M2M compared to Industrial Revolution, science fiction

TORONTO — The world’s most interconnected retail store isn’t in London, Paris or New York, Canadian Tire Corp. chief technology officer Eugene Roman said Wednesday, but in West Edmonton, where his company has implemented everything it knows about machine-to-machine communication. Roman told the audience at the one-day M2M Canada 2014 conference at the Toronto Board of Trade that his company has made huge investments in connecting every part of its stores, building a system that constantly monitors temperature, stock levels, lighting levels and even customer activity. “We live in the age of the machine,” he said. “Machine-to-machine allows us to see things that were invisible before, without human input.” Roman was one of more than a dozen representatives from companies and industry groups, including Rogers Communications Inc., Ericsson Canada Inc. and Huawei Technologies Canada Co., that attended the conference, organized by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. Machine-to-machine (M2M) is essentially the automation of connection of nearly every kind of electronic device, including anything from simple light bulbs in your home to sophisticated sensors that allow driverless cars to function. At Canadian Tire, which has opened 10 new “cyber labs” in the last 14 months, that means store shelves can tell distribution centres when they are running low on product, robots can pick it from a warehouse and pack it into a truck, and the company can see what customers need at a level far beyond what was previously feasible, Roman said, all without human input. Roman said Canadian Tire hired 90 former BlackBerry Ltd. employees to build its M2M capacity. One of its distribution centres is now completely dark, he said, because the robots do not need light to find and pack products. “Inside our distribution centres, machines talk to machines all the time,” he said. “As long as we understand that the future is automatically mobile and everything that can be connected will be, we can get it right.” At the conference, panellists discussed issues such as security, policy implications and the application of M2M to connected cars. “Everything that you see in sci-fi films, it's going to happen,” Fiorenzo Mastrioanni, director of business products and solutions at BCE Inc., said in a presentation. “It's not if, it's when it will happen.” Eric Simmons, general manager of M2M at Rogers, said in an interview that the world was poised for a “revolution” in interconnectivity that will be comparable in scale with the industrialization of Europe and North America in the 19th century. “Machine-to-machine is the industrial automation of the Internet and mobile,” Simmons said. “It’s taking it to the next level. It’s going to have an impact on our society that we’re only now beginning to realize.” Simmons presented at the conference and noted that different measurements of the M2M market end up with different valuations. Still, by all of the indicators Rogers has more than half of the market, and he said in the interview that the company intends to continue being an M2M leader. “We already have so many of the solutions that companies are looking to put in place,” he said. “Rogers has so many different assets available to us that allow us to offer a lot of unique value propositions that other companies will never be able to do.” Simmons said that his team includes more than 100 employees. He said Rogers, which has already brought a million M2M connections online, wants to be an integrated provider for M2M services. That means its customers will deal with only one company for the design, implementation and service of their M2M networks. “It’s Rogers leading the solution for the customer,” he said. “We’re not going to be necessarily manufacturing sensors. That’s not the business we’re in. Being able to provide those components, we’ll be the ones putting the pieces together.” William Crago, vice-president of technology at Huawei Canada, said in a presentation that the M2M market is expected to be worth about $50 billion globally by next year. As systems become increasingly interconnected, security becomes a major concern. Ron Zimmer, president of the Continental Automated Buildings Association, said in a presentation that many current M2M systems were not well protected from cyber attacks, citing a specific case where an Internet-enabled refrigerator was shut down remotely by a malicious hacker. Other interconnected systems, such as security cameras or building maintenance controllers, can be found through simple Google searches, he said. “That’s just a nuisance right now,” he said. “It could be a CSIS building, or someone could hack Parliament and we’ll see it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the National Post.” Zimmer said the security problem is not insurmountable, pointing to the example of online banking. “As developers, we have to put in those systems of protection,” he said. Brenda Connor, who works in M2M at Ericsson, told the audience at the M2M conference that technological advances and the volume of data have made concerns about security the major limiting effect on M2M adoption. “An asset that a company has is its customers’ trust and loyalty,” she said. “That can be lost easily. It's not the amount and the volume of data, it's the security that's important.” M2M, she said, will become commonplace very soon, but not because of one “killer app.” “The killer app is the open ecosystem that allows development to happen, development we can’t even think of the applications for,” she said. “It's not a killer app, it's a killer ecosystem.” — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story reported that Rogers intends to have one million M2M connections by the end of 2014. In fact, the company passed that milestone in 2013.

M2M compared to Industrial Revolution, science fiction

News | 03/20/2014 12:22 am EDT

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