The machines of the world may not be smarter than human beings, at least not yet, but they certainly have us outnumbered. An estimated fifty billion machines are already at work around the globe, compared to the world population of 6.7 billion people in 2009 (M2M Magazine, 2008). Population growth in most developed countries is slowing, but billions of new microcontrollers and machines go into operation every year. Connecting those machines to each other and to a network of wireless modules and sensors is the business of M2M (machine to machine), a well-established industry with enormous global growth potential.

Until quite recently the M2M sector has focused on solutions for the government and for enterprise customers in security-conscious and infrastructure-dependent industries such as energy resource management, manufacturing, transportation, and logistics. With the proliferation of smart products and connected devices in homes, automobiles, and the pockets of more than four billion cellphone subscribers, some M2M vendors and wireless carriers are now eyeing the consumer market as part of a strategy to rebrand M2M as smart services. This chapter analyzes the evolution of enterprise smart services from a foundation of M2M systems and the challenge of transplanting a technology and service culture designed for industrial customers and machines into the consumer environment. It describes the benefits that enterprise managers expect from M2M implementations and contrasts these benefits with the requirements for creating a consumer-oriented value proposition for connected smart services.