Having finished reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (News - Alert) biography, one place where Steve looks sentimental is regarding Hewlett Packard. When Steve came back to Apple one of the things he tried to do was make sure the company could keep its edge. In trying to incorporate the innovation into the culture, often the discussion turned to HP and “what’s gone wrong”.

I mention this because I was looking at HP’s Instant On campaign for discussing M2M in the Enterprise. If you never heard of it, I think that’s understandable.

You can find all the materials here.

In it, you will see the effort taken about the sheer volume of data and what is truly processed and what is lost. 

IMHO (in my honest opinion), the problem is that it provides forest view without any insight into the trees.

IT works best when the value can be seen in the impact of ROI. Saying that 85 percent of the data is lost forgets the most important question. Does the Pareto Principal apply to M2M? If so than the 85 percent of the data lost may be a model for efficiency.

If 20 percent of the information gives you 80 percent of the insight the question is not how to capture the 85 percent but do we have the right 15 percent and what would be gained if we captured 5 percent more.

Actually, even that reasoning is bogus. Instead, let’s ask the question the right way.  What can IT measure with M2M that will impact the bottom line?

For most business this starts with Remote Access Management. We all know distribution and the proper analysis of logistics has direct impact on the bottom line. Steve Jobs implemented Just in Time manufacturing at Apple (News - Alert); if the machines are connected to visualize workflow that has a direct impact. If the system then has a connection to distribution that has a direct impact. If Retail reports inventory that also has a direct impact.

Three different places modifying the same data and having direct impact.

HP features a graphic with the word ‘Intuition” circling ‘Better Enterprise Decisions”. 

It feels like a very indirect impact.

HP has a history of measurement and testing and high end processing. It would be nice to see some M2M for the Enterprise case studies.

The problem as I see “IT” is that HP wants to really talk about big data and pattern recognition and not about M2M.

M2M is a logical place to want to apply these points, but you have to provide some case studies.

My intuition tells me that BigData that is Instant On has to have a purpose for people to capture it, otherwise 85 percent is useless.