Wireless Maingate has managed to gain a wide level of knowledge that is used in all aspects of key customers’ business. This has changed the way Wireless Maingate views the M2M world. By being in the absolute foreground of innovation and delivery capabilities Wireless Maingate is currently involved in several large-scale projects where the definition of M2M will change.
“We are no longer talking about products online and how to do it, we are focusing more on the value it brings and why enterprise should do it. By understanding the “why” we can implement and measure the value for our customers. Obviously we understand the “how”, but that is part of our core business anyway,” says Baard Eilertsen, CEO at Wireless Maingate.
“We could never do this unless we had very deep knowledge about our customers’ business and the value chain of their business segments. It has taken a lot of years to gain this knowledge but we see that it is paying off. The specific knowledge we currently have has actually given us several contracts within our customers’ strategy development and implementation of such. That is the ultimate proof that we have focused on the right things, how to improve our customers’ business,” continues Baard.
One such project is for E.ON Sweden. The project started in the beginning of 2010 and was defined as, “Finding the best solution to gain real time presentation of energy consumption to the consumers and create an awareness of consumption behavior”.
Wireless Maingate and E.ON shared a 50/50 cost based project and by July of 2010 the first pilot was up and running with all top executives within E.ON Sweden AB.
The solution is one of a kind and is a combination of core knowledge between Wireless Maingate and E.ON. “We have taken the absolute best from both worlds, added a few technologies and developed our own where we didn’t find a suitable third party product, and assembled it into an end-to-end service for all E.ON customers.
The challenge has been to measure energy usage and present the readings in real-time through several medias. The medias we are using are in-house display, an iPhone app and on E.ON customer WEB, all in real time,” says Baard. The launch of the product was done in the beginning of December and currently 20,000 customers have an invitation to be the first to start using the solution.
What Wireless Maingate expects of the solution is to gain the awareness of the consumers to understand how their energy consumption could be more efficient and also to get an understanding of how consumers can act to lower the dependence of energy and save money.
“It is all about understanding what energy is and how it is used. We know that electricity prices are rapidly increasing at the same time our need for electricity is also increasing, leading to electricity taking a larger share of our living costs every month. At the same time utilites, like E.ON, sees that there is a need to improve their dialogue with the end consumers to gain a better understanding of how consumption can be more efficient in the future smart grid technologies. Wireless Maingate has taken the first step in creating this for both the consumer and for E.ON,” says Baard Eilertsen. The first step is taken, but the solution is currently divided into eight releases within the development road map.
“Wireless Maingate and E.ON understands that we could not develop and release a product that will solve all future issues within energy efficiency, so what we did was agree on where to start and then start planning a road map approach in developing the solution in the coming years. This is also part of engaging the E.ON customers into the development planning, ensuring a high rate of active customers to interact with. The solution is built in such a way that we can add services along the way with the app and we also have access to the update services of iTunes to spread more advanced services. The ultimate goal is the ‘Smart Energy Home’ where we all can, remotely off course, monitor and control our domestic environments and usage of energy,” continues Baard.
“This proves that we are very much in the foreground of innovation and where our knowledge is used at the absolute peak of what current M2M can be used for. It is also why Wireless Maingate is now moving into a new arena defining a new position for the company where machine-to-human will be in the focus of our solution development.
Another reason is that we see that all major operators in the world are now launching their M2M strategies and while we see that they are all trying to create a trustworthy market message we take our 13 years of experience and understanding of our customers to take this to the next level. We also make machines communicate but more importantly we make sure that we have a human aspect in our thinking and deliveries because without the human interface we will never be able to create real value,” says Baard.
In general there is a slow but ongoing paradigm shift of industrial enterprise business models. The need and value of having access to accurate information – always – is challenging the way large manufacturing companies handle information from their devices. “Maingate aims to close the gap,” says Patrick Isacson, Senior VP Industry of Maingate. “We consider M2M to be an infrastructure of information. There are so many actors out there today offering the theoretical opportunity to connect. Customers don’t need that – they need information.
We don’t talk techniques – we talk functions. We don’t talk ‘know-how’ – we talk ‘know-why’. We don’t talk ‘total cost of ownership’ – we talk ‘total value of function’. We have a crystal clear vision of what for, wherever and however data is produced and Maingate will bring the information in a proper way – and make it useful.”
Leading actors on the M2M market forecast 50 billion connected devices by 2020. The current market growth is over 20 percent. “M2M is the single most important application for industrial remote data handling and the second most important way of handling information next to the internet,” Patrick continues. “By constantly pushing the boundaries of interaction and by humanising machines Maingate will have an important and interesting position on this arena.”