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A vast, fluid web of alliances
The M2M / Pervasive Internet era will be driven by an entirely different set of business alliances than those of the PC and dot-com eras. The competitive structure of the PC-centric world was built upon comparatively few major alliances, and those were quite static hub-and-spoke unions—Wintel being the classic example. By contrast, the Pervasive Internet will flourish in a vast, fluid web of alliances not based on the old command-and-control structure.

Figure 1: Pervasive Internet Go-to-Market Systems

Click the image for a larger on-screen version. Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

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The revolutionary shift to machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies is upon us, yet the major alliance initiatives have not materialized. Yes, there have been scattered local maneuvers, but not the systematic, big-vision moves required to bring a new era into being.

All the major constituents in this arena—technology suppliers, value adders (OEMs, SIs, incorporators, etc.), and the real-world adopters—are moving too slowly on this front. One group in particular—the power, control, and automation suppliers—is perhaps moving most slowly of all. This is a paradox, because the suppliers of digital power and control technology are uniquely positioned to provide the necessary alliance leadership.

Technology “arms merchants” still don’t live in a real-time world
While the technology supplier community provides essential Pervasive and M2M enabling and components—especially Web Services technologies and the “always on” (and secure) Internet itself—the large technology “arms merchants” (IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, et. al.) have long been cloistered in a B2B universe based on the old batch computing model, not on a model of real-time device inputs. For this reason, major IT, electronics, and communications companies have historically been enterprise plumbers blissfully free of the need to connect their services to the non-business real world at large. We’re not likely to see Pervasive alliance leadership from them.

Figure 2: Digital Power and Control Peers

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Nor are we likely to see it from the adopters and device OEMs that the major technology “arms merchants” serve. To be sure, manufacturers and end-users of vehicles, appliances, consumer electronics, building systems, medical equipment, etc., appreciate the importance of Internet connectivity, but their vision tends to be parochial—limited to the connectivity needs of their own very vertical worlds. Even more than the technology players, they tend to occupy the center of their own universes.

Digital power and control players understand the real world and vertical markets
By contrast, the digital power and control community has close, ongoing contact with major device players, as well as the technology supply community. Digital power is much more grounded in the real world than the navel-gazing technology community, and much more application and vertical-market fluent. These suppliers are positioned to be involved on both the physical and virtual side of the Pervasive opportunity. If one adds up the revenues related to both their core power and control businesses, as well as new revenue enabled by pervasive technologies, the total easily passes $250 billion. That, like almost all the numbers related to Pervasive, is a very large sum indeed.

Companies like Siemens, Honeywell, ABB, Emerson, Eaton, Schneider, Rockwell, Siemens, Invensys, Mitsubishi, and Omron have much to gain, and just as much (or more) to lose if they don’t position themselves properly. They already have equipment and systems in our buildings, vehicles, factories, offices, and homes. They have also created software and services that run and automate complex environments. Ultimately they could be the community best-positioned to break ahead of the pack—if they don’t become their own worst enemies.

Internet connectivity is a major disruptor in all economic spaces, and the rapid evolution and interplay of the three major groups is initiating a new era where integrated digital power and control will be embedded in virtually all real-world devices. These new power and control technologies are replacing vast quantities of electro-mechanical systems, and will be essential to everything Pervasive—from silicon drivers and networks for everything from vehicles to semiconductor lighting, and powerchips in everything from appliances to MRI machines and pacemakers, and the power grid itself.

Power electronics are key to the Pervasive Internet
The killer-apps of the Pervasive Internet era—equipment monitoring, predictive maintenance, asset management, and other “Web Services”—will be intensely dependent on the ever-increasing speed and density of power electronics. These applications are ideal opportunities for digital power and control suppliers to take the lead in developing alliances and value-added relationships. If you look at the amount of money that businesses spend on these problems, or could save with better solutions, you see that there are far more dollars available in Web-driven services than in the merely product-based activities of yesterday.

Furthermore, companies like Emerson, Siemens, GE, and ABB have much to gain from architecting Pervasive alliances. Incalculable value will flow from integrating many real-world devices and facilitating their control and automation. The architects of Pervasive alliances will drive that value—and command it. A company that “sensors up the world” will control the world, and have a huge competitive advantage in vastly profitable ancillary activities—for example, the trading of energy.

GE may well typify this more than any other power, control, and related automation player. With its focus on services themselves, as well as the combining of services, capital financing, and equipment, GE provides a stage upon which the real long-term gains of the Pervasive Internet can be seen. We recently visited with GE Capital, where a senior executive characterized the advantages of remote enablement and monitoring. “Remote management,” he said, “will turn GE’s equipment, services, and financing competencies into ‘actuarial science.’”

If major players don’t weave the alliance-webs, smaller players will
Many people inside digital power and control companies get this. But these companies are large bureaucracies founded on focused products addressing focused markets. The Pervasive Internet era will cut across traditional product P&L and market boundaries like a machete. Smaller, nimble players like Xsilogy, Cimetrics, Strategic Response, Ei3, and a whole host of others already understand this. These companies have forged more partnerships and alliances in the last eighteen months than the entire power and control crowd combined. If the major power and control players don’t see the implications of this soon, a new category of company may emerge to fill the crucial role of Pervasive Alliance Architect.

