Balancing the heavy focus at this year’s MWC on connecting people through social networking applications was a parallel thread about connecting things, writes Alun Lewis.
However you’re going to brand it – from Ericsson’s 50 billion connected devices vision to the GSMA’s own Embedded Mobile program, complete with its own house in the courtyard – a whole new market is emerging.
Yet supporting the connection of billions of ‘things’ is going to present a fresh set of headaches to mobile operators. That’s what Evolving Systems was betting on, as it announced its Intelligent M2M Controller solution at the show.
Drawing on technologies developed for the company’s flagship Dynamic SIM Allocation system, the M2M Controller takes a strategic route of bypassing the traditional SIM management systems that interact constantly with core OSS/BSS functions. Given the scale of the transactions involved, these would tie up resources, so they’re moved onto a new platform that delivers only the needed levels of connectivity for each application – along with the appropriate security and security environment.
Evolving Systems’ CTO, Stuart Cochran, explains the wider context: “In a very short period we’ve seen M2M amongst some of our customers move from being a discrete project run by a manager to a line of business run by a VP – it’s here and it’s real. As a recent study by AnalysysMason for the GSMA found however, around 85 percent of the cost of ownership of running large M2M services are going to be in the operational area – not in adding wireless chips to things. It’s therefore essential to drive out costs in this part of the business as early in the service lifecycle as possible if they’re to thrive into the future.”