Recent device shipment forecasts suggest that wireless device networking will escalate exponentially throughout this decade. But the smooth, steep curve shown here is likely to have plenty of real-world zigs and zags. (Click the chart for a larger view.) Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

Rockets can become shooting stars
The arrival of the full ZigBee™ specification this year could well be the booster rocket for a dramatic lift-off of wirelessly enabled sensors and controllers in many markets—from industrial monitoring and smart buildings to smart power and homeland security.

But for that to happen, the new technology will have to overcome significant gravitational forces. So far, we’ve seen too little acknowledgment that those forces even exist.

No matter whom you talk to (and we’ve talked to many suppliers and OEMs), you’ll hear that the phenomenon is going to be huge. That's unquestionably true—eventually. But the proper stance is cautious optimism. Though no one knows how bumpy the rocket’s trajectory will be, there will certainly be bumps.

The chart shown above is based upon wirelessly enabled device shipment scenarios in the following ranges:

• Year-end 2004: 200-500K. Assumes Chipcon, Atmel, and Motorola are in play.


• Year-end 2005: 2-4M. Assumes other platform vendors plus a dozen or more high-volume OEMs in full-scale deployment.


• Year-end 2006: 6-10M. Assumes broad market adoption in both B2B and B2C applications.

The assumptions underlying these numbers are not wildly unrealistic, but they are optimistic.

Let’s not repeat the dot-com crash
The Internet bubble of the 1990s was driven by hype and rampant speculation that eventually turned an investment circus into an investment ghost town. The resulting retrenchment produced one of the worst business climates in memory. We don’t want to repeat that scenario.

For suppliers, promoting a new technology as an instant business panacea is a mistake. The early excitement over RFID tagging has already produced skepticism that makes clear the danger of over-hype. Some large companies quickly announced ambitious plans for RFID adoption, only to realize—less than a year later—that they were putting the cart before the horse. This lurch-forward, jerk-back behavior needn't have happened. Suppliers and partners could have given these companies more realistic and tech-savvy guidance.

Creating customer value must come first
Galaxies of device data will be worthless unless they can be translated into actionable business intelligence shared across the enterprise. For adopters, deriving full value from device networking will, in almost every case, involve significant overhaul of existing corporate IT infrastructures that were simply not designed for pervasive inputs.

And in most cases, deriving full value will also require serious re-thinking of existing business models, because product companies will have adopted device networking as part of a major strategic transition to smart, data-driven, customer-centric services offerings. And such offerings are not something that most product companies understand very well at all.

These are serious business challenges indeed, and the mere installation of new networking products won’t solve them. Suppliers of wireless sensor networking have a great deal of adopter education and hand-holding to do. They need to think hard about what constitutes value for their customers. If they haven’t done so already, they need to forge the business alliances that will allow them to offer those customers solid, complete real-world solutions.

The wireless sensor networking “rocket” will have other gravitational forces to overcome, too. For example, there is the sheer marketing challenge of promoting acceptance among end-users. In both B2B and B2C applications, suppliers and OEMs will need to tell a new and complex story convincingly. It’s not likely that they will have all their marketing magic in place right out of the gate.

Networked ubiquitous computing really is The Next Big Thing in corporate IT—or at least it deserves to be. But bad PR is one of the worst gravitational forces of all. If adopters end up feeling burned by overblown hype and misplaced investment, we could have a frustratingly long wait to get into orbit.

Next time: How will suppliers actually make money with wireless sensor networks?

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® demonstrations. They say pictures are worth a thousand words. 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® demonstrations, you’ll see limited versions of our own projects. Currently, they include Pervasive Internet Suppliers, Smart Buildings, Smart Power, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Cluster Computing. Bear in mind that the full versions of these projects include vastly more information than the limited demonstration versions. The “Pervasive Internet Suppliers” project, for example, was created to replace and improve our own earlier online publication, Pervasive Internet Report.

The “Cluster Computing” demo is a brand-new project, featuring content developed in association with Barrington Partners. We’re very excited about our new alliance with Barrington. Together, we plan to develop SmartSphere®-based research on several important new technology growth areas, in both multi-client and single-client formats. (If the “Cluster Computing” project in particular interests you, send us mail or call us.)

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® demonstrations.
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).

What do your colleagues and customers think about key Pervasive issues? Find out, fast and free.
Harbor’s site visitors are technologists and business leaders with the same thing on their minds: Internet-enabled device networking, smart services, and enterprise automation.

Our Polling Booth lets you can tap into this unique community in a very real and valuable way. Cast your own vote on a key Pervasive question and see all votes charted in real time. (Click “Vote!” in the site’s navigation to get there.) You can vote only once on each question, but you can come back any time to see the latest results. You can even cite the polling data in your own site pages or publications—providing you credit Harbor Research as the source.

We’ve started with a handful of questions about core Pervasive issues, and we’ll add more regularly. Do you want community opinion on something we haven’t asked about? We welcome suggestions for the Polling Booth at feedback@harborresearch.com.

Visit our site and try out the polls and charts. Click “Vote!” in the main navigation.