. This smart change could be applied within the wider distribution sector; by merging delivery routes/drop-offs, distribution resources would be optimised, fuel costs lowered, and traffic congestion reduced. In a similar manner, “mobile warehousing” will have the benefit of keeping stock in the field, closer to the customer. We’re supporting Fujitsu in creating a secure network of vans, acting as mobile stock points and connected by a combination of mobile broadband and low-power radio technology. This secure wireless solution is readily applicable to manufacturing, where decentralised optimisation decisions can be made by monitoring the data from physical processes.
City mobilisation and traffic flow Local authorities continually look to improve traffic flow and reduce pollution, and smart changes can make a big difference. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) specialists are already helping local authorities to enforce speed limits, bus lane use, and congestion charges as well as aiding police and other emergency services to source roadside vehicle ownership information. Meanwhile, UK-based Clearview Traffic Group assists drivers in planning their journey, avoiding slow traffic or an accident site, and finding a parking space. Other companies, such as TracknStop, are looking to improve the use of tracking and data transfer to prevent vehicle crime.
Their solution helps drive down global vehicle thefts and lets consumers work with the appropriate authorities if their car is stolen. The device can be retrofitted into any vehicle and can remotely track, safely disable, and retrieve the stolen auto. Within the next 10-15 years, autonomous cars and street-side infrastructure will be increasingly commonplace. In these early years, worldwide auto manufacturers are forming strategic positions on autonomous vehicles. At the same time, trials and demonstrators are showing the potential and stimulating user demand. Earlier this year at the Freescale Technology Forum in the US, Arkessa's communications helped Freescale demonstrate their Connected/Autonomous Car solutions both within the exhibition halls and on the streets of Austin, TX. Air pollution is still a major issue in many cities, with the European Environment Agency stating that ‘nine in every ten European city dwellers breathe bad air’. Managing traffic flow by optimising travel times in peak hours and implementing optimised driving can cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by as much as 60%.
Energy supply Centralised energy distribution networks currently tend to be huge, inefficient grids. They lose power in transmission and are ill-equipped to cope with unexpected surges in use. During the England v Uruguay match of the 2014 football World Cup, the UK’s National Grid anticipated a surge of around 1,300MW at half time. That's equivalent to the capacity of a large gas-fired power station. Surges are a manageable challenge when planned for, but cannot always be anticipated. Energy distribution will be further complicated by electric cars, home generation, feed-in and storage. CGI’s smart grid experts are working with utility companies across the Americas, Europe and Australia to help them understand and leverage this complex and fast-changing segment of the energy supply chain. Imagine a future where energy bills go down and not up! Energy generated at home can be stored and used when needed, with any surplus sold into the grid. Electric cars in turn can become part of the supply solution – not part of the demand and distribution problem.
Energy efficiency Around 40% of the world's energy is consumed by buildings, and this could be reduced by an estimated 15-25% by using building analytics to optimise building performance in areas such as lighting, ventilation, temperature, and air-quality. In the streets, local authorities can meet their energy saving targets by upgrading their existing lampposts with LEDs. If the ‘Humble Lamppost’ - an Integrated Infrastructures and Processes Action Cluster (IPAC) initiative from the EU’s Smart City project – is adopted, then municipalities can also benefit from a range of built-in components including CCTV, Wi-Fi, security, air quality measurement and transport monitoring.
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Andrew Orrock, CEO of Arkessa, explains that although the challenges are complex, the ecosystem required to overcome them is already in existence. Humanity has crossed a threshold, much of the data is already being generated and shared in open municipality databases to enable insight, and this access to data continues to grow exponentially.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH ARKESSA 48
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Residential properties can be aided by Climote, the connected home specialist, whose devices have multiple consumer benefits, including fast installation and userfriendly controls for simple energy management, enabling Smart Cities to achieve demonstrable energy savings of up to 20%. Future HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) policies in large enterprises, offices, call-centres and educational buildings could benefit from a fusion of weather forecast, outdoor air temperature and quality, and internal environment data. M2M data can be combined to make more efficient control decisions and optimise energy use.
Applied intelligence – both machine and human Smart deployment of M2M/IoT and data analytics systems are essential components in driving efficiencies across these sectors in a sustainable way. We should be conscious however of the ‘rebound effect’, where energy consumed by ICT advances could cancel out potential efficiency savings. It’s already reckoned, for example, that the whole internet currently consumes as much power as Japan. While embedded processors, wireless connectivity and data centre technologies are continually optimised for compute and power efficiency, the Smart City community must strive towards unified approaches to deployments and service creation. Fortunately, the community combines high intelligence with well-informed sensitivity to the human issues involved at its heart. It is, however, restricted by budgets, the rate of innovation and political strategies. Ultimately, the Smarter Cities will be ones where there is a collaborative eco-system. Companies such as Fujitsu, UrbanDNA, and CGI are already working hard with us to spark new businesses, processes, and urban policies for future cities but there's still a long journey ahead. As much as the community around Smart Cities can set plans and are embracing technology to improve the way the cities function, we can be certain that the next generation will interact with technology and their urban surroundings in ways that we can’t yet fathom. Just as with IoT deployments, Smart Cities have learned the lessons of the recent past should future-proof their technology selections and target near term benefits at the same time. It is of course a big challenge but, by focusing on efficiencies in health, transport, and energy, the ecosystem can enhance lifestyles, enable Smart City 2.0 and truly change the World.
Andrew Orrock, CEO Andrew is CEO and co-founder of Arkessa, a leading M2M and IoT managed services provider. He is committed to creating an efficient Internet of Things ecosystem, and is passionate about the positive impact it can have on the planet. For more information visit www.arkessa.com, or contact us at hello@arkessa.com
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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DATA
Vast data – new tools needed to create new realities It’s clear to any observer of our industry that its focus is fast shifting away from connectivity and towards the very acute issue of what exactly we’re going to do with all the data that we can now collect and analyse, writes M2M Now’s Alun Lewis. As a result, attention is concentrating on the role that analytic tools such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can play in helping us better understand our products, services and communities.
The idea of getting machines to do our learning for us – or at least a lot of the heavy lifting – goes back to the days of Alan Turing. But what’s the current situation and where could this intensely important field be taking us? The algorithms that we create will inevitably influence human behaviour, a topic that Jaron Lanier has explored in a couple of excellent recent books such as ‘You are not a Gadget’ and ‘Who owns the Future?’. In terms of the scale of the challenge facing us, Ben Parker, principal technologist at analytics company Guavus comments: “IDC’s Digital Universe study forecasts that the IoT will drive annual data production from 4.4 zettabytes today to
50
44 zettabytes by 2020. Machine learning and analytics will be critical to cope with this overload, so that all the data points can create benefits automatically. For traffic congestion in a smart city, a properly designed machine learning algorithm blends structured data such as historical rush-hour traffic patterns with unstructured data such as Tweets about an accident to automatically take measures to reduce congestion, for example retiming traffic lights and diverting traffic down uncongested alternate routes.”
Analysis in real-time In aerospace, real-time analytics already plays a huge role as Rupak Ghosh, vice president of engineering services company Cyient, explains: “The IoT is revolutionising the aerospace industry. Airlines can translate vast volumes of data into meaningful business information that can then be applied to determine the status and performance of aircraft systems and subsystems. Sensors are now distributed throughout the aircraft to monitor key performance parameters, such as fuel burn in the engine. On landing, this information can be analysed, with action taken to correct any minor faults and ▼
When it comes to spotting patterns in data – or at least the data that we receive through our senses - humans are superb. The trouble is that we’re so good at spotting patterns that we impose them even when there’s no pattern actually there, hence our predilection for seeing fairies, UFOs and other entities. Indeed, there’s a useful ancient Greek word – pareidolia – that means the human tendency to see faces in clouds that’s often useful to remember in all the current analytics debate.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
get the aircraft back in service as soon as possible. Five years ago, this post-flight analysis would have taken many days to complete, whereas now there are solutions available that provide useful data within minutes of landing. There’s more work to be done before real-time health monitoring from the skies becomes a reality - current bandwidth for in-flight data transfer is around 400 Kbps and the next planned upgrade is up to 10 Mbps.” For real-time analytics company VoltDB’s CMO, Peter Vescuso, addressing this mix of dynamic and historic data will be critical: “Organisations are interacting with Big Data – data that has volume and variety – but very few are successfully interacting with Fast Data – data that is both Big and has velocity. We are quickly reaching the point at which a new corporate data architecture is necessary to support both Big and fast data. Frameworks such as FIWARE and Hypercat are being discussed as approaches to a solution. In the immediate term, other systems, based on very fast, transactional databases, are being used to manage flows of sensor data from electric and power grids, enabling utilities to both manage fast flows of sensor data and use it in real time to make policy, billing and utilisation decisions. The challenge is being able to analyse this data as it’s coming in, create context for it based on current and historical information, and make instant, intelligent decisions that directly translate into business and civic value.” In terms of the growing power of tools, for Puneet Pandit, founder and CEO of specialist IoT analytics company Glassbeam – who recently announced a partnership with ThingWorx – techniques like AI and neural networks are appearing as compute resources become available more cost-effectively via the cloud: “The cutting edge focus of analytics is around machine learning and AI – and there are many ways that systems can now draw on unstructured data to solve problems, such as searching through existing knowledge bases. In addition, there are other techniques such as supervised machine learning and genetic algorithms.” One significant issue in many implementations of this vision however is the tendency of organisations – and the humans that they consist of - to create disconnected departments and silos, as Brian Gilmore, solution expert, Internet of Things and Industrial Data, at Splunk suggests, “One word – data silos. There’s a painful lack of interoperability in M2M. Machines talk like machines – and even worse, only to machines that are just like them. There are cultural and language barriers in the space and it’s both stifling innovation as well as blocking advanced concepts in machine data analytics. So how do we fix this? Some cultural change is required first – the domain owners of M2M, especially on the industrial side, need to remove some of the walls to their environments, either letting the data out, or letting the tools in.” Gilmore concludes: “But why stop there? What value can social graphs bring to M2M? Augmented reality? And what happens when we move
M2M Now - July / August 2015
advanced analytics of M2M data to new platforms? We’ve already seen very early results in the value that elastic cloud technologies can add, so how about quantum computing?” Similar perspectives, but focused on the Utilities sector come from Mike Ballard, senior director, utilities at Oracle EMEA. “There’s now the ability to mix utility and non-utility data – especially with the introduction of smart meters. This enables us to drive down with much more detail into the greatly diversified patterns of consumption that we see across different households. Analytics already can present thirty to forty typical consumer profiles and this is going to grow as we gather more data and energy markets themselves become more complex. This in turn is going drive much more accurately targeted marketing, spotting home workers, for example with particular deals.” And on the topic of quantum computing – seemingly IT’s own version of our perpetual wait for fusion power - Robert Bates, head of Information Architecture at Wipro Analytics, comments, “Quantum computing enables a leap forward in the ability to extract predictive and prescriptive solutions to many data problems. Wipro is currently working with a number of customers on developing quantum-like simulators using large scale platforms from public cloud providers as well as internal assets, for those that can afford the efforts, to run multiple simulations in parallel and then using regressive as well as correlation statistics to determine progressive direction and rates of change. We’ve been partnering with many leading Big Data analytics platforms and have also incorporated many open source technologies into our portfolio strategy. He adds: “An immediate practical application of current quantum computing simulators for commercial uses would be specifically to identify trends in behavioural analytics. Individual, as well as segmented, behavioural data could be worth billions and Google has publicly stated its efforts to build a quantum computing platform. Additionally, Wipro sees tremendous capacity in an explosion of IoT information in conjunction with advances in nanotechnology. This will be key for the manufacturing and healthcare and life sciences industries.” Touching on future potentials and the need to work together to breakdown the silos, Tom Gilley, founder and CTO of innovative data service exchange company wot.io that provides companies with access to different analytic tools, observes, “When you look at successful implementations of AI – which are so successful that people don’t really recognise the advances that have been made – such as voice recognition, these have usually involved the cumulative sharing of models from different disciplines to refine the intelligence. With VR, for example, this involved the application of acoustic models, language models and dictionary models. This is a critical issue in areas that involve multiple parties – such as in Smart Cities.”
