Alex Brisbourne, KORE Telematics: I was on a panel recently with a leading guy from Intel, and he was talking up the fact that the whole industry needed to have Intel Atom processors at its edge points, and lots of capacity in the network, moving lots of data through. And I said, "Look, nobody's going to buy an Intel Atom-based sensor, which all it's doing is trying to determine whether to switch the sprinkler system on, under the sod on a golf course."

Scott M. Fulton, III, ReadWriteWeb: I can see Intel's need to create a market for itself, and Atom being its smallest processor - albeit one that really should go into a smartphone, and really nothing smaller than a wristwatch - but knowing that it's not going to have a tremendously low-power device, and that it's not going to build a 4-bit, 4004 processor again, it's going to use as much publicity as it can to create a market for itself outside the netbook.

AB: We have to be realistic. The fact is that, you go back to the [period of time] shortly post-Andy Grove, but certainly with Pat Gelsinger. With every single slide deck [Intel used] to sell a project [was driven by], "Does it sell processors?" Everything else was subservient to that particular beast. You had to convince people that they had to move up the processor tree.

I thoroughly buy the notion that that's what they [Intel] said. But I don't entirely agree that it's a universal message for the trunk of the M2M market.

SF3: Is there a possibility that just the same way Intel needs to sell processors, IBM needs to sell middleware, so it may be taking a package that doesn't quite fit what the real world envisions for the [IoT] application, and trying to shove that hexagonal peg into a round hole?

AB: It's always hard to deduce with IBM whether the engineering or the marketing organizations are at the front of the bus. By and large, it's a marketing organization. And with the whole "Solutions for a Smarter Planet" and other related taglines which they've put together, I think IBM and Google have both done a fantastic job of raising the practical awareness of what could be achieved, particularly if you look at their areas of strength: distribution, logistics, and other areas. You're seeing the initiatives coming out of Qualcomm, the Qualcomm Life program for health management, a significant number of initiatives we're involved with in the health management area as well.

Clearly, every company goes back to its mother lode of where its profitability lies, and builds its strategies around it. But if you look at it in the context of IBM, it really is at the heartland of data management. So this seems to be markedly relevant to them. I think the challenge with IBM, honestly, is that remote telecom-enabled data management, particularly with thin communications - going out to these individual devices - has never in truth been one of their great strengths. I mean, they're fantastic in what they've done in the world of RFID, and now what they're doing in NFC and financial services. But how to marry that into the thin-route, M2M stuff, still remains challenging. At the end of the day, it's all about selling the data management solution.

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