28th March 2007 -- Machine-to-machine wireless technology developer Wavecom SA plans to launch a service in the fourth quarter of this year, providing machine monitoring and over-the-air firmware updates to companies using its products.
Wavecom, headquartered in Issy-les-Moulineaux, develops wireless modules for automotive, industrial and wireless professional applications, and now plans to extend its offering into services.
The Remote Device Management Services (RDMS) offering is already being trailed with a few customers and is scheduled to go on general availability in the fourth quarter, said Emmanuel Walckenaer, head of the new business.
Walckenaer has just joined Wavecom from smart and SIM card developer Gemalto, where he created the OTA software update offering, with a support hotline and training unit. Walckenaer said he was joining Wavecom to bring "my experience in building B2B services".
While Gemalto was about firmware over-the-air to SIM cards and thus dealing with mobile operators, whereas Wavecom is about FOTA for customers of its M2M technology, there are commonalities in that "both are hardware and software companies," he went on.
The challenges, therefore, are in establishing a new business model for the new services part of Wavecom.
"We'll have to set up a hosting center and a pre-sales organization, but the benefits of a secure OTA update replacing a site visit are potentially huge, particularly as a lot of our customers are small-to-midsized companies," said Walckenaer.
Wavecom's biggest competitor in the M2M space is Siemens, though it is only a very specific part of that conglomerate, and very hardware focused, according to Wavecom.
"They don't even have our degree of software focus," said Lisa Ann Sanders, Wavecom's director of communications and investor relations. "There are no M2M vendors with a service offering right now."
RDMS will in fact comprise two separate services, said Walckenaer. "Firstly we'll offer monitoring, which will be low-level, network stuff rather than for applications," he began. "We'll be able to check for different versions running in the network and so on, as well as to see how well the connection is running."
"Second will be the download service, which we're calling the Delta OTA, whereby we determine what extra code needs to be delivered to the remote device and according to what SLA," he added. "We might need to update 100,000 machines and need to define whether the updates can be carried during the day or overnight, for instance."
--Rik Turner--