Ben Parker, Guavus
Puneet Pandit, Glassbeam
Brian Gilmore, Splunk
Tom Gilley, wot.io
Robert Bates, Wipro
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CASE STUDY
Rally drivers turn to satellite M2M for safety and tracking in the North African dunes The Rally of Tunisia is a famous event which started in 1982. For decades, motorcycles, quads and cars – typically 400 vehicles on average – have taken to the sands every spring and sped across some of the world’s most extreme desertscapes.
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However, the annual rally came to an abrupt halt in 2012 following a number of securityrelated incidents: Continuing to hold the race was deemed too much of a risk. The Tunisian government made its message clear – the race could only be resumed once the security risk had sufficiently diminished, or was appropriately mitigated.
the event organiser, France-based NPO Events had the ability to track each vehicle’s location as well as enable drivers and riders to communicate with officials and with rescue services in the event of an emergency, whatever its nature, mechanical or physical.
A friend in orbit Tunisian satellite solutions specialist, VMD, a Globalstar VAR operating in Africa, was entrusted with the task of implementing a solution that would assure the safety of the participants, and enable communications even when participants were deep in the desert.
When it was mooted that the race might be resurrected in 2015, government departments leapt into action to do everything possible to increase the likelihood that the race would get the green light. The Tunisian Ministry of Sport and the Ministry of Tourism both faced intense pressure to deploy new measures to ensure the safety of all participants as well as officials and visitors to the race. It was widely assumed that if the race was not given the go-ahead in 2015, then it would probably be the last attempt ever. So the stakes were high.
VMD set up a partnership with NPO to develop a customised tracking system. With the requirement that the devices needed to be small, waterproof, easy to use and reliable, the solution was based on the SmartOne M2Mbased satellite tracker from Globalstar.
It was of vital importance that race officials at
Jamel Hajji, sales and marketing manager at
▼
When it was mooted that the race might be resurrected in 2015, government departments leapt into action to do everything possible to increase the likelihood that the race would get the green light
M2M Now - July / August 2015
VMD explained: “We fitted a SmartOne tracker unit to each car, quad and motorbike, and attached it to the battery power supply.
The security solution included a rescue helicopter manned with a crew who could pinpoint the location of the distressed racer rapidly and precisely
“We designed the device to have two alert buttons; the driver or rider would press orange for a mechanical emergency such as a breakdown, and red for a medical emergency,” he added. It was important that the entire system enabled reliable ‘itinerary recognition’, so that race officials and rescuers would know where each vehicle was at every point, in relative positioning with each other, as well as being able to rapidly know their position amid thousands of square kilometres of unmarked, dune filled sand. Alongside its technology partners, VMD also developed a software map interface to fulfil these requirements. After several tests of the system in Morocco and southern Tunisia by VMD, the Tunisian government was satisfied that the M2M-based system would deliver on its safety and security requirements. The 2015 Rally of Tunisia was given the go-ahead to take place on the 25-30th May.
Coordinated aid The security solution included a rescue helicopter manned with a crew who could pinpoint the location of the distressed racer rapidly and precisely. The helicopter was kept busy during the race as land-based rescue vehicles and ambulances could not reach deep into the dunes, and the helicopter intervened in multiple SOS rescues. One of the main benefits of the system was that the helicopter crew could pinpoint the location of all competitors from a single screen view.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
Day two of the rally was a particularly gruelling stage, and eight cars suffered irrecoverable mechanical failure. Two drivers even spent two nights in the desert. The airborne team was also called to rescue a driver who while broken down in the desert suffered a diabetic attack. In another dramatic rescue, a driver crashed resulting in a cerebral fracture. What makes the SmartOne unique? “Ruggedness and precision,” explains Hajji, “SmartOne helped rescuers locate the injured and ill very rapidly.” Everyone involved is now very hopeful that the success of the 2015 race - and the demonstrable life-saving capability of communications and safety enabled by satellite M2M-based SmartOne - will help re-establish the Rally of Tunisia in the annual rallying calendar.
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EVENT PREVIEW
WEARABLE EXPO - Wearable Device and Technology Tokyo January 13th 2016 will see the appearance of the second WEARABLE EXPO - Wearable Device and Technology – event, an exhibition specifically focused on wearable devices and their supporting and enabling technologies. Running over three days and taking place at Tokyo’s Big Sight venue, there will be around two and half times more exhibitors than at the 2015 event, with more than 250 exhibitors expected. Right from its launch, the exhibition has attracted a wide variety of visitors from the automobile, medical, IT and other industries – nearly 70% of whom had purchasing authority. Last year, negotiations for business deals there were intense, with visitors from other Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong as well as Japan. Next year’s exhibition will be divided into five specialised zones: The Device Zone is for companies to show their latest wearable devices such as smartglasses, smart clothing, wristbands, smartrings and other smart accessories. The IoT Zone is for IT companies who provide connectivity solutions that support the wider wearables market.
For further information please visit: www.wearable-expo.jp/en/. As exhibition space is limited, companies are advised to contact the show management as soon as possible at: wearable-eng@reedexpo.co.jp.
The Development Technology Zone is for companies who provide the technologies that underpin wearable devices, such as batteries and sensors. The Business Solutions Zone focuses on companies who provide wearable-enabled solutions, such as in factories to increase production, improve logistics and facilities management in the distribution sector, and efficiency and patient care in the medical and healthcare world. Finally, the AR/VR Zone specialises in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality related systems and services.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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THE BACK PAGE
And which particular M2M/IoT tribe do you belong to? When it comes to introducing new technologies to any sector, understanding the cultural issues of the business communities involved can be just as critical as the choice of system or vendor. Alun Lewis, M2M Now magazine’s new editor, ponders whether we need a new breed of ‘digital anthropologist’ to help us navigate this emerging terrain and what skill sets we’ll need.
Alun Lewis
One of the major pleasures and privileges of my decades in ‘the industry previously known as telecommunications’ has been the entry it’s given me to so many wildly different market sectors. Each vertical, whether it’s banking or healthcare, has its own unique cultural heritage that inevitably influences how they see they see the world – and how they think they can exploit new technologies for their own ends. Highlighted in our February/ March issue’s Industrial Automation report from 451 Research, Brian Partridge, for example, emphasised the implicit challenges in the M2M/ IoT space of bringing together far more intimately the very disparate worlds of IT and Operations. You can see traces of this cognitive disconnect – and its related dissonance - throughout history, both old and modern. Whether it’s the Incas failing to use the wheel – or the Ancient Greek aeolipile, also known as Hero’s engine, a steam turbine which never moved beyond being a ‘natural curiosity’ - there are always very human reasons why technologies remain unexploited or ill-used.
