M2M development costs have always been a hurdle for start-ups. Purchasing the licenses and talent to program for a particular platform can significantly thin the herd of would be users.

The Axeda (News - Alert) Corporation is taking a completely different approach to this issue and hoping to stimulate adoption of its platform with it. Starting today the company will be making its Axeda Platform available for free, eliminating the barriers to developing real-world, wireless machine-to-machine applications, and facilitating a company’s ability to get their solutions to market.

“Axeda is a cloud based system that actually listens to all those machines devices and turns them in to the business action and powers applications and effectively helps people do their jobs better, quicker and faster,” said Axeda CEO Dale Calder (News - Alert) in a recent interview.

The connectivity of the current business environment is undeniable. M2M is impacting the way people process transactions and distribute software like never before. Business models enabling faster transaction with insurance, telemedicine and digital signage emerged at ever increasing rates in 2010 and would have been otherwise impossible without M2M capabilities. Estimates project upwards of 430 million wireless M2M connections by the end of 2013, compounding the need for solid M2M development options.

“2011 will be a breakthrough year for M2M,” said Eric Goodness, Research VP, Gartner (News - Alert), Inc. “As the provider ecosystem moves to take complexity out of pricing models and make overall solution consumption easier, companies will see even more opportunities to connect assets and develop solutions that will transform their industries — with first movers having a decided advantage.”

The Axeda Platform being offered will work off a licensing pay-as-you-grow model with free access offered to the first 100 connected products and 10,000 daily transactions. Licensing price beyond 100 products will be assessed and determined by the volume of distribution once it happens. 

In the release Axeda CEO Dale Calder (News - Alert) said, “Market research has shown that the average M2M project takes 3-5 years, costs $8M, and experiences 2-3 failures,” added Calder. “We want to save companies from the time, cost, and overall frustration of trying to build the required infrastructure themselves.  We want to get them on the 5 day plan, not the 5 year plan.”

The Axeda Platform Processes more than 250 million transactions a day and it delivers 90 percent of the capabilities needed to meet most M2M programming requirements. These capabilities coupled with the company’s start-up minded pricing strategy make Axeda a great choice for businesses looking to get their feet wet in the M2M market.

Want to learn more about M2M? Check out the M2M Evolution Conference. To be held Feb. 2-4 in Miami and collocated with ITEXPO East 2011, the M2M Evolution Conference will focus on how telemetry has been changing to take advantage of the Internet, where WAN and LAN systems were points of aggregation in the past today’s machines benefit from the ability to connect worldwide. And as the machines continue to look to network the wireless world represents a large growth opportunity for data communication. Don’t wait. Register now.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco