I was at Wavefront Wireless Summit and the hot topic is M2M.

M2M is machine to machine.

M2M can include the case of industrial instrumentation - comprising a device (such as a sensor or meter) to capture an event (such as temperature, inventory level, etc.) that is relayed through a network(wireless, wired or hybrid) to an application (software program) that translates the captured event into meaningful information (for example, items need to be restocked).^[3] Such communication was originally accomplished by having a remote network of machines relay information back to a central hub for analysis, which would then be rerouted into a system like a personal computer.^[4]

M2M is hot thanks to companies like NEST that took the disconnected thermostat and connected to your mobile device, browser and the cloud.

Sitting on a panel and listening. It is really hard to surf the web and look at your e-mail when you are on a panel, so you need to listen. :-) I realized that the data center industry with its focus on performance of the its electrical and mechanical systems for some of the smart data center guys is probably the most connected M2M solutions out there. Data Centers are some of the youngest industrial plants. Yes a data center is an industrial plant. It is an information industrial plant. And , uhhh it has a lot of connectivity, storage and compute available if the monitoring of the infrastructure was designed in. Some of the smartest guys have whiz kids who are creating new algorithms to run their mechanical systems more efficiently, saving money in power used and the maintenance.

Listening to people who need to use cellular connections to get telemetry data from farm equipment is really hard. Is there cell coverage in the first place? If not, you need to deploy cellular infrastructure. Data Centers if designed for monitoring have plenty of capacity for M2M.

We don’t about M2M, but state-of-the-art data centers are huge machine to machine environments. Including the servers themselves are sending GB of data machine to machine. Splunk and others are doing this.

Need to think about this a bit more on how M2M and data centers should be discussed. I’ll add category for now on “M2M"