“Specialisation is for insects” Robert Heinlein 56
In a book published last year by ex-TM Forum industry guru, Martin Creaner, ‘Delivering the Digital Economy’, he highlighted the internal cultural failings such as arrogance and inertia that left much of the traditional telecoms industry struggling to find a profitable and strategically strong place in a fast changing, online world. One key problem causing this is that in many industries and businesses, careers often progress
by knowing more and more about less and less. Telecoms – especially where IoT and M2M are concerned – are ultimately about the infinite interconnectedness of everything. While having huge respect for those industry specialists and for the analyst communities, I do sometimes feel that we’re actually starting to need some more unconventional “synthesists” with the necessarily broadest perspectives to show us how things can fit together in untraditional ways. One great example of this was explored a few years ago in John Markoff’s excellent ‘What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry’. If you want to understand the emergence of windows, mice, hypertext and many of the networking technologies we take today for granted, look to a bunch of long-haired visionaries in the Northern California of the 1960s and 1970s, who wanted to subvert the military-industrial complex then dominated by Ma Bell and mainframes. As Robert Heinlein, the famous science fiction writer once quipped, “Specialisation is for insects” and, as a species, we only came to dominate the planet by being able to soft-wire solutions in our brains and not rely on evolution to give us dedicated tools like wings and fins and claws. Gaps, boundaries and liminal spaces are where evolution happens fastest – and there are certainly enough of those in the IoT/M2M domain to keep us busy for a long time yet.
M2M Now - July / August 2015
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C O M E S E E U S AT B O O T H 4 8 3 2
CONTENTS
US SUPPLEMENT
With two U.S. shows high on the agenda for the M2M/IoT community over the next two months – IoT Evolution and CTIA Super Mobility – M2M Now thought that we’d take a specific look this issue at the forces at work in the country. With research from International Data Corporation (IDC) suggesting that the worldwide Internet of Things market will grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020, you can be sure that a major part of that will be generated by U.S. companies – both as vendors and as consumers of IoT products and services. In this supplement, we provide overviews of what to expect at both conferences, regional news roundups and our usual mix of industry insight and comment.
S6 S4 U.S. NEWS Recent significant developments in the U.S. market
S10
INTERVIEW: MARC JONES
WEST COAST ROUNDUP
The CEO of Aeris examines the current challenges facing our industry and how we can help smooth out a clear IoT adoption path for our customers and their users
A quick tour by M2M Now contributor Guy Daniels on some of the players in that region
S16 FEATURE
S12 INTERVIEW: ALEX BRISBOURNE
KORE’S CEO talks with Frost & Sullivan’s Vikrant Gandhi about exploiting the many advantages of LTE
S18 EAST COAST ROUNDUP M2M Now contributor Guy Daniels on the East Coast’s continuing role in industrial leadership, plus a review of PTC’s Boston LiveWorx event
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
Jeff O. Smith, chief innovation and technology officer at Numerex, asks how best to compete in the Industrial Internet of Things era
S20 EVENT PREVIEWS Get an insight into what’s going to be hot at the two major U.S. shows of the late summer and who’s going to be leading the debate there
S3
US NEWS ROUNDUP
Cellular IoT/M2M devices to reach 908m in 2019 A new report from New York-based 451 Research finds that the number of cellular connected IoT/M2M devices will increase nearly fourfold globally from 252 million in 2014 to 908 million in 2019. This will be driven by hardware and bandwidth costs dropping to a point where nearly every enterprise can reap the benefits of virtualisation; the ability of cloudbased middleware and data platforms to securely generate insights from machine data at ever greater scale; as well as the general buzz around the topic that is leading to awareness of the transformational potential of IoT/M2M. It finds that connected passenger vehicles and
connected energy will pace the market in terms of connection volume while emerging solutions such as 'pay as you drive' insurance will grow the fastest. “We expect that M2M/IoT solution suppliers will find fertile ground in vertical markets such as retail and government that will adopt IoT/M2M to enable strategic digitisation strategies such as smart cities and the use of digital signage, mobile point of sale, and connected kiosks to drive the transformation from brick and mortar to ‘click and mortar’,” said Brian Partridge, VP of Research.
Intel buys semiconductor company Altera for $16.7bn Intel Corporation is to acquire semiconductor company Altera in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16.7 billion. The acquisition will give Intel access to Altera's field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, enabling it to produce new classes of products that meet customer needs for the IoT and data centre markets. “Intel's growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments,” said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel. “With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore's Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more. Whether to enable
new growth in the network, large cloud data centres or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs.” Altera will now become an Intel business unit, while Intel plans Brian Krzanich, to continue CEO, Intel support and development for Altera's ARM-based and power management product lines.
Wi-SUN Alliance creates new categories for utilities and municipalities The California-based Wi-SUN Alliance has announced a new adopter class of membership, created specifically to make it easier and more cost effective for utilities and municipalities to deploy the Wi-SUN solution set to meet Phil Beecher, their Smart Grid and chairman, Wi-SUN Smart City needs. The Alliance Wi-SUN Alliance is a non-profit association focused on the IEEE 802.15.4g standard for Field Area Networks (FAN).
S4
“The Wi-SUN Alliance is focused on developing a strong test and certification programme to deliver interoperable products for the Smart Utility, Smart City and related IoT markets,” said Phil Beecher, chairman of the Wi-SUN Alliance. ‘This new class of membership will make it easier for utilities and municipalities to join the many other organisations already supporting the Wi-SUN solutions set and take advantage of these products and programmes.” Current applications include advanced metering infrastructure, distribution automation, smart cities, infrastructure management and intelligent transportation systems.
Google announces Project Brillo Google is taking a new approach to IoT platform development. At the company’s I/O developer conference, Google announced its Brillo project, which it describes as the ‘underlying operating system for the internet of things’. Brillo is derived from the Android M OS but has been optimised for IoT environments, and will also support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). A developer preview is expected during Q3 of this year. Google appears to be positioning Brillo as a smart home platform, in competition with Apple’s iOS-based HomeKit. It is likely that Google will use the Nest Learning Thermostat, acquired as part of its $3.2bn Nest purchase last year, as the central home ‘hub’, in a similar way to how Apple is positioning its Apple TV. In addition, Google announced Weave, a cross platform common language that will let Brillo devices communicate with each other.
80% of IoT apps will be generating revenue for users by 2018 Boulder, CObased Harbor Research forecasts that 80% of IoT apps will be generating revenue for users within the next three years, as opposed to just 65% today. The research, conducted on Mark Armstrong, behalf of VP Progress software firm Progress, also found that smart homes and wearables were the top two key markets for app development, followed by automotive and sports/fitness – the public sector was at the bottom of the list. However, by 2018, app developers expect that healthcare, smart city and automotive will be the top three industries for IoT app development and revenue generation. “Developers put their long-term bet on industry and infrastructure IoT apps as the foundation for revenue generation,’ said Mark Armstrong, VP of Progress, sponsors of the report. “They just need the right technology tools to gather, analyse, use and manage contextual IoT data to maximise this opportunity, from both a creative and revenue perspective.”
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
US NEWS ROUNDUP
Qualcomm and Daimler sign connected car deal Qualcomm Technologies has formed a strategic partnership with car manufacturer Daimler to transform future vehicles with mobile technologies that enhance in-car experiences and vehicle performance through 3G/4G connectivity and wireless charging technology for invehicle use. Daimler will also use Qualcomm’s Halo wireless electric vehicle charging (WEVC) technology and will assess the application of Qualcomm Technology’s newly developed Automotive Solutions. “It’s important that we remain on the cutting edge of technology and continue to deliver unparalleled experiences to our customers,” says Prof. Dr. Thomas Weber, member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG. “The automobile has become a mobile platform and an extension of always-on connectivity,” added Derek Aberle,
president of Qualcomm, “and, as such, we’re utilising our expertise as the leader in mobile technology to deliver in-car experiences comparable to the ease and convenience of smartphones.” Aberle also said that Derek Aberle, Qualcomm’s wireless president, broadband chips have Qualcomm been installed in 20m cars as of May.
Dr Thomas Weber, Daimler AG
Success for ThingWorx IoT development platform Japan’s NTT Docomo has expanded its relationship with Boston-based PTC, a global provider of technology platforms and enterprise applications for smart and connected products, operations, and systems. PTC provides Docomo with its ThingWorx IoT Development Platform, to streamline the use of cloud-based IoT platforms. PTC and
John Stuart, SVP of global education
Docomo will continue to jointly market IoT solutions that are specifically developed for the Japanese market. PTC has also launched its IoT Academic Program to address the growing concern about an IoT talent shortage by providing students with an investigative learning experience and hands on exposure to its ThingWorx IoT application development platform. “IoT is one of the most revolutionary and exciting technology trends of this lifetime,” said John Stuart, SVP of global education at PTC. “Companies and educators alike are trying to understand how the IoT can be taught and implemented, and we’re working closely with our corporate customers, market partners and educators to ensure students from all disciplines are better prepared to meet the needs of today’s IoT world.”
Reducing security risks in industrial automation environments Rockwell Automation and Cisco have launched new architectures to reduce security risks in industrial automation environments, as part of their Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) solution. The Industrial IoT is increasing the need for highly flexible, secure connectivity between devices, machines, work flows, databases and people, enabling new models of policy-based plant floor access. A securely connected environment also enables organisations to mitigate risk with
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
policy compliance and protects intellectual property. “Security can’t be an afterthought in today’s plant environment,” said Bryan Tantzen, senior director at Cisco. “As we connect more devices and create more efficient ways of operating, we also create certain vulnerabilities.” The new CPwE security expansions include design guidance and validated architectures to help build a more secure network across the plant and enterprise.
