The era of near-perfect, near-real-time information about assets and customer behavior is looming like a tanker coming out of the fog. Business as usual could turn out to be a very bad idea.

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Many companies have launched new businesses enabled by networked devices, and many others have already made their decisions and started the process of designing their connected products and their new business models. The move to the Pervasive Internet is happening, and the pace of adoption is accelerating. It is not only possible, it is here.

Clear First-Mover Advantages for Adopters
We have seen evidence of first-mover advantages in industrial asset management, vehicle telematics, industrial gases, networked building systems, energy monitoring, and medical imaging systems. Early adopters have not only brought their connected offerings to market, but may already have locked down lasting dominant positions in their respective industries. The following are only the most obvious impacts:

• Break-out “double digit” top line growth in traditionally GDP-driven businesses


• Line-of-business ROS increases in the 5-10% range


• Service force productivity improvements of 20-35%


• Dramatic, quantifiable customer retention improvements

At the same time, technology suppliers have ensured that the tools for device connectivity are largely in place. Except in the least developed parts of the world, where there may still be infrastructure issues, there is no place on earth where a connected product cannot be deployed to the advantage of both its manufacturer and its users.

The Big Risk is Delayed Action, Not Technology
Yet many companies will fail to make the shift. Is it because the technology is immature and not to be trusted? In some areas of the technology value chain, the pieces may not be mature. Certainly, it will be some time before the losing suppliers have been shaken out and the remaining winners can be counted on to supply the quality products and complete services required to minimize risk for adopters. Yet even today, robust systems can be built out of existing pieces, and what remains of technological risk pales next to the risk of delayed action.

M2M in Business Represents a Radical Paradigm-Shift
The key word is risk. The leadership in many manufacturing companies is not accustomed to the volatile, high-stakes world of business driven by networked devices, and it is this transition, not the technological shift, that many will fail to make. Many changes in thinking will have to take place for companies to succeed in networking their devices and updating their organizations for the next era of information technology.
These changes come in many areas:

• In internal leadership, we have already seen and expect to see more cases where many members of organizations have a clear view of where the company needs to go, yet are unable to present the business case for change in a compelling manner.


• In planning, companies may not know whom to invite to the planning table, let alone what to do when everybody’s there. They may have strategic planning processes in place that are ill-equipped to deal with major paradigm shifts.


• In business execution, manufacturers may have little understanding of the nature of a new, information-intensive offering, or of the needs of a market that will be trained by the companies that have made the shift successfully. Such customers will be far more demanding than in the past.


• In organization, companies may fail to understand that the new skills, shifting alliances, and new customer bases that can come with the Pervasive Internet may demand radically new organizational structures.

Networked Device Information Changes Everything
In short, many companies will fail due to the inadequacies of their leadership. Many companies will be hampered in their thinking by a tendency to assume that the company after networking will be the same company and in the same business as before networking. This is a safe assumption in almost no case.

The first fact about any networked product, which is so obvious that no one needs to be told, is that it will capture and convey data. The second fact, not quite so obvious, is that these new data become a core asset. The third fact, not an obvious leap for many managers, is that information as an asset makes for fundamental changes in a company’s business. The fourth fact, which makes things simple but by no means easy, is that most changes brought about when information becomes central have the effect of moving a company toward a service business model.

We say this is simple but not easy. The fact that information makes services move to the fore is not hard to grasp. But in practice, “services” represents a business paradigm so foreign to many manufacturers that they cannot understand, let alone implement, the changes necessary to make the shift successfully.

In fact, the phrase “shift to information-driven services,” though accurate, could be dangerously misleading if it makes the required corporate culture and business model changes sound almost tame. They aren’t. The era of near-perfect, near-real-time information about physical assets and customer behavior is looming like a tanker coming out of the fog. Any degree of complacency about it will be deadly. If you’re inclined to deal with the future by making small tweaks to business as usual, the best (but hard to swallow) medicine might come from Dr. Monty Python: Everything you know is wrong.

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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, and Qualcomm.

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 M2M / Pervasive Internet players, including Cimetrics, DataSweep, eDevice, Ember, emWare, Questra, Wireless Innovation, and Xsilogy, 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).