Press release: Telecom Italia joins the Global M2M Association

The Global M2M Association (GMA), a cooperation agreement in the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) sector between TeliaSonera, Orange and Deutsche Telekom, today announced the addition of Telecom Italia to the association. Through the GMA, four of the leading mobile operators in Europe can now collaborate to deliver best-in-class, enhanced and seamless M2M services, making it easier for businesses to deploy and manage M2M solutions and innovations around the world. The unique partnership provides global coverage with an unmatched European footprint of 28 countries, or 94 percent of the European population.

At the core of the GMA is a strong commitment by all partners to enable unsurpassed global M2M solutions across multiple sectors. Examples include traditional telemetering services, critical eHealth solutions, automotive commercial services and innovative services, such as consumer electronics connected devices. The cooperation agreement also provides customers with many business benefits, including roaming services for a seamless customer experience, enhanced interoperability, innovations and partnership development.

• seamless customer experience: Global customers seek seamless cross-border and multi-domestic M2M solutions. To facilitate a seamless customer experience, the GMA is committed to enhancing roaming quality of service through unified incident management processes, harmonized service level objectives and common procedures for fault reports or escalation.
• enhanced interoperability:  All sorts of M2M modules are present in a wide range of devices. The GMA has created a module certification program to provide a unified and industrialized approach toward M2M product specifications, resulting in quicker and more optimized integration into customer machines and devices. Module certification will enable the most optimized interoperability between module and network.

• innovations and partnerships: The four companies are focused on further developing partnerships and fostering innovation by enabling M2M solutions and building a thriving M2M ecosystem with leading partners across the entire M2M value chain to provide customers with simplified services and faster go-to-market opportunities.

   “We are excited to enter into this cooperation agreement with three key players in Europe, enabling us to offer the most comprehensive M2M solutions across all sectors,” said Lucy Lombardi, EVP Industry Relations & Cross Business Initiatives at Telecom Italia. “The GMA demonstrates our collective commitment for continued collaboration in the interest of our customers and the M2M ecosystem.”

Mario Polosa, Director of the M2M Project Office at Telecom Italia, added, “The M2M market is already moving quickly, with customers demanding harmonized service architectures without borders. We are firmly convinced that the GMA model is the best solution to consolidate and develop domestic and global opportunities together with our partners.”