Real-time automotive data collection and analysis Santa Clara-based Hortonworks, contributor to Apache Hadoop for the enterprise, has collaborated with car audio and software company HARMAN to enable the connected car ecosystem with real-time IoT data, insights and prognostics solutions. The two companies intend to offer solutions to help automotive manufacturers gain valuable insights by analysing real-time information based on data streaming from connected cars. Using the Hortonworks data platform, they will collect, store and analyse data from real-time alerts on driver behaviour, road safety or the need for maintenance and repairs, and can inform automotive engineers about driving behaviour, safety risk and car performance across all vehicles. “This is a very exciting step forward in the evolution of the connected car as we speed up the time to market with powerful functionalities that benefit the OEMs and their drivers,” said Sanjay Dhawan, president of HARMAN Services Division.
Speeding up IoT timeto-market with Xively Boston-based LogMeIn has released the next generation of its Xively IoT solution, designed to help companies bring secure, internet connected products to market in a shorter time frame, while Michael Simon, CEO and accelerating their co-founder, LogMeIn transition into connected product businesses. The performance, security, data privacy, and management innovation introduced in the new Xively was influenced by findings from the company’s existing IoT customer base, which include IoT 'first movers' in the consumer product goods manufacturing, home automation, light industrial, and life sciences industries. “We believe that the IoT has the potential to transform every product company, regardless of what products they make, into a technology company. And that opens up a wealth of new opportunities,” said Michael Simon, CEO and co-founder of LogMeIn.
S5
INTERVIEW
Orchestrating the next wave of IoT innovation The IoT sector is reaching an important second stage in its evolution. Pilot projects might be running within individual companies or in vertical markets but, in many cases, the supporting IoT ecosystem – which now also extends into the critical area of analytics - is still too fragmented and diffuse for benefits to be realised quickly and cost-effectively. The current challenge for our industry is to help smooth out a path for users, turning their first faltering steps into a smoothly coordinated dance, joining together different devices, connectivity options, business processes and partners and customers in hopefully elegant and intelligent ways.
M2M Now’s Alun Lewis recently caught up with the CEO of Aeris, Marc Jones, to discuss his insights into the future of the IoT space, where the likely stumbling blocks on the road ahead might lie, and how the industry can adapt itself to add greater value to its customers. M2M Now: Marc, you’ve had a fairly diverse industry background before joining Aeris. Can you talk us through your journey and lessons on the way? MJ: From the perspective of today, it all makes sense - as these things sometimes do. While I’ve also been a securities lawyer and investment banker, I’ve been intimately involved in some of the key building blocks that now make up the IoT universe. Fairly early on in the high-tech part of my career, I was VP in charge of making the first chip sets for IBM PCs. That gave me an invaluable insight into manufacturing issues from the ground up and how components and devices had to fit into longer value chains – all in an intensely competitive, cost versus performance environment.
From there I moved to become president at Madge Networks just as network technologies were undergoing a revolution and great effort had to be put into aligning with rapid changes in standards – not dissimilar in some ways with where this aspect of the IoT is now. The next piece of the jigsaw saw me at chairman and CEO of Visionael, an OSS vendor. That again was relevant to the IoT, given the need to provision, control and manage ever larger numbers of remote devices in smoothly seamless ways with minimal human intervention. Finally, I was invited onto the board of Aeris, becoming its CEO in 2009. Complementing that commercial journey, I’ve also served as chair of the National Cyber Security Partnership’s Enterprise Task Force and testified before the US Congress on both cyber security and on Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance issues. M2M Now: Chatting earlier, you mentioned two recent Aeris initiatives that you felt would address some of the more problematic areas in growing the IoT that are fast becoming apparent. Could you talk us through those? MJ: Firstly, what’s clear is that - for once industry hype is finally backed up by hard evidence of major IoT deployments across an ever-widening range of industry and business
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One company that’s been doing this for nearly twenty years is US-based Aeris which includes such names as Hyundai, Acura, Rand McNally, Leica and Sprint amongst its customers. Building on its years of investment in its own core network, application platforms, billing and management systems and cloud infrastructure, the company is now exploring new ways of bringing its solutions to market, making access to the IoT world faster, cheaper and more directly relevant to individual companies.
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Marc Jones, chairman and CEO of Aeris
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
That said – and speaking generally – it still takes far too long and is far too difficult for many businesses to get to grips with the complexity of all the options open to them in what we might call first generation IoT. Right across the value chain – from device enablement and integration issues through connectivity to the management and business process integration areas – these factors have, so far at least, stifled the truly widespread application of IoT innovation. Compounding this are very necessary concerns about
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sectors, reaching into our homes, cars, offices, factories – and even into our clothing and healthcare. Even the smallest, most arcane and niche business could almost certainly find some benefit from IoT – especially in terms of the tactical and strategic insights that the data gathered can provide if used appropriately. I’d doubt that you’d find a major industrial or business concern on the planet now that doesn’t have some IoT project underway, or isn’t actively evaluating it in terms of both threat and opportunity.
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INTERVIEW
“Neo has been specifically designed to eliminate many of the factors previously facing companies of all shapes and sizes who were looking to engage with the IoT”
Increasingly important too is the global nature of today’s business world. Having the ability to reach out and interact with devices and, by implication, with their users and customers wherever on the planet they are - is another obviously key building block. What’s needed is a way for a company’s engineering teams to make a start exploring the possibilities now open to them. The ability to start with an economically justifiable pilot project and see how different options best align with a business strategy and product or service line makes pragmatic sense. Fortunately, technologies like the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service options are as applicable here as they are for companies that already use Google or Amazon – but only if they’re backed up with deep IoT-specific knowledge that also includes insights into specific mechanical, manufacturing and market issues and the all-important and often vulnerable connectivity segment. M2M Now: So what’s Aeris doing to address these problems? MJ: Awareness of these stumbling blocks led us to launch our Neo affiliate program last year which essentially provides self-service connectivity for companies, provisioned through just a few simple clicks. Neo has been specifically designed to eliminate many of the factors previously facing companies of all shapes and sizes who were looking to engage with the IoT. You can simply go to neo.aeris.com, create your free Aeris account and order your SIMs online in under five minutes. There’s no volume commitment and we don’t lock you in a minimum term contract. You can terminate your service at any time. On top of that, extensive documentation takes users through all the stages involved, a forum helps leverage diverse expertise from other members of the community, and a
number of service packages can provide the right levels of support at the right price. M2M Now: If the choices confronting individual companies are complex enough, how do you see the state of play with different sectors – each of which usually has its own way of doing things and its associated cultural and technological baggage? MJ: It’s a bit too early to really talk about successful sectors as such and it’s probably more useful to look at individual companies that have taken the lead. There are, however, a number of common factors that apply across almost all sectors and that have to be taken into serious account. For a start, there are the regulatory frameworks involved that have usually built up in each sector over many years – often to protect the public, but also sometimes to protect powerful players from disruptive competition. If you look at the healthcare market for example – and the complementary ‘wellness’ device and service sector, deliberately renamed to avoid falling under medical regulations – there are a host of different national and international standards that must be met and strictly adhered to for obvious reasons. The IoT has enormous potential to improve the health of both individuals and entire societies across developed and developing countries. Similar issues arise in the automotive sector, the utilities and with the fast growing interest in smart city solutions. A smartphone or tablet app used by an engineer to interact with a generator, for example, has to incorporate mission-critical engineering principles in ways that a fitness bracelet obviously doesn’t. Tied closely in with regulations are standards – and there’s no shortage of involved standards bodies here, both in the IT and communications worlds and each vertical market. The success of particular standards – and the bodies that control them – is going to be predicated on how well aligned they are with the real world business needs of the actual users of standards. Just as with governmental regulations, the standards ▼
security, especially as we move into a world where devices talk to other devices with potentially unanticipated results, such as car-tocar signalling, or where critical systems such as the utilities and smart power are involved.
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Marc Jones is chairman and CEO of Aeris and has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry as a securities lawyer, investment banker, and senior business executive. Prior to Aeris, Marc was the chairman and CEO of Visionael, raising over $40m in capital to fund their rapid growth. Prior to Visionael, Marc was the president of Madge Networks, a company that grew during his tenure from $40m to $500m in revenue with a successful IPO. He was selected by Goldman Sachs as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in 2012 and 2013.
world can often suffer from the influence of oligopolies who are happy to play realpolitik games that often impact on business efficiency out in the real world. Another more commercially-focused problem comes from funding cycles and project timescales – especially where an IoT strategy has to be incorporated into wider manufacturing and business planning timeframes. Different parts of the IoT value chain – embedded devices, sensors, finished products, service support, retail models are all evolving at different rates and synchronising these together is a non-trivial issue. In many ways this echoes the problems that the mobile sector has faced in the last decade or so where handsets move at the speed of fashion, while the supporting networks must earn their keep over a number of years. Our part of the industry – the platform and connectivity providers and enablers – have a vitally important role to play here in trying to keep some kind of consistency and trust while the wider landscape continues to change. On one hand this involves dealing with the obvious basics like over-the-air provisioning and upgrades; on the other it involves committing to understanding our customers’ businesses well enough to anticipate the changes underway to their business processes and relationships. Ultimately, for example, they don’t care whether connectivity is done by 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, WiFi or the newer Long Range, Low Power options that are now emerging – it could be carrier pigeon as long as they get the actionable information that they need for their business ends. M2M Now: Your announcement earlier this year of a cooperation with Tech Mahindra seemed to position Aeris as much keener to grow your focus on specific markets. What was the thinking behind this? MJ: Returning to my earlier theme of speeding and simplifying IoT adoption and exploiting our existing strengths in connectivity, device management and platforms, we looked for – and found with Tech Mahindra – a complementary
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expertise in analytics-led, cloud-enabled systems that could give telecom service providers a fast, affordable and infinitely scalable access to true business transformation solutions for their own customers. We’ve branded this as ‘Jumpstart IoT’ and it includes a number of powerful elements such as a device and connectivity management platform, specialised system operations and support services, a device data and analytics services infrastructure and, perhaps most significantly in terms of our own growth and ambitions – a wide range of field-tested vertical applications that can be optimised to meet the demands of each service providers markets. Complementing this, we‘re also actively focusing on extending both our reach and that of our customers – and, by implication, their own customers and clients through two initiatives. One of these involves growing our footprint globally. The rise of a truly global marketplace in recent years means that companies of all shapes and sizes want their products and services supported wherever they are being used. The implications of this reach far beyond just adding appropriate connectivity solutions. There are inevitably wider local regulatory or legal issues to take into account for our customers in some countries and regions, such as cross-border data transfer and storage, or data privacy. The other initiative parallels this blurring of boundaries – only this time it’s focused on our customers’ value chains themselves. Applications don’t exist in isolation any longer and real value will increasingly be added by aggregating data from all the different parties now involved as the demarcation lines between products and services continue to erode. It’s no longer simply a B2C model, but instead potentially a B2C2M2M2B etc. chain that is effectively recursive to infinity. In that context, we have to adapt our own systems to support these new ways of doing business. Getting all these players, their devices and their data dancing together in commercial, technological and even legal harmony is the key challenge facing both Aeris and the wider IoT community.
