There’s another technological revolution bubbling under the surface, and it starts inside a Coca-Cola machine.
Reaching into a beverage machine for your drink of choice has never been something of top priority to the everyday consumer, but when that machine is all out, we immediately take notice and oftentimes get grumpy.
While beverage distributors have long been able to forecast when vending machines are likely to run out of stock on a particular drink, which is why they usually have the drinks we want, one distributor is going above and beyond to ensure guaranteed satisfaction.
Coca-Cola Amatil, an Australian bottler and distributor for Coke and its sister products, began installing SIM cards in each of its 40,000 vending machines across Australia starting a decade ago. This move, effectively making each machine a mobile device, has proved a game-changer.
“As that technology has improved over time, we get real-time updates on vends,” the bottler’s chief information officer, Barry Simpson, recently told the Financial Review. “As we implement cashless solutions and roll out loyalty programs, we can track spend by consumer and we can track trends far more quickly and target offers to specific consumers.”
Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT), known more precisely as machine-to-machine communication (M2M). Advances in mobile technology have started making more than just tablets and smartphones connected to the Internet, and the effects of this added communication among machines is just starting to make its dramatic impact felt.
Austrialian mobile provider Telstra (News - Alert) claims that roughly 800,000 individual machines are transmitting data without human intervention over its mobile network, according to the report. This represents $80 million for Telstra in annual revenue, and it will grow by roughly 50 percent over the next two years, according to research and investment group, CLSA.
Worldwide, the M2M market currently is a $30 billion industry, according to IDC (News - Alert), and some vendors are predicting that up to 50 billion devices, both human and M2M, will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Everything will be talking to everything else, and this will bring changes that even most pundits cannot yet predict.
“Sensors are becoming smarter and smarter and lower and lower cost, and there are a lot of pretty exciting and exotic technologies which now tend to be converging on low-cost, low-power, relatively intelligent devices themselves,” noted Ian Oppermann in the article, director of digital productivity ans services for CSIRO. “It’s hard to see all these different sensors are not going to be intelligent and provide lots of data.”
Simpson continued to tell the Financial Review that the technology has become a commercial differentiator, pointing to companies using mobile networks to track their trucks as a good illustration of the trend.
“I don’t think you can find a compelling business case not to invest – the velocity of the business and the needs of customers in the marketplace says you need to be at the top of your game,” he concluded. “I don’t think you can do that without investing in the technology.”
To learn more about SIM technology, click here.
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo