Telecom Lead India: The market for Application Enablement
Platforms (AEPs) software — designed to provide core features for multiple M2M
applications — will grow from $169 million in 2011 to $1.7 billion by 2017.
Increasingly, third-party providers of what ABI Research
calls Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs) are stepping up their efforts to
abstract away much of the burden of application development,” said ABI Research
practice director Sam Lucero.
Despite the vast opportunity for merchant-market AEP
solutions, the market at present is nascent, small, and comprised of a plethora
of vendors coming to the market from differing backgrounds.
Over 30 companies are currently active in this space,
ranging from pure-play providers like Axeda, ILS Technology, and ThingWorx, to
M2M module and modem suppliers like Digi International, Sierra Wireless,
Novatel Wireless, and Eurotech, to core network infrastructure providers like
NSN and NEC.
At the present state of market development, pure-play
providers as well as those coming at the market from a module/modem background,
are gaining the most traction in the market. This is a benefit of their close
focus on the M2M market and their nuanced understanding of the needs of M2M
application providers.
However, there is clear opportunity for consolidation
going forward, and ABI Research expects that as the M2M market becomes ever
more mainstream, it is likely that large core network infrastructure and IT
equipment vendors with deep pockets will start to roll up the smaller players
in a natural process of consolidation.
Cellular M2M application development has traditionally
been a complex, costly, and time-consuming endeavor.
Typically, developers create their applications from
start to finish as entirely custom projects. However, across different
applications and verticals, there is actually much commonality of requirements
in terms of core features and functionality. For example, how to model an
object in the application, how to create rules and alerts, and how to provide
security mechanisms are all features that span the M2M market.
