Vodafone is launching a communications platform to enable
companies to speed up and reduce risk on projects where machines
communicate with each other.
Vodafone anticipates a trebling of investment in machine to
machine (M2M) communications projects over the next five years.
Analyst Berg Insight
predicts the M2M market, which includes smart metering, "connected
cars", and the remote monitoring of equipment, to rise from €3bn in
2008 to €8.9bn in 2012.
M2M communications is already well-entrenched. The most common
example is where a mobile telephone contacts the nearest base
station to provide its location, and the base station can then
forward calls to the handset.
Other examples include telemetry, where a sensor collects and
sends information to another machine that aggregates it or sets off
an alarm; weather buoys and balloons that send temperature and
pressure data to weather modelling computers, and even the
Coca-Cola vending machine that alerts the bottler via the interent
when stocks run low.
Vodafone's
global
enterprise division will provide a single point of contact for
customers to manage national and multinational M2M projects from
idea to post-implementation.
A service platform will let customers manage and control
centrally the roll out and connection of M2M devices. This will
increase the speed of implementation and reduce the cost,
complexity and risk traditionally associated with deploying such
projects, said Nick Jeffery, chief executive of Vodafone's global
enterprise division.
The platform will offer a suite of management functions,
including the ability to activate, suspend and deactivate devices
at the click of a button, he said.
Vodafone has set up a 100-strong M2M team to analyse and develop
systems for emerging M2M markets such as smart metering for energy
companies, and e-calls, an alert system for cars involved in
accidents, for the automotive industry.
An upcoming Vodafone report entitled Carbon Connections claims
that M2M-enabled smart systems could cut European Union members'
greenhouse gas emissions by more than 90 million tonnes a year by
2020.