For anyone involved in the IT industry, they know how important M2M is within a majority of business operations and the many benefits any organization can see when implementing these types of solutions.

Opening its doors in 2009, ThingWorx touts itself as being the first application platform of the connected world due to the fact that the company seamlessly integrates Web 2.0, social media and Connected Intelligence into one platform.

Recently, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had a chance to speak with ThingWorx CEO Russ Fadel about where he sees M2M strategies headed in the not so distant future, what M2M verticals are continuing to grow and what impact overall M2M technologies have on end users. For the full report, see below.

M2M is like the story of the blind monks and the elephant… so many pieces.  How do you explain M2M to your family and customers? 

I try to use an example that they can relate to - with my two young daughters I described the oven at the bakery tweeting 15 minutes before their favorite pastry was ready so that they could plan to arrive just in time to get it “warm and fresh from the oven”.  To customers, it is providing sensory inputs to their business processes so that they can operate much like the human body does, with real-time sense and respond. 

How often does it feel like the same audience? What needs to be done to shorten the newcomers’ learning curve?

Since we are a newer company and we focus on a broader set of markets than just M2M, I don't frequently feel like it is the same audience.  What I do see is a convergence occurring, where companies that identify with different markets are talking about the same business issues and running into the same technical challenges.  As the convergence progresses, I think the newcomers learning curve will shorten since the messaging they hear from analysts, vendors, colleagues, etc.  will start to coalesce.  Today, each segment has a different way of talking about what will soon be recognized as common challenges.

We often talk about platforms in M2M. Does this mean we are developing a core of attributes common to every M2M strategy?

I think the “platform” term is frequently misused and the M2M arena has been no exception.  As M2M merges into the broader connected world, the differences between what “extensible applications/M2M platforms” offer and what a platform should deliver will make this even more apparent.  When you look at software products designed for M2M, you typically see many application-like characteristics including built-in notions of what connected assets looks like, the type of data they generate and the services they can offer.  As these products have evolved over the years, an extensibility layer has been added that offers a set of APIs that allow programmers to add services, integrate to line-of-business applications and extend the data model.

This broader connected world, or the “Internet of Things” (which has evolved to the more appropriate “Web of Things”), has a much broader set of devices, business processes and interconnectivity requirements than were never comprehended in the early M2M world.   As such, in order to efficiently deal with the diversity of use cases, a platform to meet today's challenges has to:

• Start without a preconceived notion about the properties, services, or data storage requirements necessary to support the breadth of use cases – these “emerge” from the act of modeling the specific application
• Have an extensibility model that allows new functionality (service, analytics , user Interface components, etc.) to be added to the platform by third parties to meet specific vertical market requirements.  These extensions behave like those provided with the platform, benefiting from all of the core platform services like security, IP protection and application migration.
• Must be scalable, secure, and provide the ability to communicate in real-time through firewalls.  Applications in the connected world will have 2-3 orders of magnitude more connections between people, systems and things and these will be in much more complex and dynamic network topologies and network of networks.
• Provide foundational support for social connections between people, systems and devices to enable frictionless collaboration
• Dynamically generate REST APIs from the configuration so that the capabilities of the things in the application are easily consumable and reusable

Also, I see that it is not always clear in the M2M world what areas of value existing and who is providing what pieces.  At a very basic level above the device hardware, you have a Network (WLAN/LAN, cellular, etc.), provisioning platforms, application platform, applications, application hosting and application services.  Many players in the M2M world have a hybrid business model providing two to three of these areas of value – ThingWorx is exclusively a pure software company focused on the application platform layer, allowing its partners to deploy on-premise, in the cloud, embedded or hybrid model.

Our focus in Miami is on medical and smart grid; what other M2M verticals are important for your company and should be considered for future M2M events?

We are seeing great interest across a wide range of markets including:

• Smart infrastructure: monitoring of physical structures (bridges, buildings), city infrastructure (parking, traffic, environment, utilities)
• End-to-end manufacturing: where a product is tracked from raw materials through consumer disposal using connectivity to create a searchable data exhaust to enable cradle to grave visibility
• Industrial Machinery: now that the costs for deploying a remote service management application are falling by three to five times, it opens this up to a whole new class of equipment manufacturers

We also run into dozens of innovative applications leveraging smart connected devices – it would be interesting to have an event showcase that was exclusively for companies pioneering brand new business models.

Often our lessons are generational based on our children and the millenials now entering the workforce.  What is the impact of these new users and what is their relevance to M2M?

Four words come to mind:  instant, social, search and mobile.

These new users operate with a new set of expectations that, strangely enough, map directly to foundational characteristics of the next-generation of connected applications.  In the people-to-people world of the Web today, users expect an ambient awareness that notifies them instantly of anything that is important in their world.  They leverage the power of their social network to solve problems faster, make better decisions and to be able to dynamically adjust their connections to meet their current needs.  For the new user, search is the paradigm for finding what they need whether it be from the reference material or from their social graph.  And finally, they expect this to be available anywhere they are, increasingly through mobile devices.  

 Now imagine connected applications having all of these same foundation characteristics – albeit with one exception – they extend beyond the world of people and information to the world of physical devices.  That is the future of connected applications.

Why is M2M Evolution a must-attend communications event?

M2M Evolution gets it!  The M2M industry has matured and is evolving from its past into being foundational in connecting everything-to-everything – a.k.a the connected world.  Many of the attendees and exhibitors are having a real impact on this transition.

ThingWorx is a Gold sponsor of M2M Evolution, collocated with ITEXPO East 2012. Happening now at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla., ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. For more information on ITEXPO registration, click here.

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