Swisscom selects Ericsson's DCP as M2M platform

Remember this blogpost from December where I complained that Swisscom had not told us their big piece of M2M news? Well, that big piece of news was this. They've selected the Ericsson Device Connection Platform, making them the second operator running the platform after Telenor Connexion which developed it before selling it to Ericsson.

The first trials will be in February 2012 and commercial deployment in the summer.

Good news this for Ericsson, which really needed a second reference customer. Swisscom isn't exactly a global player, as its facilities-based footprint only covers Switzerland. But it is the dominant player in both the Swiss fixed and mobile markets by quite some way. It also has a strong brand and established reputation with multinational companies. As a result it might hope to pick up some global deals for enterprise M2M implementations, for instance for supply chain management.

Also it's good news for Telenor, which must be hoping for more potential partners to migrate onto the platform. Currently it's struggling with issues of scale against Vodafone and the emerging alliance between DT, Orange of Telia Sonera. Building up a bit of global scale will help. Having Ericsson clearly gives them that to a certain extent but basically, the more partners the better. Swisscom is just a small step in the right direction for Telenor.

For Swisscom it's also a good move. The DCP is a great platform and will help with efficiently addressing the M2M opportunity. In terms of future-proofing and ensuring the requisite M2M feature-sets Swisscom has made a good choice.

Although Swisscom wasn't one of the CSPs that featured in our inaugural M2M CSP Benchmarking Report, we do profile Telenor Connexion and one of the criteria upon which we judged CSPs was platforms, so we run the rule over the DCP. Further Reports and Research Notes are planned on the theme of platforms over the course of the next few months. Contact me for more details.

Machina Research estimates that there will be about 46 million M2M devices, including 10 million cellular, in Switzerland by 2020, up from about 4 million at the end of 2010 (Source: Machina Research's Connected Intelligence Forecast Database, 2012).

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