M2M definition?

I have surfed so many blogs/reviewed so many journals and its amazing how every 5 yrs we get fasciniated by #2 between two alphabets and market analysts show billions of $$s around it..the same happened around few yrs back with some wise person coming out with terminology "M" 2 "M".

Just to give you some history, back in my days of consulting we came out with term "A" 2 "A" when we didnt know what else can we do beyond "B" 2 "B" OR "B" 2 "C". We had so many projects and the market was getting commoditized with new firms popping up everyday in our space, so we decided alright guys time to re-think strategy..and hence was borm A2A, meaning Any to Any..what it meant was Any device can access/present anything to Anyone or any application utilizing Wireless..sounded cool huh! we even managed to grab over 10 clients and some companies even recieved fundings to build this...unfortunately market was still busy healing from bubble burst and the concept vanished or was too early for the market...

I had concluded that time, anything with #2 is possibly jinxed, hence always stayed away from it..but to my surprise fast forward 6 yrs and i heard M2M...wow! its like all old memories came back..i called my old friends and news spread like fire in my circle on this latest trend...we had a joke going around 2 is back..watch out :)

Not sure what the fate of M2M companies will be, but at the end of day its just an old concept with new face lift..i.e. How you can connect your enterprise to remote assets..Asset can be machines/people/buildings etc. etc. ..so to my readers i request whenever you think of M2M or if new to the world of M2M and hear about it, just think in plain simple terms, its nothing but way to connect remote assets to your enterprise. and life will become easier...

Next logical step will be what is value chain of connecting remote asset to enterprise...my answer..think of KISS..

DATA COLLECTION - DATA TRAVEL - DATA DESTINATION and things will start to fall in place...good luck! as always comments are welcome...

I always want to stress the readers, to get the new M2M source book where Peggy Smedley, the editor/publisher of M2M magazine gives a good definition of M2M.