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MARKET PERSPECTIVE
David Friedman, CEO, Ayla Networks
Gary Marks, President, Opengear
Jahangir Mahammed, CEO, Jasper
IoT on the USA’s West Coast West Coast USA: California, Silicon Valley, internet start-ups. Could it be any more different from the East Coast - and surely it’s a hot-bed of developer interest in M2M and IoT, asks Guy Daniels.
David Freeman, Ayla Networks
The region certainly doesn’t disappoint, with countless companies – large and small – developing innovative M2M and IoT technologies. It also has a strong regional identity, one that is closely associated with the internet and networking culture of the Valley. Because, while telecoms development may have started over on the East Coast and continued in pockets in Texas and the mid-West, today’s network innovation is firmly centred around the San Jose region. Thanks in part to the work done at Stanford University, NFV, SDN and open source are the new drivers of telecoms network innovations, and every major vendor and global operator now has a presence in the Valley, tapping in to the innovation culture. This all results in a perfect environment for companies to explore opportunities to develop new M2M hardware and services; there’s a wealth of talent available, plenty of funding opportunities and a ready-made ecosystem to support and scale successful projects. And, with the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple headquartered in the region, you would think the focus would be on consumer-based IoT technology. After all, Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in January 2014 is enabling the smart thermostat company to scale up its home-based IoT products and services. Apple is following suit and is busy expanding its Homekit and Healthkit platforms to encourage developers to create an ever-expanding range of IoT devices and services. According to Gartner, there will be 26 billion IoT devices by 2020, and a report by Progressive Policy predicts that IoT will contribute up to $1.3 trillion to the US economy in 2025. For the Silicon Valley giants, it’s all about building and supporting IoT platforms. But while there’s plenty of home-based IoT tech being developed,
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the region also supports a strong industrial-based development effort. Ayla Networks in Sunnyvale, California, develops cloud IoT technology that allows manufacturers to turn home controls, commercial HVAC, appliances and lighting into intelligent devices that are managed in the cloud by mobile apps. Ayla was awarded ‘cool vendor’ status in Gartner’s latest IoT report. It says that its agile mobile application platform (AMAP) provides 85% of coding and development work common to any high-performing, reliable and secure IoT mobile application. “Few manufacturers possess the sophisticated software engineering and user-interface design expertise to develop mobile applications that meet end users’ high expectations for a mobile app user experience,” said David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks. “Ayla exists to handle the underlying complexity of making IoT connectivity work, freeing manufacturers to focus on their core expertise in making great versions of whatever they do best – whether it’s a smart plug, a thermostat, a water heater or a home appliance.” Jasper, based in Mountain View, California, dropped the ‘Wireless’ part from its name a year ago to focus on M2M and IoT opportunities. “The real power of the Internet of Things is that it transforms a static product into a dynamic service,” said Jahangir Mohammed, CEO and founder of Jasper, which offers a cloud-based IoT platform for enterprises. “It's no longer an isolated thing. You can dynamically change what it can do for people on a daily, minute-by-minute basis. So now it's only appropriate that we don't look at that as a ‘thing’. It's a part of a much larger fabric; it's a service. This is the real power of the Internet of Things.” ▼
“Few manufacturers possess the sophisticated software engineering and user-interface design expertise to develop mobile applications that meet end users’ high expectations for a mobile app user experience”
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
Guy Daniels is a freelance telecoms writer
Brea, California-based Moxa develops advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solutions and is now offering industrial IoT solutions for smart grids. Focusing on the IoT, Moxa can offer a wide range of cellular gateways, data concentrator units, and head-end server products for the measurement, analysis and optimisation of energy usage, right down to the level of individual consumer devices. Networking company Systech, based in San Diego, California, is a great example of adapting to meet the new business markets, that are increasingly centred around M2M. It started life in 1981 building products for multi-user computers. Now it has entered the M2M space with its SysLINK range of IoT gateways, which have recently received Z-Wave certification. Common applications of its gateways include building automation, energy management, retail and mobile health, with interface options that also include ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular. At the beginning of June this year, Intel announced that it was acquiring specialised chipmaker Altera, based in San Jose. The $16.7 billion deal is a measure of the importance Intel places on IoT and M2M, as it seeks to better position itself as a leader in the emerging IoT sector, and to support the global IoT ecosystem it is developing through its network of Ignition Labs. (See page S4). Slightly further inland, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City in Utah, is Opengear, which makes critical infrastructure management solutions. Its infrastructure manager ensures the continuity of always-on IoT services, even during a network outage. “When you imagine every device in your office and home potentially connected and online, it’s going to require networking equipment that can handle the stress of a projected 26 billion connected IoT devices by 2020,” says Gary Marks, president of Opengear. “You have to consider how reliant users are going to be on these devices when they’ve become so deeply entrenched into our daily lives – connectivity hiccups simply won’t be tolerated.” However, there is also significant cross-over between M2M and IoT activities on both coasts. BK Medical, mentioned in our East Coast review, used the services of IoT platform provider RTI, a Sunnyvale, California-based company that was named ‘The Most influential Industrial Internet of Things Company’ in 2014 in a survey conducted by Appinions on behalf of Forbes. RTI develops data distribution service (DDS) technology, which provides a physicalto-digital link for industrial IoT applications. So it’s not all connected home and smart appliances on the West Coast; there’s plenty of innovation to support industrial and vertical market M2M deployments as well.
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INTERVIEW
LTE - bringing a new spectrum of opportunities for M2M and IoT LTE presents both a challenge as well as a huge opportunity for both IoT companies and their customers. New standards continue to emerge, some specifically focused on supporting M2M applications, while debate over spectrum availability and allocations continues in many countries.
VG: Starting with the current state of adoption of LTE, can you give some examples of the emerging M2M applications that are running on LTE networks? AB: It’s important to know both where we are today and also where we are going with LTE. In the context of the industry, LTE may well represent the technology enabler that levels the playing field and becomes the true liberator of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision. Currently, KORE sees LTE being used for high bandwidth and relatively higher throughput deployments. For example, LTE is being used to support Tabletbased deployments in areas such as nursing. Other clear examples of high bandwidth usage include broadcast for TV and radio station activities, where dual-network LTE can be used to give greater reliability. Content from high definition cameras can also be streamed over these LTE networks, which is an interesting application. Other use cases for LTE include video security, industrial backup, leased line replacement for
businesses, and also for ubiquitous Wi-Fi hotspot services. Leading auto makers are already heavily advertising 4G LTE in their cars, which have Wi-Fi routers running over LTE being built into the next-generation of these vehicles. Wi-Fi hotspots in public vehicles, such as buses and trains, are additionally being deployed. Even though it’s still comparatively early, LTE is becoming more important by the day, and will ultimately be used in a broad variety of contexts. For KORE, we’ve already strongly adopted LTE and have a rapidly increasing penetration of LTE devices across our growing customer base. VG: The relatively higher cost of LTE modules and devices is an industry challenge. When do you see costs dropping to acceptable levels to ensure increased penetration of LTE? AB: About now! It really is already on the doorstep. KORE will soon have a broad-based initiative underway to educate the market as there are more than a few misconceptions out there. One, for example, is that LTE modules are expensive – that’s the first. LTE Networks don’t have the same coverage as 2G or 3G networks – that’s the second misconception. Thirdly, people also tend to believe that the networks are not fully interoperable. Then, there is also a notion that roaming is patchy in the world of LTE. In reality, based on KORE’s experience and its knowledge of OEM initiatives, we expect LTE devices to very soon reach the price where 3G
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Despite this, as Alex Brisbourne, CEO of KORE, one of the world’s leading M2M/IoT service providers, recently explained to Vikrant Gandhi, industry director for mobile and wireless communications at Frost & Sullivan, work on solutions able to exploit the many advantages of LTE are already well advanced.
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Alex Brisbourne - CEO Alex has over 20 years of experience in the networking and telecommunications industry, in Europe, North America and Asia and most recently, as a General Partner in Aegis Management, an early stage technology incubator. His experience includes serving as General Manager for Microcell, the Canadian GSM mobile operator, where he launched the first 2.5G GPRS network in North America and Senior Vice President of Wavetek Wandel Goltermann, a leading test systems developer, based in North Carolina. Alex has extensive experience in wireless, enterprise and fixed line services and sits on the Advisory Board of a number of technology companies in the USA and Canada. In January, Alex was voted Chairman of the International M2M Council, the largest and fastest-growing IoT and M2M trade group.
