LIVE FROM COMMUNICASIA 2013: End-to-end solutions and big data analytics are the type of high-value services which will enable operators to make more money from machine-to-machine deployments, Markus Breitbach, head of M2M at Deutsche Telekom, said.

This will provide a growth opportunity as the technology becomes more widely deployed, which will lead to falling prices for M2M hardware modules and connectivity — putting a squeeze on margins in these areas.

“What’s really the catch is ‘what do we do after this?’ Because a lot of solutions nowadays are already there, maybe not rolled out everywhere in the world, but you have to look for something that is not there today,” Breitbach said.

“Its mainly about finding new ways to make money out of this, it’s getting creative with the business model. It’s about big data analytics and what to do with the data and how to create new services on top of that huge amount of data,” he continued.

In order to provide end-to-end solutions, partnerships have been identified as an important tool, rather than the company looking to do everything itself.

“We don’t see any reason why time to market wise and cost wise we should do that, and we are also not the experts of every niche in every vertical — that is simply something nobody would believe. Therefore we have expertise coming even from the smallest companies, that are strong in a certain area,” he said.

Breitbach also highlighted that while the technology sector is familiar with M2M, many potential customers may not be — and further, do not need to be.

“When it comes to, let’s say, a farmer, do you really believe they know about M2M? No, because it’s not their business,” he observed.

“This is where we want to become the mediator between our cryptic descriptions of technologies, and real use features for a certain segment in the market,” he continued.