Today's news that Verizon has purchased Hughes Telematics business for a reported $612M is just the latest example of consolidation in the M2M market as noted by our M2M service.

In our February 2012 insight we predicted that ?2012 will represent a year of major change, as consolidation among various players in the M2M value chain continues and mobile operators look to move up the value chain through creation or extension of M2M service platforms. Fragmentation issues will be more readily addressed in 2012 but there is still a long way to go.

The opportunity in M2M is huge. How huge, well somewhere between our conservative 5B+ connections and more bullish 50B from other sources out there.

We have already seen significant consolidation with operators like Deutsche Telekom looking to expand and enhance their position for the next big thing.. the Internet of Things. Now Verizon for a modest sum is beefing up its enterprise solutions assets. Several other examples include: AT&T extending its position in M2M application development with a U.S. reseller agreement with Axeda Corporation, an exclusive among major U.S. mobile carriers. The AT&T M2M Application Platform Powered by Axeda is designed to streamline the development of M2M applications to enable more rapid deployments at lower cost. Verizon acquiring the remaining 50% of nPhase, its joint venture for the M2M business it formed with Qualcomm in 2009 nPhase provisioning and back-end M2M systems combined with Verizon's sales force and distribution channel was envisaged as making it easier and faster for companies to get their M2M devices running on Verizon's network.

2012 will be a transition year that sees large SIs start to look more seriously at very large projects in the M2M market.

Significant consolidation has already happened among module makers and the next phase of market development is likely to be more consolidation but also expanded partnerships.

Strategy Analytics believes that carriers are well placed to offer developer toolkits and also be a forum for developers to share information and knowledge, as well as potentially creating opportunities to aggregate and showcase developer applications.

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The cloud computing frenzy continued at Enterprise Connect 2012 in Orlando last week as Avaya and NEC rolled out branded business UC public cloud services and other vendors took to the stage and exhibits to display their cloud offerings.

Avaya announced the Avaya Collaborative Cloud, a scalable framework designed to provide choice and extensibility for its customers to “use, build, deliver, and enhance” cloud communication services and applications. Although during the past several years Avaya has provided customers with products for building clouds, this announcement is the first comprehensive view of how Avaya and its enterprise customers and partners will create and consume cloud services. Avaya’s first public cloud service, AvayaLive Connect collaboration services for small and medium businesses (SMBs), features integrated UC voice, voice conferencing, messaging, video, mobility, and presence for PC, Mac, iOS and Android device remote and mobile users. Subscribers should be able to self provision a virtual machine in the cloud dedicated to their organization with phone numbers and extensions within minutes rather than hours. Avaya’s second public cloud service, AvayaLive Engage, is a rebranding of Avaya web.alive which features an immersive virtual 3D environment for remote meetings, training, sales, and support.

NEC Corporation announced UNIVERGE Cloud Services Unified Communication-as-a-Service (UCaaS), a suite of voice, data and video services accessible via a Web client on PCs, smartphones and tablets.  Options include IP telephony, unified messaging and voicemail, audio and video conferencing, Web collaboration, presence and IM, and contact centers.  These business cloud services are available in private, hybrid or public cloud deployments backed by continuous high availability and disaster recovery, encryption and security.  Up-front and monthly payments are handled by NEC Financial Services.  This service will be available in the United States in Q2 2012 and in other regions later in the year.   This UCaaS offering represents an expansion of NEC’s UNIVERGE Cloud Services which represent the SaaS portion of NEC’s Cloud Transformation Strategy for helping enterprises “rationalize, realize and manage” customized cloud computing strategies that align with short- and long-term business goals.

Other UC cloud services on exhibit at Enterprise Connect 2012 included Cisco Collaboration Cloud, Comcast Business VoiceEdge, IBM SmartCloud for SocialBusiness, Microsoft Office 365 and Skype, ShoreTel Hosted VOIP (rebranding of M5 acquired in March 2012), Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape Cloud Services, and  West Corporation’s West IP Communications (rebranding of division including Smoothstone acquired in June 2011).

The current potpourri of public cloud service providers consists of several types of companies that jumped on the cloud bandwagon in phases.  When web native service providers such as WebEx, Google, and Salesforce.com began offering business software as a service (SaaS), there was a mix of optimism and skepticism regard how much IT market expansion would result from reaching new customer segments.  When enterprise software vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle began offering hosted services versions of their own software, there was a clash of excitement and concern regarding how much disruption would be caused to traditional information and communications technology markets and channels.  When telecom operators such as AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telecom, BT, Orange, and Telefonica began redefining themselves as cloud providers of network-based services, there was an understanding that the operators were anxious to go beyond providing mobile and fixed communications services to become credible cloud providers of broad service portfolios that will include business process applications, infrastructure and development platforms. 

But for UC equipment and software vendors like Avaya, NEC, and Siemens, wouldn’t it make more sense to partner with cloud service providers?  Why are these vendors taking on the new role of service provider to offer branded cloud services based on their own server products? 

The first reason is simply because they can.  Any information and communications technology (ICT) company can offer their own virtualized hosting environment to offer cloud services with self-service provisioning and usage-based monthly fees.  They can choose between creating cloud services in their own data centers or through a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud provider such as Amazon, Google, and Rackspace. 

The second reason is that they feel they need to offer branded cloud services.  These vendors do not want to be left behind when cloud services cannibalize on-premises deployments to a significant degree.  Not having a cloud option alongside their traditional on-premises offerings would put them at a large disadvantage in retaining and attracting customers as cloud computing moves closer to ICT world domination.  These vendors could rely on cloud service provider partners to offer cloud versions of the vendors’ products.   However, that would work well if there was a level playing field where every vendor went to market through cloud partners.  In reality, many vendors have launched branded services that offer customers direct relationships for sales and support.  In addition, bypassing third party cloud providers to deal directly with customers has the added benefit of interacting and collaborating with customers whose perspectives and loyalties are critical in competitive and evolving markets.  Offering branded cloud services creates invaluable opportunities for listening to the voice of the customer. 

As the business cloud services market evolves, vendors should consider that customers are likely to prefer to engage a handful of trusted service providers that will both aggregate and integrate a variety of application software, infrastructure and platform “as a service” offerings to help customers save time and money in selecting and using the best performing IT portfolio.  UC vendors such as Avaya and NEC should include in their mid to long-term go-to-market plans not only branded cloud services available directly and through current resellers and dealers experienced in selling the vendors’ on-premises solutions but also business cloud aggregators such as Jamcracker with the hosting expertise and offering breadth to effectively promote the benefits of UC as part of expanding business cloud services relationships. 

Strategy Analytics projects the global UC software and services market will surpass the $7 billion revenue mark in 2011 and achieve an annual growth rate of 9%

With one out of every three workers in the global workforce being mobile, any UC or fixed-mobile converged solution that does not have mobile at its core is not addressing the needs of businesses.

Mobile UC solutions are designed to streamline and improve the mobile worker's ability to communicate and share information with colleagues, customers, and partners. The market for such solutions is still emerging and consists of a disparate group of vendors driven by the rise in personal-liable purchasing, the need for cost cutting, and the availability of mobile device management (MDM) solutions to manage such devices

The market for such solutions is still emerging and consists of a disparate group of vendors including enterprise networking/telecom customer premises equipment (CPE) providers (e.g. Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens), mobile platform and software providers (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM), and pure-play mobile UC vendors (e.g. Aastra, DiVitas, ShoreTel - Agito Networks). Several other players exist in this market, and more are sure to emerge, but those included in this report comprise the most visible in the market today.

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