Vikrant Gandhi Vikrant is industry director, Mobile & Wireless Communications at Frost & Sullivan North America. He has over eleven years of product marketing, research, and consulting expertise, which includes supporting clients’ needs through more than 120 syndicated market research deliverables and consulting assignments. He has particular expertise in the IoT, digital advertising, enterprise mobility management and next-generation wireless network infrastructure and services markets. He holds an MBA from the Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management, Pune, India.
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Additionally, interoperability is improving all the time. That said, there is still work to be done. There are more than 40 potential LTE bands in total and each specific geography will have its own mix of these. For example, you could be supporting more than three bands over a network running in North America for LTE. But there is concentration also happening in rollouts, which is a good thing. VG: What are the best practices that you would recommend for enterprises deploying on LTE networks to ensure global coverage? AB: If you look back at the history of M2M, application providers or enterprises came up with a product idea, which they wanted to be wirelessenabled and they then usually went down the ▼
GSM devices were as recently as the last quarter of last year - around the mid-$30s kind of point. In practical terms, we are also ending up with four different network technology stacks for LTE. As you fast forward a bit, you will see certain new categories of LTE devices start to appear and they will be in the $10-$12 range, which is where the 2G GSM products are right now. Then, for Class 1 devices, in the spring of next year, these could be in the mid-$20 price range and will certainly be below 3G. That’s a very important starting point. If you look at the lifetime ownership cost, the LTE network cost per megabyte is going to be noticeably lower than that of 2G. You don’t need a gigabyte data consuming application to justify a LTE network; you have a very viable, cost efficient replacement to 3G technologies coming like a train into the market.
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INTERVIEW
road of doing it by buying a modem and integrating the product. After that, they usually also needed a SIM card to enable wireless connectivity once the final product was ready. This is roughly how things were done. There’s clear evidence now that as this becomes more of an enterprise class adoption process with businesses thinking about deployment issues much earlier in the process. As a result, the connectivity players – such as KORE or the carriers – are being consulted much earlier. So, instead of building a product first, they should be talking with connectivity providers right from the start, outlining their desired coverage and then learning what they should do. Enterprises should open up to what they want to achieve, and then try to minimise the SKUs that they have to support. That way, when they roll out in different countries or regions, they will know which carriers they will have coverage with. That’s KORE’s clear advice to enterprises – go and talk with the service providers before you start building your product. Talking with somebody like a KORE gives you more options as KORE isn’t reliant on any one particular technology or network. Enterprises should also start to think about their economic models. As you go into multiple national marketplaces, you do have to think about network availability and cost of connectivity. For some applications, 20%-25% of the total lifetime cost of a deployment is going to be the connectivity element. This can all too easily become 50% if not planned properly. VG: How is KORE positioned to help enterprises maximise LTE opportunities for their M2M deployments? AB: KORE’s Technology Marketing teams, which include its OEM relationship team and its Analyst team, look closely at what is happening with LTE technology and the spectrum bands. KORE is actually rolling out an awareness programme to help educate the marketplace about LTE and this should be starting in the early part of August 2015. KORE is also doing many things behind the scenes to make it easier for enterprises to adopt LTE for their M2M requirements. For example, KORE is currently working on developing a blanket proposal to create a RFP type of approach, building a commercial framework where KORE’s customers could buy LTE devices
as a combined entity and so get better rates. This combined entity could have a substantial purchasing power, even though the customers making up that entity may not need so many devices individually. KORE has also collaborated with its carrier partners to develop a unique economic model that can help people easily migrate from 2G GSM - even for low bandwidth consuming applications - onto LTE and be able to justify the ROI for those applications. KORE currently supports LTE on all prime carriers here in the U.S. and with Rogers in Canada. We’ll be launching panEuropean LTE in the fourth quarter with two carrier partners, plus LTE services in Australia in conjunction with Optus. This will allow KORE to reach all these markets with a ubiquitous LTE product, which are also already supported on KORE’s platform. So, KORE has a product, it has a programme, and it is providing resources to help people understand where to go and buy the equipment. VG: What about the integrated billing and revenue management issues that have emerged as a key requirement of the ‘services oriented’ ecosystem that is now emerging as a result of M2M developments? How is KORE helping M2M customers simplify service delivery and billing processes to provide for such requirements? AB: Both the billing and usage-allocation aspects of this are important for enterprises. Previously, cost management was done in silos, in a nonintegrated manner for different M2M applications. An enterprise is now likely to want to drive multiple applications – these could be a security application, a fleet application, a supply chain application, and so on. Enterprises want to be able to properly identify and analyse the cost of deployments - including the connectivity costs across all of them. KORE has already built significant flexibility into its platform to be able to measure device level activity. In the meantime, if they want to handle end customer billing, then KORE has plug-ins such as RevX that can be used. So, if a product company wants to offer a medical monitoring product to the end customer, then billing, collections, and other related processes can also be handled by KORE. It is similar to the Audi connect® programme where even ▼
KORE is rolling out an awareness programme to help educate the marketplace about LTE and this should be starting in the early part of August 2015
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Ultimately, KORE helps enterprises get better visibility and control over their internal costs, while also supporting the external processes related to end customer billing for consumer-facing M2M applications
though the underlying subscription is with the mobile operators, KORE handles processes such as activation, settlement, credit card management and first line personnel support. KORE also sees multi-network capable applications that deliver better reliability becoming more important, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re wellpositioned to support that development. Ultimately, KORE helps enterprises get better visibility and control over their internal costs, while also supporting the external processes related to end customer billing for consumerfacing M2M applications. VG: Overall, what are the key differentiators for KORE in the cellular M2M space? Also, going forward, what more should we expect from KORE in support for next-generation M2M deployments? AB: KORE will continue to build out its networktechnology-of-choice capability. Certainly in some markets, developing and being able to provide a national capability becomes very much more important in serving high bandwidth, content rich applications effectively. As a result, KORE will enter into more relationships with carriers. Over the next two years, KORE will
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probably have six more networks added to its hub to address emerging marketplaces, particularly those where there are regulatory considerations such as Brazil and India. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll also continue to invest in application enabling toolkits. When KORE looks at the application enabling space, even though these are tough markets to monetise, we feel well positioned thanks to our completely integrated offering. In the next few months, KORE will have around 200,000 devices on its application enabling platform which is focused on helping people build apps where location information is a key component. That is really the secret sauce, in the way other platforms can focus on sensor integration and IT integration as their core competency. KORE will continue to maintain a strong focus on M2M security and we see that as another opportunity. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s again an area where the integrated approach, consisting of network, devices, services and security all matter. Additionally, KORE will focus a lot more on supporting the evolution of the enterprise. To summarise, breadth of coverage, depth of application capabilities, integrated service offerings to the enterprises, and enhanced security will all be important areas for us.
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ADVERTISING FEATURE
Does your company have what it takes to compete in the Industrial Internet of Things era? A perspective from Numerex The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an exciting new phase of the IoT era and it’s already rapidly growing and evolving. Whether it’s on the factory floor, in the warehouse, at the register or beyond, solutions are needed by small and large companies everywhere to attain new efficiencies and enable new revenue streams. But when it comes to deployment, even very sophisticated businesses quickly come to realise that they lack the deep IoT domain knowledge necessary for success. To track, monitor, optimise or secure fixed or mobile hard-assets on this scale is a monumental task for any company, regardless of its technical sophistication.
Dangers of going it alone nxLOCATE™ is an intelligent device which provides trouble-free asset ID and tracking of fixed and mobile assets
Companies attempting Industrial IoT implementations themselves often face long deployment times, system instability, high operating costs and end up with a solution that does not properly scale to meet their organisation’s long-term needs. That’s why many businesses seek an end-to-end IoT solution provider partner who can build on an existing robust platform. Recently, Numerex announced an extended, endto-end Industrial IoT platform, nxFAST™, specifically designed for building and deploying secure, flexible, and scalable Industrial IoT solutions for enterprise-class industrial and commercial businesses. The nxFAST platform is the latest addition to the Numerex solution set, enabling widespread, rapid deployment of IoT solutions in manufacturing, materials and chemical processing settings, or in nearly any other industrial or commercial area of business. The nxFAST Industrial IoT platform quickly yields new insights by providing ‘smart data,’ allowing the user to make significantly better business operating decisions, and through that, to increase profitability. The nxFAST platform provides the building blocks for large-scale implementations focused
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on increasing productivity, efficiency and operational effectiveness.
