Review of M2M Corporate Events in 2013

2013 as a whole was another year of strong corporate activity in the M2M market. A total of 147 events easily surpassed the 115 events that were recorded in 2012. These events include: announcement of an industry changing technology breakthrough; market entry/expansion initiatives; strategic partnering; investment-related acquisitions or divestitures; distribution agreements along the value chain; product innovation and outsourcing of key service delivery capabilities.

While 2013 saw many more companies taking to the press wires to publicize their sales wins, these are not recorded here as corporate initiatives. If anything, sales wins are the consequence of one or more corporate strategy commitments made in prior years.

An important development that occurred over the course of 2013 was a shift in sentiment to promote IoT in preference to M2M. This began with a raft of announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2013. Momentum continued to build around the IoT theme due to significant publicity drives and business commitments by large organizations such as ARM, Bosch, Cisco, GE and Intel.

M2M Corporate Initatives - Strong H1-2013

Over the first half of 2013, there has been strong evidence that companies in the M2M market are continuing to implement a range of business strategies to capture new M2M service and revenue opportunities. Specifically:

• the number of corporate initiatives is more than double that for the corresponding period in 2012

• the market is no longer entirely driven by supply-side companies; several enterprises have strategically embraced M2M connectivity and have either partnered with mobile network operators or they are taking the lead role in developing new services

Two Aspects to Business Model Innovation

New business models and business model innovation have become very topical in the M2M industry over the past year. Now, companies are talking less about eye-catching use-cases and more about the business of commercializing the most promising ones. The IoT market, currently preoccupied with cool and quirky devices, has yet to make this transition.

For any company in the M2M market, there are two aspects to business model innovation. The first deals with business-unit organization at a corporate level. The second applies to any special approach that is needed to capitalize on a specific market opportunity.