Feature: Introduction to M2MPoint
During this turbulent and economically challenging period, many companies have been waiting for others to determine their future for them: customers, Wall Street, new technologies, Microsoft. Companies have been paralyzed by a fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and a lack of imagination. The successful companies, however, have gone about creating a future that will lead them out of the ashes of this most current period. This newsletter is designed to give corporate leaders the vision, intelligence, and courage to respond to the changing technological environment. With a focus on M2M (machine-to-machine) communications, The FocalPoint Group has created a website (M2Mpoint.com) to inform leaders about emerging technologies, innovators, profit opportunities, and industry trends. We believe that ongoing communication with industry participants will create a vibrant and cohesive community of interest, whereby corporate leaders can more confidently pursue opportunities for their business. Each issue will include a feature topic, an interview from an industry expert, key statistics, weblogs, and more.
Interview: Gene Becker, Program Director for HP Mobile and Media Systems Lab M2MPoint: What do you do at HP Mobile & Media Systems Lab? |  | | GB: The Mobile & Media Systems Lab conducts advanced research in many aspects of mobility, digital media and ubiquitous computing playing out in an open, standards-based framework built on the web and related systems technologies. I am investigating |
| technology strategies and alliances that will help define new applications in these areas. In addition to long-term research, HP Labs has played an important role in fostering R&D innovations that can be used for real customer engagements, and we continue to investigate ways that technology can be practically applied to various business and consumer environments. |
Some of our work, including our Cooltown research and demos, have helped to visualize the simultaneous emergence of various flavors of technology: wireless networking, small device technologies like storage, display and power, sensors, GPS and other location techniques, networked embedded systems, ad hoc and peer network architectures, physical tagging technologies like RFID, imaging, display appliances, XML-based services, utility computing, and more. We are creating a vision of convergence that has established us as thought leaders with our customers; but one of the reasons it has been well received by customers and other observers is because it is not simply a story, there is real insight and real technology behind it. And now it's time to make it real, so HP’s business teams have been putting the vision into practice, one deal at a time. M2MPoint: Has the current economic environment, particularly for technology companies, changed things at the Lab? GB: In HP Labs, we have continued our agenda of developing the long view in ubiquitous computing. I would say that we are aiming at areas of significant future growth, in domains that are aligned with the core strategies of HP overall. At the HP company level, we’ve become much more focused on making these technologies work for our customers. There were a number of customers that were dabbling in technology during the “bubble” and then there were customers that knew they needed to incorporate mobility and ubicomp technologies as a business necessity. Those that had a vision of technology to meet business needs are still pursuing new implementations, and we are working with those companies. We know technological innovation isn’t stopping, but at the same time we must also prove that there is more than just a hypothetical value to networking devices. M2MPoint: How will HP play in an M2M-connected world? GB: Well if you have watched HP at all lately, you have no doubt heard the term "Adaptive Infrastructure". This is a major initiative focused on the Enterprise and large scale networked systems, and it is the richly articulated strategy for building an always-on infrastructure that is not only completely reliable, but also flexible, manageable, cost effective and responsive to the rapidly changing business and technical requirements our customers are facing in today's environment. At the same time, there's no question that our own devices are all moving rapidly in the direction of connectedness, from iPaqs with integrated Bluetooth, WLAN and WAN, to projectors, printers, etc. The connectivity is for end use scenarios, but also increasingly for getting control and management capabilities in place for IT managers and service providers faced with this explosion of diversity, complexity, cost and risk. And the same is true for our customers across the board. And of course web services are continuing to march forward. One concrete example of how we are pursuing specific opportunities is our alliance with Nokia to deliver M2M solutions for remote management of equipment and facilities. This combines Nokia’s GSM-based M2M communication platform with HP’s industry-leading server systems and OpenView management environment. M2MPoint: What are some of the hurdles to more rapid adoption of the M2M-connected world? GB: In terms of the hurdles, well, there are still plenty of things to do, right? Most notably: 1) Standards -- the way real businesses adopt technology is not by purchasing a vision or an architecture, obviously. So today every little company and every large enterprise and so on are building solutions on their own little islands, custom-built for their specific business need. Integrating across these islands will be a real challenge, yet necessary if we are going to have a world that makes sense to people that don't live on islands. This of course includes standards for security, privacy, identity and trust, which are multidimensional hard problems. 2) Business models are another critical area. All these new technologies are creating exciting possibilities for deeply transforming the way businesses work, the way end users communicate and experience the world. But transformation is hard, and as we have seen in the recent stage of emerging Internet businesses, not every idea is going to be viable. Figuring out the new balance of cost, value and bottom line impact, and how to achieve this in the context of evolving existing businesses rather than causing chaotic revolutions, is key to moving the vision forward. This is one of the reasons why it's good to have a huge professional services capability, as HP does post-merger. 3) Technology. At the level of M2M systems, meshes and sensor nets, there are quite a lot of technical issues to be dealt with, such as scalable network architecture, ad hoc and self-healing network behaviors, dynamic routing protocols, techniques for securing systems and dealing with bad actors robustly, and again lots of standards need to be figured out. 4) Social and political acceptance is another big concern, especially when we talk about ubiquitous sensing technologies, large-scale data mining, and aggregation across multiple data sources. The new focus on homeland security in the US is a double-edged sword in this regard, on the one hand it opens up many opportunities for applying new technology to hard sensing and analysis problems, but then there's the enormous potential downside in social and political liberties. M2MPoint: How might the M2M space unfold over the next several years? GB: In general, I think the various industries and pundits involved are guilty of overestimating the short-term impact of M2M. Given the nature of transformational change in existing organizations, it's entirely possible that very little large-scale progress will be apparent in 2-3 years. That's especially likely if economic growth continues to be sluggish, which seems plausible. Some things do seem likely, though. For example: 1) Personal mobile devices are going to continue integrating communication, computing, imaging and sensing technologies at a rapid clip. My phone today has a decent VGA camera, captures audio, stills and video, does MMS, 2D games, Java, IR, Bluetooth, and stores 256MB, and that's not even the state of the art. With a few button pushes, I can publish text and multimedia to my personal weblog in almost real time. I'm guessing that significant volumes of devices will integrate WAN and WLAN, streaming media, GPS, tag sensing, biometrics and other features within 2-3 years, at which point the services will start to get very interesting. 2) Situated display appliances (think LCD and plasma screens in public places) are going to proliferate, and these will be networked appliances supporting web applications and multicast and narrowcast content. In the short term they will be one-way devices, but eventually they will be interactive with the various devices that people carry, and in some cases with networks of sensors as well. 3) Wireless LANs will undergo massive growth in deployment, and also substantial shifts in network architecture. We will see the integration of mobile WAN and WLAN. We may also see early deployment of so-called mesh networking, driven by the needs of public safety and emergency response applications. HP has strong IP and business interests in several of these technology areas. We are excited about what the future holds. About Gene Becker
Gene Becker leads the Nomadic Computing research group at HP Laboratories, and conducts long-term research in human-centered mobility and ubiquitous computing. From 1998 to 2002, this group created the Cooltown vision, architecture and technology platform for delivering web services to nomadic individuals and communities, in a world where computing and network technologies are pervasive. Cooltown provides the basis for HP's corporate vision of a richly connected world where people, places and things are first-class citizens of the web. For over ten years, Becker has championed the creation of new technology-based businesses for HP. In addition to his Cooltown work, he served as operations manager for the OpenPix internet imaging product family, and helped launch strategic initiatives in broadband services, enterprise servers, commercial printing and consumer technology. Becker earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate study in computer science at Stanford University . |
