Swisscom announced it has become the seventh operator to join the Global M2M Association (GMA).

The Swiss company joins up with a number of high profile operators, including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TeliaSonera, Telecom Italia, Bell Canada and Softbank, to take part in the association, designed to offer customers a “global seamless delivery of advanced M2M services”.

Established in 2011, the GMA brings together global operators to optimise M2M interoperability globally, and enhance M2M roaming services. The operators work together across borders to develop testing and certification procedures, as well as the market ensuring compliance to enable “quicker and improved integration into customer machines and devices”.

Alexander Lautz, SVP M2M at Deutsche Telekom, and one of the founding members of the association, said the addition of Swisscom sees the GMA gain “one of the world’s M2M pioneers”.

“The addition of another tier-one operator allows the GMA to further ensure that customers have the best footprint for a lean and effective interaction of global M2M services through integrated business processes and a single point of connect.”

Swisscom’s head of M2M, Gerhard Schedler, added that its participation with the assocation will allow for “improved and simplified processes”.

“The status of connected products throughout the lifecycle – from production, testing, shipping and distribution to the end user will be automatically adapted and easily manageable,” he said.

According to GSMA Intelligence, Swisscom has more than 7.2 million connections, with more than 658,000 connections in cellular M2M.