Verizon hosted a trade show for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) partners and their customers in Las Vegas Oct. 15, and we were fortunate to be there. It’s was great to mix with fellow members of the M2M community – from M2M providers to customers to Verizon BAEs and ASAs – and compare notes about:
- How consumers and businesses are using their wireless devices to improve regulatory compliance.
- How M2M solutions are allowing businesses to monitor and control their remote industrial assets.
- How M2M technologies are minimizing risk, improving business processes and enhancing the bottom line.
Operator? Why is Verizon in the M2M Market?
The cellphone market is pretty well saturated. According to a study by Pew Research Center, 91% of Americans own at least one cellular device. With aggressive marketing campaigns from AT&T, Sprint, and especially T-Mobile, it’s has become more difficult to keep customers from switching. With the nation’s largest and most reliable network, this isn’t a huge concern for Verizon, but to continue it’s amazing growth, Verizon sees a huge opportunity for their company and customers with the growing M2M market.
M2M is different than IoT, but they are often lumped together because of their similarities
With M2M technology, cellular providers like Verizon can substantially increase the number of connections on their existing network. Similar to cell phones, Verizon leads the M2M market because of their reliability and expansive coverage, they are the forerunner in the M2M field and have been so for the past several years. Another reason for this success is their excellent partner program, which pairs cellular, business, and M2M experts together to find the right solution for companies. As a Verizon partner, Omni’s goal during the event was to help Verizon sales agents and customers identify M2M solutions that can help their clients conduct business more efficiently, and also demonstrate some of our most popular solutions.
Seeing is Believing
There’s nothing like a live demonstration to showcase your stuff, and at the event, we showcased two of our most popular solutions.
Tank Monitoring
Fuel, wastewater, dairy, and even beer tanks are difficult and costly to monitor manually – especially when they’re remote. To demonstrate our m2m tank monitoring solution, we installed an ultrasonic sensor to the top of our clear iced tea dispenser and set up our NetTelligence™ software to show how our tank monitoring solution, reflects changes in liquid levels in real-time.
The glowing red light is the ultrasonic sensor and the NetTelligence™ software is displayed on the MacBook next to it
Refrigeration Monitoring
Restaurants, food processors, caterers, hospitals, and even wineries have a need to maintain specific temperatures to preserve the quality of their goods. For this demo, we used a mini fridge stocked with Coca-Cola, housing the easy to deploy, PT 300 with built-in temperature, GPS, and cellular gateway. Each time the door opened, the PT 300 sent an alert to our software dashboard and smartphone.
The PT 300, NetTelligence™ software, and our red fridge at the Vegas event