The role of smart devices and sensors The capture point for the critical data from all IIoT deployments begins at the sensor. nxLINK™, is a compact, industrial-grade, ‘intelligent sensor interface’ which harvests data from sensors and wirelessly transmits it either to a cellular or satellite communicator or to a local, smart control-panel. The nxLINK offers a simple GUI interface for users to configure data collection triggers based on threshold attainment, by time of day, or upon detected motion. Designed to operate in temperatures ranging from -10 to 70 degrees Celsius, nxLINK weighs less than six ounces with two user-replaceable Lithium 3.6V batteries installed. nxLOCATE™ is an intelligent device which provides trouble-free asset ID and tracking of fixed and mobile assets. It includes tilt-andtamper sensors which makes it significantly more sophisticated than the average ‘dots on a map’ asset tracking devices currently available. nxLOCATE incorporates FOTA (Firmware over The Air) capabilities for remote configuration, and can report information over a cellular network requiring only 2 AA lithium batteries for twice a day reporting. The nxDIRECTOR™ is a ruggedised, cloud-ready, industrial cellular-enabled router/gateway that provides intelligent data routing and processing at the edge of the network. The nxDIRECTOR features flexible plug-in cellular radios (LTE or HSPA+, HSPA), a Linux operating system for local processing, dual Ethernet connection with separate MAC addresses, dual USB 2 host, HDMI video capability, expansion ports for Beagle Bone Capes, and multiple short range radio communication capabilities (for instance, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy BLE, Z-Wave and Zigbee). nxDIRECTOR ‘s flexible hardware architecture and operating system provide a solid and ▼
There are many competencies required for developing and deploying typical IIoT solutions, but at the very least they must include these five major capabilities: • Connecting and managing hundreds - or even thousands of devices • Transporting and processing data on cellular or satellite networks • Normalising the data from those devices to facilitate efficient processing • Performing analytics and providing visualisation capabilities • Delivering the information via a robust application
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
intelligent platform for enterprise-grade, userspecific applications while supporting multiple carriers and bandwidths, including 3G, 4G and LTE networks. The wide capabilities of this workhorse device mean it can be deployed in many different environments and serve a multitude of needs.
The On-Ramp to the Industrial IoT Another key component of the nxFAST platform is nxCLOUDCONNECT™ Data Routing and Normalisation Service. The amount of data generated by IoT deployments can easily create a fatal bottleneck for the solution as the variety, velocity, and volume of data from thousands or even hundreds of thousands of connected devices transmit their data simultaneously. nxCLOUDCONNECT ensures that all collected data is aggregated and translated to a common format, through a single and seamless connection, using a standard interface, removing the data choke points. It also supports various communication protocols including the Numerexdeveloped open-source Pistachio protocol as well as MQTT and COAP, a burgeoning standard in the EU. This capability allows data from many sources to be received and normalised in such a way that the data can be easily consumed by other services, dashboards, or applications. In addition, nxCLOUDCONNECT serves as a plug-and-play subscription management centre for services such as geofencing, reverse geocoding, cell ID, weather, thresholding, pattern matching, blacklisting, two-way voice, tamper detection and more.
Additional Services Once all of that data is aggregated, companies face the issue of how to best analyse it in order to extract maximum business value. The nxFAST solution uses the ‘industry standard’ tools of ‘Big Data’ analytics, including Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, and Amazon Web Services. This allows companies very efficiently to store and to find value from large data sets and, in turn, to
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
make real-time decisions that increase revenues, maximise efficiencies, and reduce costs— ultimately increasing their bottom lines.
Security Is Paramount Finally, companies require data security in the era of Industrial IoT. For years, Numerex has been an industry leader in protecting the data assets of its customers. Using authentication, encryption, and virtual private network (VPN) technologies to protect customer data, Numerex remains committed to designing, building and implementing highly secure Industrial IoT solutions. Numerex addresses security at every stage of the solution, with full security integration across all five layers of the technology stack including the application, platform and web services, network connectivity, data transport, and the data centre or ecosystem layers, ensuring that all security measures work together.
Once all of that data is aggregated, companies face the issue of how to best analyse it in order to extract maximum business value
Numerex is certified under the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor Framework and has also undergone scrutiny for ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification, an internationally recognised information security standard, and is one of very few companies in the IoT industry to have earned and retained the designation.
Deploying an Industrial IoT Solution Companies considering deploying their own solution would be wise to investigate providers who have the scope, scale and expertise to implement a full, end-to-end approach in delivering an Industrial IoT business solution. Solutions that are built on the Numerex nxFAST Industrial IoT platform are based upon a set of proven, time-tested building blocks. As a result, the customisation required to meet a company’s specific needs is minimised and paves the way for rapid deployment, saving time and money. Whether a company needs an end-to-end solution or assistance with a portion of an Industrial IoT deployment, Numerex stands ready to enable them to achieve their goals.
Jeff O. Smith, chief innovation and technology officer, Numerex
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MARKET PERSPECTIVE
Chris Lowery, President, Wyless
Jeff Kelly, Wikibon
Jeff Immett, CEO, GE
IoT on the USA’s East Coast Think East Coast telecoms, writes Guy Daniels, and the chances are you’ll come up with some of the big names in network innovation – from the industrial suburbs of Boston, through New Jersey and down to the technology corridor of northern Virginia. Boston was once home to giants such as 3Com, Wang, Starent and DEC, centred along Route 128. At least, it used to be. Many of the telecoms vendors of the pre-IP world have long since gone, and the term ‘technology businesses’ in Boston now largely refers to the Facebook legacy of software start-ups (Facebook famously started at Harvard University). Now, about the only sizeable pure networking firm left is Acacia Communications. New Jersey is still home to Bell Labs though, and that great research centre continues fighting the telecoms corner, although no longer affiliated with AT&T. Down in Virginia, the Dulles Technology Corridor is home to many technology firms, and was once rather optimistically called ‘the Silicon Valley of the East’. That might have been a stretch, but firms such as NeuStar, CSC and XO Communications are headquartered there. So what does this mean for IoT? Well, the fact that so many networking firms have long since gone doesn’t mean that the culture of industrial technology has gone too. There is plenty of innovation underway in companies up and down the eastern seaboard. What’s more, the East Coast is where some of the biggest IoT users are based. The North Eastern USA is home to some major companies across many vertical markets – from manufacturing to healthcare and financial services. Many of these firms already look to IoT to solve their problems and are prepared to deploy solutions at scale.
Guy Daniels is a freelance telecoms writer
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Symbolising the heritage of the East Coast is the Industrial Internet Consortium, based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Industrial Internet is a term coined by manufacturing giant GE that embraces the use of M2M for industry. The IIC is an open membership group formed in March 2014 by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel with the aim of “breaking down the barriers of technology silos
to support better access to big data with improved integration of the physical and digital worlds to unlock business value” and accelerating the Industrial Internet. ‘The Industrial Internet Consortium currently has 167 members from 24 countries,” says the IIC’s Julie Pike. Emphasising the importance of the region in M2M and internet development, she adds that, “members that are headquartered in the northeast of the United States hail from many industries: security, software, and healthcare to name a few”. GE is a global leader in numerous industries and the Connecticut-based company is investing heavily in M2M and big data. As Jeff Kelly of Wikibon notes: “data created by industrial equipment such as wind turbines, jet engines and MRI machines ... holds more potential business value on a size-adjusted basis than other types of big data associated with the social web, consumer internet and other sources.” GE has already launched dozens of “Predictivity” industrial analytical applications, which CEO Jeff Immelt says could generate more than $1 billion for the company. “We are at an inflection point,” said Joe Salvo, manager of the Complex Systems Engineering Laboratory at GE Global Research. “The next wave of productivity will connect brilliant machines and people with actionable insight.” On a smaller scale is BigBelly, a Needham, Massachusetts-based firm whose message is to “transform waste management practices and contribute to the smart cities of tomorrow”. Trash collection and recycling is a resource intensive process that costs US cities $55 billion annually. BigBelly places IoT modules within rubbish bins and recycling centres, and offers a managed services option to city authorities, allowing optimised collections, route-planning, collection
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GE is a global leader in numerous industries, including energy, aviation and of course lighting, and has been trading since 1878
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
statistics and analysis. The city of Philadelphia bought 210 of the company’s recycling containers in 2009 and saved $2,600 per month just by avoiding landfill charges. Start-up firm Dog Hunter is another great example of M2M innovation. Based in the iconic Faneuil Hall building in downtown Boston, Dog Hunter is the commercial side of Linino.org – which combines the Linux OS with IoT hardware, WiFi 802.11n connectivity, OpenWRT and the P2P AllJoyn software framework. It wants to make open source WiFi home automation seamless and easy to understand for all levels of technology users, so it’s created the Linino software framework and operating system. Dog Hunter specialises in the design, development and production of Linino WiFi modules, to be used in automation control systems and sensor management. Founded in 2003, Wyless is an IoT managed services provider headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices around the globe. It runs a multi-carrier global wireless data network and offers management software and IoT services, to enable its customers to quickly deploy scalable and reliable IoT applications. “Our key focuses are growth of our core businesses, development of exciting new technology and above all, our customers,” explained Chris Lowery, chairman of Wyless. “Our roadmap is simple; perfection of our existing managed services offerings combined with future technology will ensure that our customers succeed in IoT.” Looking at sector-specific applications, Boston is one of the world’s leading centres for biotechnology and healthcare. Boston-based BK Medical, a specialist in ultrasound equipment, launched a year-long study to determine how their centralised standalone ultrasound systems can be integrated into multiple distributed systems. Working with IoT platform provider RTI, it’s adopted a data-centric approach to ensure that their architecture can be integrated with hospitals and healthcare providers.
PTC’s LiveWorx 2015 event strategic acquisitions announced at the Boston IoT Party Revolutionary War puns aside, an unseasonably warm and sunny Boston played host to around 2,300 developers and decision makers at PTC’s annual get-together at the start of May. Drawing people from 30 different countries, the event was also watched live in 91 countries. Presentations are still available at: liveworx.thingworx.com/. Keynotes from senior PTC executives brought the audience up to speed with recent acquisitions such as Axeda and ThingWorx. Emphasis was also placed on how the 3D data used to design and build products – PTC’s heritage having started in the CAD/CAE space – was now tied to data coming in from the products themselves, creating what the company calls ‘digital twins’. In this new virtual space, product development and customer satisfaction could be enhanced, linking real and digital worlds in near real-time.
