Harbor’s SIGNALSmart™ framework portrays all the stepping stones of the M2M technology path. Supplier ecosystems that cover the whole path will win by delivering end-to-end solutions that drive M2M / Pervasive Internet adoption. (Click the image for a larger on-screen view.) Source: Harbor Research, Inc.

Download a printable PDF of the above diagram (70 KB).

What we’ve learned from our adopter clients
Recently, Harbor Research has facilitated a number of meetings for OEMs, large system-integrators, and other potential adopters who want to explore the impact of M2M on their businesses. Across a wide variety of global enterprises, the concerns are strikingly similar. What do adopter CEOs worry about?

Sure, they’re concerned about Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). They’d love some reliable numbers, and they’re frustrated that everybody’s numbers are all over the map. But they’re also impressed by the map itself, because even the smallest numbers on the map are huge.

And adopters are surprisingly sympathetic to the idea that ubiquitous networked computing represents a whole new era of the Information Age, and that its growth and opportunities are not easy to quantify. They’d rather have suppliers be honest about that than pretend that the latest back-room dartboard is The Final Truth.

More than numbers, adopters care about broad qualitative issues. They don’t expect totally risk-free scenarios. They’d simply like to take steps to remain competitive without shooting themselves in the foot. They’d like a reasonable shot at success, as opposed to a shot in the dark. Over and over, we’ve heard the same adopter concerns:

• Remote monitoring and diagnostics are only the beginning of the story. As we move towards more sophisticated systems, how do we understand the impacts across our whole organization? Ultimately, our entire way of doing business will be affected. We know we need to prepare for this, but we’re not sure how.


• What are the new and evolving value propositions driven by this type of enablement? How do we take full advantage of our investment in M2M?


• How can we avoid adopting technologies that are going to disappear?


• How do we make sure that device data really gets translated into actionable business intelligence?


• How do we avoid throwing away most of our existing IT investment?


• And more than anything else: Who are the leaders in this space? To whom can we turn for a trusted, full solution that really fits our business and has the best shot at a good return?

For the adopter, a daunting terra incognita
With M2M, adopters are crossing into new and alien territory. They’re willing to go because everybody says “there’s gold in them thar hills,” but it’s scary. They’d love to have a trusted guide. What if this whole M2M thing turns out to be a boondoggle? They might be casting their fate to the wind of a futuristic IT fantasy. And not only do they have to buy a lot of stuff just to go on the trip, they have to change their whole lives:

• The shift from batch processing to pervasive inputs. Everything about present-day corporate IT is geared to the old “batched” computing model. Data-processing in the enterprise has always been about “what happened.” In the M2M era, it becomes about “what’s happening,” with a never-ending Milky Way of data-points to deal with in near real-time. It’s a big difference. Suddenly, a typical OEM is going to feel like NASA with a moon shot happening every moment. Life inside Mission Control is going to be very different.


• The shift from products to services. Even though most product companies are dying to increase their services revenue, they often have not absorbed the profound business-model changes required. M2M technologies will give them the “field intelligence” necessary for good strategy and tactics, but that’s like leading the horse to water. The horse still has to drink. What can suppliers do to help adopters evolve their business models?

Put yourself in the adopter’s position
Right now, potential M2M adopters are seeing a fragmented, bewildering landscape with no clear leaders. They don’t want to turn to one vendor for smart, self-organizing sensors, to another for an access solution, to another for data management, and to yet another for enterprise IT integration. They want someone to solve the whole problem. Most importantly, they want a whole solution from someone who understands their business and where they’re trying to go—and who can help them go to new places they couldn’t envision on their own.

In other words, they want a bridge over the vast chasm between technology innovation and real-world business value.

Suppliers have done great technology development.
Now they need equally great business development.
Individual vendors are not going to bridge that chasm. No one company, however large and diversified, can build a total M2M / Pervasive Internet solution alone.

In the next era of the digital age, individual suppliers will not compete against peer suppliers. Rather, whole business ecosystems will compete against other ecosystems. The smartest ecosystems will win. A smart pervasive computing ecosystem is one that does two basic things:

• Owns the whole technology picture. “Ecosystem” implies a total environment. The diagram above uses the Harbor SIGNALSmart™ framework to portray the full sweep of technologies—from Smart Devices to Smart Services—that make up a valuable M2M / Pervasive Internet implementation. An effective ecosystem will encompass this entire framework.


• Owns the customer’s problems. Even though suppliers talk about pervasive computing as “invisible,” it’s often the only thing they see. It’s hard to accept the fact that your own brilliant innovations are not the star of the show, but they’re not. Customer value-creation is the star. Suppliers need to climb out of their black boxes and see the world through the adopter’s eyes.

M2M / Pervasive Internet suppliers may have been thinking that the whole problem was getting adopters to see the light. They may have a few rays of light to see themselves.

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.