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Harbor Research welcomes your feedback. Send it to feedback@harborresearch.com.

Who We Are and What We Offer.
Harbor Research Inc. has been providing strategic consulting and research services to leaders in communications, computing, control, and content since 1983. The firm has built relationships with larger multi-line companies including AT&T, ABB, General Electric, Danaher, Eaton, Emerson, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Hughes, IBM, Intel, Invensys, Lucent, Motorola, Rockwell, Siemens, and Texas Instruments, as well as focused growth companies such as EMC, Cadence Design, Conexant, Qualcomm, and SAP.

We also continue to work for a broad array of emergent start-ups and pre-IPO technology ventures. We have built relationships with a number of significant Pervasive Internet players, including Questra Corporation, Xsilogy, DataSweep, eDevice, Wireless Innovation, and emWare, to name a few.

Harbor is organized around emergent and disruptive opportunities in high technology, with a unique focus on the impact of the Pervasive Internet—the use of the Internet to accomplish global device networking that will revolutionize business by unleashing entirely new modes of system optimization, customer relationships, and service delivery.

We provide studies, workshops, briefings, research retainers, and consulting engagements of uniquely high value to both technology suppliers and adopters. For more information, please contact us.

Harbor’s new online platform for research services offers continually updated intelligence and stunning data-visualization.

Static, printed reports can’t track the complex ecosystems and warp-speed pace of high tech. SmartSphere® projects can.

The brains of the Web. The brawn of server databases. The beauty of a CD-ROM.
For nearly ten years, we’ve been waiting for Web media to get good enough to let us do this. It’s finally here. Harbor SmartSphere® re-invents the whole concept of delivering research value. It’s to business research what the Pervasive Internet will be to business itself: a huge injection of dynamic intelligence and sheer voltage. SmartSphere® is online, interactive, dynamic, and visualized. There’s nothing static, rigid, or dead about it. Eventually, we at Harbor will do everything in SmartSphere® that we used to do on paper, and we’ll do it better. And you can, too. in a custom-configured project of your own, SmartSphere® can be anything you want it to be.

And yes, you can get printed reports. We’ve re-invented those, too. Not fixed, one-size-fits-all printed reports, but custom printed reports that you configure and SmartSphere® creates for you on the fly in PDF format.

See SmartSphere® and find out more right now:

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. So what are they worth if they’re pictures of your whole world, and you can fly around inside the pictures with your mouse?
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).

A small portion of an interactive Harbor SphereMap™. This one portrays a company’s world. You “fly around” the map by dragging it with your mouse, bringing into focus any area you want to explore. You see a company’s peers, investors, products, and alliance-structure at a glance. Clicking nodes fetches additional information from the database. Shift-clicking nodes creates new maps of other companies—and maps of markets, too.

Projects, projects, projects. Ours, and yours.
SmartSphere® is an online platform that Harbor uses to deliver Web-based services. You don’t buy SmartSphere® the way you buy a program for your computer. You buy access to one or more SmartSphere® projects. We define projects of our own on important high-tech subjects, and clients can subscribe to those projects. Clients can also define their own custom (and completely private) projects.

SmartSphere® projects are laser-focused on their subjects. No waste, no fluff, no irrelevance. A SmartSphere® project delivers continually updated information on whatever the project has been defined to track. Some of that information is created in the good old-fashioned way, by experienced researchers and analysts. And some of it is created with 21^st century tools like automated news feeds and Web-based info services. Every time you log in to a project, there’s new information—freshly tracked events, new company alliances, new company and market comparisons, enhanced company, market, and technology profiles, and insightful Harbor commentary and analysis.

When you visit our SmartSphere® demonstration, you’ll see a limited version of our own “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project. Bear in mind that the free demo offers limited information and functionality. The full “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project, for example, was created to replace and improve our own earlier online publication, Pervasive Internet Report.

Custom SmartSphere® projects. Your secret weapon has arrived.
You’ve heard about some of our SmartSphere® projects. Now let’s talk about yours. Does your company have business development, M&A, R&D, or sales and marketing goals? We hope the answer is yes. How would you like “living business intelligence”™ on the companies that interest or worry you? Or on the markets and technologies that are defining your future? A custom SmartSphere® project is the perfect way to do that. “Living business intelligence”™ means research that is laser-focused on your targets, and continually updated for as long as you need it.

Any collection of companies, markets, or technologies can become the backbone of a SmartSphere® project. You define who or what they are. You define what you want to track about them, and how you’d like to rank or score or weight them. You define the types of cross-company or cross-market comparisons you’d like to see.

Take action and take control.
If you’ve read this much about SmartSphere® without clicking something, it’s time to click. Here are those links once again.

1. Visit our free, live SmartSphere® demonstration.
2. Download a brochure on the SmartSphere® research platform and services (PDF, 970 KB).
3. Download a brochure about our SmartSphere® “living research” projects on the M2M/Pervasive Internet phenomenon (PDF, 240 KB).