Drawing people from 30 different countries, the event was also watched live in 91 countries
Supported by a presentation from Harvard Business School guru Michael Porter, was a forensic examination of how enterprises must change their own structures to respond to this data-centric manufacturing model. On one hand, analytics disciplines must include four key functions: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. On the other, there’s a need for companies to appoint a chief data officer to manage the growing ‘Data Lake’, fed by both internal and external sources. PTC also announced a number of further acquisitions including ColdLight, a big data machine learning and predictive analytics specialist, intended to serve as PTC’s core data analytics platform.
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
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EVENT PREVIEW
IoT Evolution Expo Business transformation through the Internet of Things
What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas – this time! Come August 17th, a unique set of people are going to be mingling with the crowds at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas at one of this year’s major IoT events. While there might be some back stage betting going on in terms of which technologies and applications are going to win out over the longer term, it’s going to be engineering skill and commercial insight that are going to decide our industry’s future – not Lady Luck. Originally launched as M2M Evolution, IoT Evolution Expo has evolved into an event focused on showing how M2M and the IoT are enabling life-enhancing and business-changing applications. Attendees get practical ‘take back to the office’ knowledge on how the IoT will impact their business by participating in sessions that cover practical case studies and real life IoT applications. IoT Evolution’s conference programme will feature topics that inform and educate the audience about the latest technologies, current and future regulatory policies, new verticals, network and platform solutions, new applications and all of the hottest topics across the ever expanding IoT industry.
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Speakers IoT Evolution features over 100 speakers from the entire M2M and IoT Ecosystem. Keynotes this year will be coming from Marc Brungger, CEO of Spireon and Mike Troiana, VP Industrial IoT solutions at AT&T, while Joe Gibbs, famous as a coach and team leader across the worlds of American football, NASCAR and Hot Rod racing will be inspiring the audience’s visions with another keynote on ‘A Winning Mindset’. The industry’s most renowned analysts, thought leaders and researchers will be present including, ABI, 451 Research, Machina Research, ILS
M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
Technology and others. Service providers, platform companies and device manufacturers will also all be ready to deliver guidance on implementation strategies, as well as network, software and hardware options and solutions. Finally, successful IoT pioneers and business entrepreneurs who have leveraged M2M solutions to drive game changing vertical and horizontal applications will be sharing their experiences and insights.
Five collocated events running simultaneously Every IoT Evolution attendee gets access to five collocated events. The M2M track covers M2M technologies, solutions and more. The Connected Home and Building and Transportation conferences provide insight into the unique applications, challenges and opportunities in these specific verticals. The more technical attendee will learn how to design and implement IoT solutions in the IoT Evolution Developers Conference and the Fog, Analytics and Data Conference provides attendees with an understanding of how fog computing, a new cloud-based architecture that takes computing closer to the network edge, will drive business intelligence and enable even more IoT applications. M2M Evolution – Hear from the Machine-toMachine and IoT ecosystems to help you sort through the myriad of M2M solutions, platforms and applications. The Connected Home and Building Conference – Hear how controlling nearly all aspects of buildings and homes will provide meaningful functionalities, applications and control interfaces for consumers, while also providing businesses with remote diagnostics, maintenance and analytics capabilities that will save money and drive new products. The Connected Transportation Conference - The IoT Evolution Connected Transportation event focuses on improvements underway in today’s vehicle and fleet management services and provides perspective on market forces, revenue opportunities and technical issues. A significant portion of the content in this event will cover drones and their application in film making, agriculture, construction, oil and gas and more. Fog, Analytics and Data Conference - Explore how to drive business intelligence to the edge of the network, using it to develop real time
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business analytics and create new business opportunities while also improving wider business processes. IoT Evolution Developers Conference - Get hands-on practical training on various aspects of IoT implementation, from initial concept though to deployment. Get design and development training on the entire M2M and IoT spectrum, from wearables and home devices to industrial applications. Classes cover cloud computing, automotive technologies and security, while also looking at ways to enhance customer engagement, and improve the whole end user experience.
Keynote speakers:
Mike Troiana, VP Industrial IoT solutions, AT&T
PLUS – an IoT Certification Program, Security Summit, Battle of the IoT Platforms, Networking events and more.
Exhibitors IoT Evolution Expo is supported by Diamond Sponsors AT&T, Spireon and IBM; Platinum Sponsors Eurotech and onstream; Gold Sponsors KORE, Safran Morpho, Systech and Telit; Corporate sponsors are Gemalto and Phononic and sponsors are Accelerated Concepts, Axis Communications and MERA.
Marc Brungger, CEO, Spireon
The roll call of other exhibitors includes: Ayla Networks; Cisco Systems: Dog Hunter; IBM; M2M Data Corporation; Mera Software Services, Inc.; Opengear; Skyworks Aerial Systems; Smartbear Software; and weboost.
Meeting the audience The IoT Evolution draws an international audience of over 2000 people from more than 500 companies, comprising both IoT and M2M ecosystem players as well as enterprise technologists eager to understand how to develop and implement an IoT strategy. These individuals come from an ever-widening range of industries including manufacturing, automotive, medical, chip and sensor manufacturers, retail, and oil, gas and energy. Attendee breakdowns cover: enterprise 35%; service providers 27%; M2M platform companies 16%: device manufacturers 12%; with press, analysts and others making up the last 10%. Geographically, all the regions of the world are also being represented with attendees coming from more than 90 countries: 37% from North America; 23% from Europe; 17% from Asia; 11% from India; 6% from South America; and 3% each from Africa and Australia/New Zealand.
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EVENT PREVIEW
CTIA Super Mobility 2015
The industry’s hot spot for everything mobile For those not burned out under the desert sun at the previous month’s IoT Evolution event, Las Vegas in September sees an ever bigger gathering of the digital good and great at this year’s CTIA Super Mobility 2015 – the largest mobile marketplace in the western hemisphere with over 1,100 exhibitors. Being held on September 9th, 10th and 11th at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, it’s expected to draw over 35,000 wireless professionals from around the world and from every part of the mobile ecosystem. Keynote speakers CTIA chairman and Bluegrass Cellular CEO Ron Smith will provide an overview of the intensely dynamic and competitive wireless industry. Marcelo Claure, CEO of Sprint, will address the CTIA audience to give his vision for his company’s future, while Glenn Lurie, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility, will discuss how our lives will be transformed by the Internet of Things and Verizon executive vice president and president of Product Innovation and New Businesses Marni Walden will address the company’s approach to video in a mobile-first world.
Explore the mobile ecosystem and the policies shaping it CTIA Super Mobility 2015 will also bring together key voices from sectors that leverage the wireless platform and position the USA’s role in the fast moving 4G landscape. iHeartMedia, Inc. chairman and CEO Bob Pittman will take the stage to talk about his company’s commitment to extending the reach of its content and services across all mobile platforms to meet consumers wherever they are. In turn, Under Armour‘s chief digital officer Robin Thurston will share the brand’s industry leading connected fitness strategy and Lowe’s chief development officer Richard Maltsbarger will present the home improvement leader’s view on the connected home.
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CTIA Super Mobility 2015 will also feature key policymakers who impact the mobile industry, including a keynote address from Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler. Mobile Innovation Conference: In partnership with Northwestern University’s renowned McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the event will explore a curriculum based on the most up-to-date research and knowledge available, providing insights into business strategies, consumer trends, industry developments and the latest policies. MobileCON Thought Leadership Program: Specifically for IT pros and execs, the focused content in this program includes targeted educational sessions, presentations on Thought Leadership Stages and unique Answer Bars. CTIA Open Innovation Summit: An exclusive invite-only event in collaboration with Microsoft, this is designed specifically for Fortune 500 CIOs, startup CEOs and VCs to discuss innovation and collaboration. Participation is limited to the first 300 qualified registrants. Mobile Onstage: These sessions spotlight the advancements that are radically changing the way connected consumers use mobile technologies, including educational demos and interactive presentations. M2M Now USA Supplement - July / August 2015
Event Listings Event Name
Event Venue
Event Date
Connected Cars http://connectedcarsworld.com/
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
23-25 June 2015
4th CAR Hmi Concepts & Systems http://www.car-hmi2015.we-conect.com/en/
Berlin, Germany
25-26 June 2015
IoT Evolution Conference & Expo http://www.iotevolutionexpo.com/west/
Las Vegas, USA
17-20 August 2015
Asia M2M IoT Business Platform http://m2mbusiness-platform.com/
Jakarta, Indonesia
25-26 August 2015
CTIA Super Mobility 2015 http://www.ctiasupermobility2015.com/
Las Vegas, USA
9-11 September 2015
M2M Zone @ CTIA http://www.m2mzone.com/ctia2015
Las Vegas, USA
9-11 September 2015
Smart Cities Week 2015 t.b.c. 2015http://www.smartcitiesweek.com/
Washington, USA
15-17 September 2015
IoT Solutions World Congress http://www.iotsworldcongress.com/en/home
Barcelona, Spain
16-18 September 2015
Industry of Things World 2015 www.industryofthingsworld.com
Berlin Congress Centre, Germany
21-22 September 2015
Internet of Things Security 2015 www.iotsecurityevent.com
Boston, USA
22-23 September 2015
Smart Home Summit www.smarthomesummit.net
Canary Wharf, London, UK
29-30 September 2015
Internet of Things World Europe http://iotworldeurope.com/
Berlin, Germany
6-7 October 2015
Next Generation Mobile Security for Today and Tomorrow http://www.globalplatform.org/TEEevent/
California, USA
12-13 October 2015
TU-Automotive Japan http://www.tu-auto.com/japan/
Tokyo, Japan
20-21 October 2015
European Utility Week www.european-utility-week.com/
Vienna, Austria
3-5 November 2015
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