A funny thing happened on the way to the Smart Services Leadership Summit last month, perched atop the cliffs of La Jolla, California... Despite record-high surf, we announced to a full house of 300+ delegates that this was to be the last Summit of its kind...Sounds like an ending. But I assure you we were talking about a beginning -- the start of a joint venture between Qualcomm and Verizon Wireless focused on once-and-for-all solving for the solution fragmentation that has hamstrung the evolution of M2M and Smart Services.
I'll leave the prognosticating to our analyst and reporter colleagues, but it struck me that the Black Swan Theory that keynote speaker Dr. Eric Topol invoked to characterize developments in the telemedicine space also serves as an apt instrument to put the joint venture in proper context.
The first criteria for an event to be a Black Swan event is for it to be, as its namesake, a surprise. As for the Qualcomm Verizon Wireless venture, check... (save for a few enlightened pundits who might claim they saw it coming.) The second criteria is for the event to deliver a major impact. Again, I assure you, check. And the third criteria is that after the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected, or as Dr. Topol worded it, "in retrospect looks inevitable."
Somewhere between one hour and one year following the joint venture announcement on July 28th, the partnership will look to most observers to have been inevitable. The wireless operator with a dominant 3G and 4G position and looking to build upon the saturated voice market meets the M2M wireless services and chipset stalwart. How could they not join forces to deliver what the market has been screaming for: end-to-end Smart Services solutions?
From an economics standpoint, margin-stacking among the multitude of M2M solution providers had been crippling Smart Services business models. And from a technology point of view, reasonable time-to-market depended precariously upon the successful integration of a stable of disparate hardware, software, and middleware piece parts.
I must admit a healthy measure of bias, being employed by this new venture, but from as objective a perspective as I can muster, this is a no-brainer marriage of long-time partners poised to finally shepherd Smart Services to the far side of the proverbial chasm.
Subscribe by Email