Leveraging M2M For a Complete Solution

SeeControl CEO Bryan Kester contributed to a Mobile Enteprise Magazine article sponsored by T-Mobile that does a nice job of summarizing the current market dynamics and excitement surrounding M2M. An excerpt is provided below. For a full PDF version of the article please visit Mobile Enterprise Magazine.

Bryan Kester is CEO of SeeControl, which offers a cloud-based platform designed to help people build M2M applications. Think of it, he says, as Salesforce.com for M2M. “We give customers a place where, without having to know how to program anything or write scripts, they can build an M2M application in 2 to 10 days. They they end up with something they can log into that looks like it was built specifically for their unique monitoring needs in areas such as fleet management, compressor monitoring, building controls, or whatever the problem set may be. What we offer used to involve custom software development that would cost millions and take a year or more to create,” he says.

While most people see an M2M solution as being made up of three key components, Kester says, there really are four. “There’s device, network, and then there’s an aggregation platform that gets you on the network and manages your devices. Then there’s something that we do, which is a real business application. We actually stop short of the network, he says. We listen to the network but we don’t manage the connection or the device on the other side. While managing the device and it’s bandwidth used to be an issue, in the last twenty-four months there are plenty of data aggregation and device management M2M platform providers from both wireless operators and device manufacturers.”

A good example of a SeeControl app, Kester says, is an airline that’s currently working with SeeControl to monitor its de-icing equipment on runways. “If snow’s falling and you see a truck roll out and de-ice your aircraft, we’re measuring the entire de-ice activity and we also analyze 150 data points about the engine that allows them to predict when it’s going to fail. We also manage all the mobile and central storage tanks of hazardous deice fluids that enable the whole effort; when fluids run low the airline can order new materials right from their monitoring application and manage the entire logistics workflow”, he says.

A solution like SeeControl can provide a clearer, more useful view of entire asset-based business processes. “We have five devices running on the [truck], but the end user doesn’t care that there’s a BlackBerry that tells you that the operator’s in the cab, or that there’s a sensor that tells you if the temperature is too cold for the fluid that’s meant to de-ice aircraft”, Kester says. “So we take all five of those devices and make them something called a de-icing truck that has a person inside, some fluid on it and quite literally a thousand other things happening. With most of the business applications that people are building right now the device equals the asset, and the application just presents huge logs of data and alarms related to the device, which is not what we see our customers needing. They need to fuze all this data from multiple sensors into one picture and make sense of it without smoke coming out of their ears.”

Kester says it has become much easier in recent years to offer a solution like this. For a long time, he says, it was just too expensive to deploy M2M at a reasonable scale. But what’s happened in the last two to three years is the carriers have run out of consumers to sell cell phone plans to, and they’re now very focused on M2M as their growth segment, he says.

Not long ago, Kester says, SeeControl couldn’t get an account rep at any carrier to deal with them. “I’ve had people out in the middle of Germany buying SIM cards at the local convenience store to get a cell phone account for M2M devices, when we might be deploying at places like Audi, he says. It’s comical. We’re providing an industrial enterprise grade M2M solution, and I’ve got people running in and out of convenience stores, trying to fulfill the projects’ needs”. Now, that’s all changed. “Everybody, in the last 12 months, has setup account teams set up to deal with companies like ours that are trying to help customers deploy end-to-end solutions in a way that is easier than ever before. They want more customers on the network and devices are those customers.”