This month’s unveiling of the Iridium 9603, the company’s latest data module, has set the bar spectacularly high for all devices designed for embedding into M2M solutions. The significantly reduced profile of the 9603 breaks down design barriers, being the world’s smallest two-way satellite data transceiver, and ensures its place in the hand-held and similar sized devices market.

The ‘smaller-than-a-matchbook device’ offers new ways for people and assets to make necessary, two-way connections reliably, in near real-time. Personnel tracking, mobile field monitoring, defence, research, search and rescue, remote sensing and even U.S. forces around the world are only some of the 9603 application areas.

This type of technology is already being actively incorporated into products, with speculative launch dates being considered as early as June of this year, and we can understand this anticipation. Joel Thompson, vice president of product management at Iridium stated that with this device, “Iridium is disrupting the global M2M market […] through our innovative approaches to reduce the size of our data and voice/data modules.” We do not hesitate to agree and will be keeping a watchful eye on the progress of this and other devices in the near future.

Berg Insights’ view on the future of vehicle based applications, what they loosely call “fleet management”  is very encouraging. Under the bracket “Fleet Management” they include all aspects of vehicle management, transport management, driver and mobile workforce solutions and applications linking vehicles to enterprise IT systems.

The prediction is that the European market for fleet management is entering a sustained growth phase that should deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 21% for the next five years. This would mean that the number of installed fleet management systems will grow from it’s current level of around 2 million to over 5 million by the end of 2015.

There seem to be a few factors driving this adoption. Health and safety initiatives have a part to play, as do asset tracking and security concerns. However the main factors identified by the research seems to be the cost reductions (in hardware and connectivity) that have really enabled the widespread adoption of fleet management services.

Berg also point to the notable consolidation trend that’s happening in the market as vehicle manufacturers and OEMs begin partnering with one another and with service providers to offer a comprehensive service approach. It’s something that’s been in the news recently when Spanish telecom giant Telefonica announced a partnership with fleet management company Masternaut . It looks like this might be the beginning of a trend as the major players look to take advantage of this market growth.