Market value of UAE sector put at Dh80 million to Dh100 million.
Dubai: The UAE will witness more machine-to-machine (M2M) deployments as enterprises acquire knowledge about its huge benefits, Hatem Bamatraf, executive vice-president for enterprise business commercial at du, told Gulf News.
He said it is a new trend that is gaining traction in the market.
he added:
“We are just in the beginning of the business and have seen lot of interesting signs from our customers.”
“We expect a significant growth in the next three to five years.”
He said M2M solutions are the fastest-growing offering in the telecom space, delivering innovations at a staggering pace and catalysing the growth of the industrial internet.
As part of the scope of the offering, du is providing end-to-end solutions including data connectivity, SIM cards, devices and managed reporting as a one-stop-shop to meet customers’ needs.
Du provides solutions for key verticals such as transport and logistics, energy and utilities, health care and retail.
“The UAE’s telco operators have been looking to ramp up enterprise offerings to include M2M solutions,” said Bhanu Chaddha, senior research analyst at IDC.
“We also expect operators to take necessary initiatives to align their business models to serve the expected growth in demand for M2M. One way to do so will be to align M2M offerings with vertical markets and offer targeted solutions to cater to the growing demand from industries such as automotive, health care, logistics and transportation, security and smart metering and utilities.”
Global operators like Vodafone and Orange have aligned their M2M offerings with their international operations and are looking to draw benefits from operational synergies in the M2M space. However, regional telcos are focused on “developing their own M2M portfolios and remain keen on developing partnerships to play a more prominent role in the M2M ecosystem,” Chaddha said. “Partnerships will drive development of M2M ecosystems as operators move toward an end-to-end solutions approach.”
Du has partnered with SamTech, Gemalto and other international players to provide this facility in the UAE.
Bamatraf said:
“The benefits are enormous, for example, M2M devices worn by patients on the wrists can track real-time data of the patients and vital signs can be monitored and transmitted to the doctor.”
The overall market value of the sector is put at Dh80 million to Dh100 million in the UAE this year. Du sees only opportunities in this sector and no challenges as the digital economy is gaining momentum.
“A lot of telco operators are seeing a growth in data day by day,” Bamatraf said.
“This requires a continuous monitoring of network and expanding whenever a need arises. Du is providing a huge amount of bandwidth wirelessly in addition to the fibre optic network.”
According to Cisco’s latest global Internet traffic report, there were two billion M2M connections worldwide last year and it is projected to triple by 2017 globally. M2M internet traffic will grow from 197 petabytes in 2012 to 3.9 exabytes by 2017.
Today, people are communicating with other and the new trend that is gaining traction is machine to machine communicating with each other.
M2M is a process of enabling two machines to communicate with each other wirelessly. It enables automated communication between remote machines, and centralised management of applications. The software tells what to do based on the parameters provided.
M2M works on 2G, 3G, 4G or WiFi.
It provides real-time monitoring, efficiency, accuracy, control and cost cuts without the need for human intervention.
