As Principal Analyst for Enterprise Mobility and IoT at GlobalData, Kathryn is responsible for analyzing events, companies, products and technologies within the wireless enterprise services, IoT, and private wireless solutions space.
MWC is always exciting, even for core enterprise mobility players that are offering new capabilities, forging new partnerships and acquiring new technologies.
After CES, it became clear that when it comes to M2M and IoT, the connected car, the connected home and wearables are the big themes; MWC always adds a European flair with smart city demos and announcements.
As my schedule begins to overload three weeks before Mobile World Congress, there seem to be emerging patterns that reflect what we will come away with at the show. These clues are based on the vendors that reach out to analysts for update briefings, the titles and descriptions of keynote sessions, and the invitations to demos, events and dinners by the enterprise mobility ecosystem. Continue reading “Mobile World Congress 2014: What Enterprises Should Look For – Mobility and M2M”→
CES held a surprising amount of content for the mobile enterprise. Wearables and the connected car were major themes, demonstrating interesting use cases and partnerships.
AT&T’s Developer Conference, co-located with CES, highlighted a number of recent enterprise announcements around services, partnerships and infrastructure.
While we can (and frequently do) debate whether mobile consumer electronics devices and other B2C solutions are ‘consumer’ or ‘enterprise,’ it is clear that they are ‘both.’ Businesses investing in mobile solutions that ultimately improve their relationships and communications with their consumer customers (or provide their customers with new services and products from which they generate revenues) clearly have enterprise mobility issues to solve. At CES, wearables and the connected car were major themes. Wearables are potentially a large (if hugely hyped) market with some interesting enterprise use cases. Not only can smart watches and smart jewelry (and in theory products based on Google Glass) take over some business communication tasks from smartphones, but wearables seem likely to take hold as B2C solutions for fitness and health monitoring (e.g., connected ‘lifebands’ that monitor how far and how fast you walk, UV-tracking bracelets). Real enterprise usage still seems a long way off, however, even for smart watches and Google Glass applications. Continue reading “CES Not Just for Consumers Any More”→
As the first of such acquisitions in the new year, PTC’s acquisition of ThingWorx is an interesting one; companies not generally thought of as M2M/IoT players are clearly figuring out how to add services and solutions to their portfolios to target or take advantage of the growing market for connected machines.
PTC has long been a prominent provider of solutions to manufacturers, beginning with its industry-leading CAD/CAM software in the ‘80s, which has since evolved to a portfolio for product lifecycle management (PLM), computer-aided design (CAD), application lifecycle management (ALM), supply chain management (SCM) and service lifecycle management (SLM). As connectivity is becoming an increasingly important part of manufactured goods, it makes sense that PTC would want to integrate solutions to allow its customers to build ‘smart’ machines that can be remotely monitored and serviced and to capture real-time performance data about them to improve their operations. Continue reading “And Away We Go: 2014 Begins with a M2M App Development Platform Acquisition”→
We have been talking about Smart Roaming and Multi-IMSI solutions from Gieseke, Devrient and Gemalto for more than a year. At MWC last February, Telefonica demoed a solution that would allow cross-country connectivity at in-country rates for its partners in what is now called the M2M World Alliance, which includes Etisalat, KPN, NTT Docomo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefonica, Telstra and Vimpelcom, all of whom use Jasper Wireless’ Service Delivery Platform.
Telefonica and KPN both announced commercial availability of this long-awaited service on Dec. 17. How important is this to their alliance, and is it a real threat to its competitors?
At least, in theory, global M2M agreements have had to deal with a number of obstacles when it comes to operationalizing roaming in a non-disruptive way. Not only are data roaming rates often prohibitively expensive, but guaranteeing seamless roaming with no interruptions in service, offering “identical” network performance across operators, and the ability to ensure that problems are solved rapidly are not trivial tasks. In addition, most operators that are providing connectivity, design and other professional services for large global deals have often told us that the “preferential” roaming rates they can offer with their partners are rolled into a total bundled offer price that is not prohibitively expensive. As long as they offer a global SIM that can be pre-installed in the factory and then used regardless of where the device is connecting, the total costs of global deployments are minimized. Conversely, large operators such as Vodafone and Orange, which do not necessarily have to roam across competitive carriers’ networks for pan-European deals, still have to deal with some performance and escalation issues when M2M assets are traversing across their own local operating companies’ footprints as well as when on partners’ networks. Continue reading “Has the Day for Affordable Multi-country/Multi-carrier M2M Deployments Finally Arrived?”→
Global voice and especially global data roaming remain expensive and confusing to consumers and business travelers in spite of recent EU caps and launches by global operators and alliances (such as FreeMove) that offer more reasonable zoned and pay-per-use tariff options.
While WiFi provides some relief, coverage is still spotty and unpredictable. WiFi aggregation leader iPass has come out with a new report that helps companies price out various roaming scenarios for their traveling employees and offers suggestions about how to use iPass WiFi services to take out some of the pain and uncertainty.
T-Mobile USA’s new unlimited global data roaming packages, announced in October, were an exciting move that should be appealing to its business customers, but the carrier is not completely alone in its vision. Other operators such as Telefonica and Vodafone, and operator alliances such as FreeMove, have also helped their business customers with zoned and usage-based roaming options which make the cellular costs less expensive and more predictable. Voice over WiFi is often free and readily available in Europe. However, although WiFi continues to be used as a way to eliminate or greatly reduce the cost of global roaming, it remains unpredictable, with security and performance issues added to the spotty nature of WiFi coverage, making it a less than perfect solution. Continue reading “iPass Tackles High Cost of Roaming with New Index”→
M2M security has emerged as a serious issue and a broad swath of the ecosystem is readying solutions to ensure that unguarded M2M endpoints do not cause security breaches, malware intrusion, and confidentiality leaks. Verizon launched the first operator security solution specifically for M2M this week, a cloud-based managed certificate service.
However, security is only part of what is needed to make M2M enterprise-grade. We need to apply the same kinds of capabilities to machine data that we would need for any business data that flows across networks to ensure connectivity is always available. SLAs and network redundancy for cellular, wireline, and WiFi connectivity needs to be available across these different access technologies, which need to back each other up in case of failure.
We are starting to see M2M come more into the traditional domain of IT and enterprise networks. According to Verizon, while some providers can offer a public network for the transmission of data, M2M customers should strongly consider a private network (wired or wireless) that can offer end-to-end connectivity. This provides additional layers of security and business continuity. They note that M2M solutions will thrive in an environment that allows endpoints to collect information, transmit it over a private wireless network, and transfer data into a secure, robust, and scalable cloud environment. In the cloud, customers will be able to visualize data and make insightful business decisions. In the future, they can take this a bit farther; Verizon intends to provide customers with an integrated support framework from endpoint to network to cloud and back. This will be the mechanism that supports end-to-end SLAs crossing multicarrier networks, for wired, wireless, and cloud environments (either Verizon or others). Other carriers are starting to talk this way about M2M as well; AT&T notes that its Commercial Connectivity Service, often used to connect mobile endpoints such as M2M devices to MPLS for added security, includes link redundancy to two data centers, with automatic failover in the event of an outage. Continue reading “The ‘Hardening’ of M2M”→
What a difference a year makes! In 2012, Vodafone was just starting to make sense of its acquisition of Cable & Wireless; it is clear that the operator has made significant progress in its aim to become an ICT provider of fixed and mobile network services and IT solutions (or as Vodafone said “an ICT transformation provider with a mobile core”).
Key themes and discussions during Day 1 included: a significant sales and delivery restructuring, plans to enlarge its footprint in emerging countries, a focus on fixed and mobile security, the importance of SMEs as a customer segment, a new Carrier Services (wholesale) group, the ongoing process of providing consistency across its operating companies, and Vodafone’s journey up the value chain to provide managed and transformational services.
Day 1 of the Vodafone Industry Analyst Summit, held in London on November 6th and 7th, included deep dives on a wide variety of subjects relating to its Enterprise business. Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao kicked off the event, setting out the company vision to continue to be a strong player in the enterprise and a leader in emerging markets, with “selective” service innovation and cost efficiencies in place to help the company continue to thrive in a still recovering global economy. Presentations by Vodafone Group Enterprise, the new Carrier Services organization, a key M2M customer (BMW), Vodafone Global Enterprise, the new Cloud and Hosting services group, the M2M organization, (followed by a customer testimonial by GlobeTracker), and the Enterprise Products and Network Strategy organizations completed the plenary sessions. The afternoon was packed with “deeper dive” breakout sessions on M2M, Carrier Services, Vodafone Global Enterprise, and Cloud and Hosting Services. The discussions on the 7th will feature the Cable & Wireless integration, Vodafone’s partnership with BAE Systems for providing customers with network security, and a session on how Vodafone is “One company with local roots”. There are also demos on a number of M2M services, the One Net UC solution, and enterprise mobility management solutions. Continue reading “Live from the Vodafone Industry Analyst Summit”→
MobileCon, held from October 16-18th in San Jose, was the last trade show of its kind, as CTIA prepares to merge its bi-annual shows (roughly divided in 2013 into enterprise mobility this October and “everything else wireless” last spring) and re-emerge a bigger and better show next fall. Needless to say, there was a lot of the usual grumbling among exhibitors about lack of leads and many more vendors than buyers.
