MWC: Jasper Wireless announces M2M platform deployment with NTT DoCoMo

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo is a long-standing participant in the machine-to-machine industry and Japan is a particularly competitive landscape for M2M. At the end of 2011, DoCoMo held a market-leading 38 percent share of the country’s M2M connections and had experienced a 20 percent increase in the number of M2M connections it served during the preceding 12 months. But rivals KDDI and Softbank had always been following closely behind, with Softbank in particular displaying impressive levels of growth in its M2M business.

Despite being the last of the three to become active in M2M by a considerable number of years, Softbank became the second largest Japanese carrier in terms of M2M connections served at the end of 2011. Its installed base had increased by 73 percent during 2011 to give Softbank a market share of 31 percent – despite the fact that carrier had only accounted for a mere one percent of all M2M connections just three years earlier. NTT DoCoMo’s historic leadership of M2M in Japan could certainly have been considered to be coming under threat.

It is in the shadow of these developments that NTT DoCoMo is now revealed to have been negotiating with Jasper Wireless for the provision of the vendor’s connected devices platform – just days after it was confirmed that Portuguese carrier Optimus had become a Jasper customer too. NTT DoCoMo is a carrier that has been famous for many years for preferring to develop its own proprietary solutions and standards for wireless communications. So the inking of this contract with third party software developer Jasper Wireless can be seen as an important validation of several things.

Firstly, it is confirmation of the perceived utility of the Jasper Wireless system in the eyes of a seasoned M2M competitor. Second, it emphasises the need for even established wireless carriers to seek to roll out a more value-added M2M offering in order to stay competitive. And lastly, it is proof of the need for companies within the M2M eco-system to focus on their core competencies, while at the same time leveraging the core competencies of strategic partners, rather than trying to accomplish everything by themselves.

This particular deployment may also prove to have interesting ramifications for other Jasper Wireless carrier customers around the world. For Japan is well known to be a world-leading hotbed of innovation for the consumer electronics and automotive industries – and if companies active in these industries come to develop connected products in partnership with NTT DoCoMo, they may well wish to distribute those same products abroad.

This is an exercise for which such companies would need to source additional international providers of connectivity. But the ability for enterprise users of the Jasper Wireless platform to manage their networks of connected devices globally, across any other Jasper-enabled carrier, will surely make the other carrier customers of Jasper Wireless a natural first choice for them to approach.

The long-term nature of the M2M contracts market suggests that NTT DoCoMo’s existing enterprise customers for machine-to-machine services will not be migrated to the new platform, but will continue to be served by DoCoMo’s legacy/wholesale systems instead. Also, the number of new customers that will require the value-added features of Jasper’s platform has yet to be put to the test. But judging by the historical M2M growth that DoCoMo has experienced, the carrier is likely to accrue a minimum of 450,000 new M2M connections during 2012. While Jasper Wireless has another internationally-renowned tier one carrier to add to its roster.