Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) analysis reveals that the M2M market in EU27 in 2010 registered high growth, similar to 2010. The increase was around 60 percent year-on-year reaching approximately 20 million M2M SIMs.

In a release, Yiru Zhong, Industry Analyst for Frost & Sullivan ICT group said, “Telco companies have built their growth by successfully targeting Tier 1 customers and expanding into new geographic markets in their operational footprint.”

According to analysts, Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications became popular when telecom service providers reorganized their traditional M2M solutions to offer a plethora of interconnected machines and objects.

The competitive market encourages M2M providers to find new revenue streams to enjoy a sustainable market edge. In this context, Frost & Sullivan reveals that the next layer of M2M revenue opportunities for the ICT sector will be from M2M in Government and the Smart Cities concept.

Frost & Sullivan defines Smart Cities as interconnected urban environments where citizens enjoy a completely digitalized lifestyle. Such an environment can be developed further with a committed government initiative to utilize M2M technology. Governments also stand to benefit as improved delivery of local government services can be assured which will attract more investments, said officials.

Highlighting the need for greater government participation, Zhong said, “The government must play a critical role in overcoming any coordination issues by managing interests of various urban stakeholders such as energy service providers, environment services providers, transportation, tourism, and most importantly digital citizens.”

Presently Smart Cities feature M2M functions like track and trace, remote monitoring, status updates and security access. With the introduction of new and smarter M2M applications for business critical processes Smart Cities can evolve further, noted officials.This will result in clusters of smart communities and hence ICT players have to adapt to remain relevant in the new scenario. Frost & Sullivan recognizes ICT market leaders in transforming their services portfolios for meeting evolving customer needs.

“The implication on competitive dynamics within a wider M2M service provider space is the rate of new market entry. As more telcos jump into the M2M space, competition will increase and the urgency to establish a market leadership in richer M2M applications becomes more critical,” Zhong pointed out.

A recent article in TMCnet by Susan J.Campbell highlights the importance of innovation for establishing sustainable, Smart Cities.

The M2M Evolution Conference will be collocated with ITEXPO (News - Alert) West, the world’s premier IP communications event, to be held Sept. 13-15 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX.  M2M Evolution will include a series of analyst insight, case studies, and roundtable discussions and will show attendees how to exploit this technology to minimize destruction, fraud and theft across all vertical markets.  Don’t wait. Register now. 

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