Verticals, Horizontal- and IoT-Platforms

One of the implementation challenges that historically acted to restrain the M2M market is the issue of vertical-specific requirements. Each solution necessitated a new and/or tailored IT development effort; this had an impact on solution development costs and constrained the opportunity to realise meaningful economies of scale.

Over the past few years, the M2M industry has expanded in potential scale and scope. It is now interlinked with high volume, consumer oriented application opportunities and, more recently, with an extremely broad scope of connected devices under the Internet of Things/Internet of Everything/Industrial Internet umbrella. Most recently, this evolution has spawned a number of platform announcements from M2M market research firms and also from businesses, such as Aeris, GE and Wind River, many of which are recasting M2M capabilities in an IoT light. Was any of this predictable?