However, many of the leading enterprise MDM and mobile security vendors showed up to demo their wares, and a few really interesting companies appeared on analysts’ radar screens with innovative solutions. Carriers were largely absent, although Verizon demoed Isis/NFC-enabled payment solutions, and Sprint hosted a “hackathon” in which developers had a few hours to come up with reasonably usable mobile apps using state of the art development tools and enabler.
So if lack of enthusiasm and sales leads constituted the “low lights”, what were the highlights? For me they included talking to innovative companies like GLOBO and Macheen. GLOBO focuses on the nascent SMB BYOD segment and is a $100 million, 17 year old company traded on the London Stock Exchange. It has been white labeling to 20 operators in 30 countries a suite of services under the brand name of “GO!” which make features phones act like smartphones. This core business and its infrastructure provides GLOBO with capital for expansion into new areas. GLOBO now offers an app store downloadable GO Office application which provides a secure container, secure browser, secure camera utility, secure peer to peer messaging solution for team communications, and an application development utility called app zone in which codeless drag and drop apps can be deployed on all major OSs. GLOBO acquired a little-known MDM vendor named Notify, to provide it with a basic MDM platform as well. GLOBO also offers “Enterprise Mobility in a Box” for SMBs which includes all of the above plus ten Microsoft Office 365 licenses, for $699 a year with 10 Gig of cloud storage per device per year. GLOBO has an SMB-friendly distribution channel, which includes Dell, Staples, Office Depot, and Tiger Direct, tech distributor Ingram Micro, and major league SIs such as IBM Global Services. Continue reading “Highs and Lows of MobileCon”→
Back in April, I wrote a blog on the growing problem of M2M security and how, in spite of the huge amount of data expected to be collected, transmitted and analyzed over the next five to ten years via a multiplicity of network access technologies, few vendors or service providers had put a stake in the ground with a set of security solutions devoted to M2M.
Six months later, there seems to be growing awareness of the problem: M2M data is just as likely, if not more likely, to suffer from malware, breaches of corporate data stores, SMS phishing (or use as a medium for malware), denial of service, ‘botnets,’ and stolen confidential company and personal information to be used for a variety of malevolent purposes (including corporate competitors, intrepid hackers, or those looking to sell information for financial gain).
Imagine billions of unmanned sensors and machines with little or no supervision and with no built-in intelligence (or potentially built using an insecure OS). Left to their own devices (pun intended), these sensors and machines amass and transmit vast quantities of information to remote servers in the cloud or behind the corporate firewall, without device and in-transit data encryption, or other traditional forms of security such as VPNs, personal firewalls, remote data wipe, intrusion/malware detection, or anti-virus software. Should this be the future of M2M/the Internet of Things? Continue reading “M2M Security, Revisited”→
While IT service providers always claim to be doing a lot in mobility, this year they really are: Many have reorganized/repositioned or added a mobility overlay to consolidate all the different internal organizations and services offering mobile solutions. Others have added new partners and services or reconfigured their portfolios.
While the large global IT SPs still target the Fortune 500, they see mobility as a wedge; they can take on smaller projects within large companies because they can upsell and cross-sell related consulting, advisory application development and integration projects, or get business from the prospect in other related transformational areas such as cloud/virtualization, UCC and social/data analytics/B2C. Does this make them a bigger threat to operators and pure-play managed mobility services providers than they were before?
Historically, whenever Current Analysis has talked to the large IT service providers (ITSPs) about mobility, they have claimed it is a really significant area and noted that they are providing mobility solutions throughout their vertical industry practices, their application development groups and their managed services organizations. However, each year, both the ITSPs and the operators claim they do not really consider each other competitors and, in fact, play well together for joint engagements. We recently completed a round of briefings from companies including IBM, HP, Accenture and T-Systems, and the sets of mobility services these providers offer appear to be positioned more as standardized services and less as simply a small (but growing) component of much larger BPO engagements. These solutions also seem to be similar to the operators’ portfolios. Continue reading “IT Service Provider Mobility Heats Up”→
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