I hadn't been to the CTIA Wireless show for years, but this was a good year to start going again. Obviously, what happens in the cellular carriers' world has been of growing importance to the enterprise, and this is only going to accelerate as the carriers roll out true 4G across their service areas.
I wrote in a recent post about the cellular carriers' fear of becoming commodity bit-pushers, and that concern came up again in a daylong Enterprise Mobility track at CTIA that was run by McKinsey. Prashant Gandhi, Principal at McKinsey, said of the carriers, "Unless they find a way to compete in this space [i.e., value-addded services], they really risk becoming a dumb pipe."
One of the things the carriers need to do, it was suggested, was to help vertical industries integrate some of the inherent functionalities of the cellular networks into business applications in order to increase business intelligence, and enable whole new kinds of applications and product/service offerings to end customers.
Some examples:
* In the health care vertical, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications could become a major enabler of new types of services as health care providers, insurers, and the public seek to control medical costs. The most-commonly mentioned type of service was home health monitoring, where disposable patches and other types of monitoring endpoints could use ever-cheaper processors and the emerging 4G bandwidth to allow hospitals to send people home sooner and monitor them remotely.
One speaker in McKinsey's track, Clint McClellan, Senior Director, Wireless Health at Qualcomm, even suggested that the real money in remote monitoring might not be made by this sort of outpatient monitoring, but rather via health-and-wellness types of applications. He suggested that diet companies like Jenny Craig or fitness companies like Nike might develop applications to complement their current product lines, providing a holistic monitoring and alerting application around heart rates, blood glucose levels and other metrics that people might want to track as part of a fitness regimen. McClellan predicted a "robust consumer market" for these sorts of capabilities.
* In creepy GPS monitoring news, one feature that the retail vertical may start to adopt, according to some of McKinsey's panelists, is an integration of "wave finder" technology, which tracks cell phone GPS signals, with maps of stores. The idea is to help retailers understand which displays and products get the most foot traffic, and thereby help them improve store layout and product offerings.
* Other areas where mobile 4G bandwidth has potential for integration with business apps include various forms of asset monitoring and tracking—e.g., embedding monitoring chips in a tractor that a U.S. company may sell to a customer in China; the U.S. firm can do remote diagnostics on a tractor half a world away. Likewise, waste hauling companies can track garbage bins and rental car companies can track the tires on their cars. Tires? Turns out that a not-uncommon scam is that people will rent a car and replace the newer tires from the rental car with old tires.
We saw a good bit of talk around these sorts of applications in connection with WiFi—Cisco, especially, used to talk about asset tracking apps, like hospitals keeping tabs on wheelchairs. The enabler then, as now, was a major increase in bandwidth—in the case of WiFi, the move to 802.11n.
Machine-to-machine communications gets a lot more feasible when wireless bandwidth is more abundant, as it will be when 4G networks reach critical mass. And 4G promises broader coverage than private 802.11n WiFi networks could deliver.
There will be a non-real-time component in terms of telemetry and similar types of applications, but there will also be a need for the enterprise to support, end to end, real-time delivery of alarms and real-time setup of communications sessions with live human beings to deal with the messages that the machines are sending them.
