Now imagine that this site is 10 hours away from your nearest office, and that you have other heavy equipment running at a dozen different remote construction sites. Are these dispersed assets running properly today, making money for you? Which ones are lying idle, costing you money? Are they where they’re supposed to be, or has somebody just driven off with one of your excavators? Are your operators pushing them too hard? Are the engines running too hot? Has anyone checked fluid levels recently?

Keeping up with your dispersed assets

Whether you’re in construction, leasing, agriculture, civil engineering, or any other industry that revolves around expensive, heavy equipment, you need updated information on your dispersed assets to get the most out of them. But the more you grow, the more you tie up valuable time, people, mobile devices, and wireless services gathering that information, one machine at a time.

Smart enterprises with heavy equipment and dispersed assets are adopting machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions. M2M lets them track assets, communicate changes, determine status, gather data, schedule maintenance, and make more money with their equipment, all in real time.

Here are four reasons M2M and heavy equipment are made for each other:

1. Tracking

Where are all your dispersed assets today? If a customer needs another loader at a site in the east, do you have an idle one nearby? M2M tracking tells you where your heavy equipment is right now and lets you ensure that your customers are operating it in the geographical boundaries of their lease agreement.

2. Maintenance and monitoring

Wherever your assets may be, you want to monitor them to maximize uptime. M2M opens the door to condition-based service management (CbSM) and predictive maintenance of your equipment, reducing your cost of labor, extending machinery lifetimes and enabling you to schedule work more accurately. Your assets tell you when something is due for repair.

3. Security

It’s 2:00 in the morning; why is your pile driver’s engine running? M2M gives you a big advantage in theft-prone construction areas because it operates independently of jobsite electricity, which thieves often disable. It tells you if your assets are moving when they shouldn’t be, and can let you disable the engine and summon police.

4. Business

M2M can generate a lot of data that needs to fit into enterprise systems like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com. The real business value in M2M lies in its ability to integrate with the tools you’re already using. You want to easily analyze your data for ways to make more money with your heavy equipment and waste less money on it.

With M2M, you have your finger on the pulse of your dispersed assets in real time. In fact, your dispersed assets are reporting their pulse directly to you. By enabling heavy equipment to talk, M2M optimizes conversations among the devices that need to be connected. The result: real-time status about machines and, in the future, perhaps, their surroundings.

Are heavy equipment and dispersed assets part of your job? How efficiently do you track, monitor, secure and make money with them now? How has M2M worked for you?

Estimated worldwide IT spending on big data in 2013 will reach $34 billion. [1]

• Assisted GPS can increase location accuracy down to the range of 5-30 meters.

• A slew of new devices leveraging improved connectivity to mobile handsets have fueled strong growth for wearable wireless mHealth devices in 2012. By the end of the year, nearly 30 million devices will have shipped, up 37% on 2011 shipments. [2]

These stats are just a few of the trends and forecasts that will be bouncing around the Enterprise track of the 2013 AT&T Developer Summit at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

If you want to see how they’re going to affect the enterprise applications you’re creating, sign up for the Summit and come join us Monday, January 7, 2013 following our weekend-long M2M Hackathon.

In case you missed Maureen Backe’s post a few days ago, we’re devoting an entire track of our one-day Summit to topics for enterprise developers. Today, I get to help whet your appetite for some of the sessions in that track.

Here’s what we’re planning as of now:

10:45 Session – AT&T – A One-Stop-Shop for Mobilizing the Enterprise

Let’s be honest: You came to the Summit looking for answers because something back at the office has your hair on fire. Are you trying to get machines to talk to one another? Are you trying to get machines and people to communicate? Do you need a better way to locate your assets, computing devices, and employees?

We’ll walk you through a use case, take in a video, and conduct a code crawl around several mobile and cloud offerings that you can use to address your enterprise mobility problems. Chris Hill, Senior Vice President of AT&T Advanced Business Solutions, will kick off the session. Next,  Larry Wall of Mobility Solutions Services will take you through the APIs and code snippets so you can see how we put together the solution behind the use case in the video. This session will give you a good overview of AT&T’s M2M, Location Information Services, Global Smart Messaging Suite, Platform as a Service, and Web Real Time Communications products, and a chance to get your technical questions answered on the spot.

11:45 Session – M2M and mHealth

With estimates of 170 million connected devices by 2017, the healthcare industry has plenty of M2M lessons you can learn from. The M2M platform for enterprise is already here, so there’s no need to keep building your own from scratch.

Eric Krauss, Advanced Mobility Solutions, will show you how many of your M2M needs – collaboration, security, messaging, authentication – we’ve already taken care of in our Machine-to-Machine Application Platform Powered by Axeda.  Ryan McQuaid mHealth Platform speaks about this in the M2M and MHealth Enterprise Track Session In fact, we’ve built AT&T’s mHealth Platform, our own M2M solution for healthcare, on it to move data from hospitals, providers, payers, electronic medical record (EMR) databases, and healthcare IT systems securely to applications and devices. Bring your questions about M2M and how to integrate it with your own enterprise applications to this session.

12:30 Lunch

No session is scheduled. Maureen and I will be available to hear the  kind of content you need to develop smarter applications. The more you tell us about the enterprise projects you’re working on, the better we can assemble the blog posts, technical content, campaigns, and programs you can rely on to stay ahead of the mobility curve.

2:00 Session – The Power of Mobile Identity with Messaging, Location, and Web-browser Real-Time Communications (WebRTC)

How are you going to collect all that location data to track your assets, employees, and customers? What are you going to do with it once you have it? How can you use the Web for real-time communication?

This session by Chris Aron of Advanced Mobility Solutions will show you the market for location-based services (LBS) and introduce you to the cross-carrier, network-based location technology we’ve rolled into our Location Information Services (LIS) API. You can ask questions about enterprise development use cases like roadside assistance, geographic compliance, location analytics, and proximity marketing — and start thinking about new products and services for your customers.

Beyond locating people, WebRTC lets you build a communication channel through an ordinary Web browser. Dan Guyette of Mobility Product Management will take you through B2B and B2C use cases and explain how you can use AT&T Network Services to enhance WebRTC applications with our Web Developer’s Kit, standard APIs, and reusable widgets. We’ll show you how to get started with your own deployments, then lead you straight to LIS, the Global Smart Messaging Suite (GSMS), and our WebRTC tools.

Tired yet? That’s what’s available just through mid-afternoon! We have more sessions planned and a panel of experts on hand, so stay tuned; I’ll include those sessions’ descriptions in the next wake-up call.

Meanwhile, what else do you want to talk about in the Enterprise track of the 2013 AT&T Developer Summit? Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to be ready to answer your questions.

[2] ABI Research Report-Sports and Wellness Drive mHealth Device Shipments to Nearly 30 Million in 2012. Dec. 2012

[1] Gartner Report-Gartner Data Drives Rapid  Changes in Infrastructure and $232 Billion in IT Spending Through 2016. Oct. 2012

While we may not be able to put a hard dollar amount on savings generated from developers incorporating APIs and sample code into their solutions, we do know that a collaborative “sandbox” approach helps produce the best mobility solutions without time-consuming and costly rework.

Developers from enterprises and startups alike are using the AT&T AMS Product Trial Environment as a sandbox environment for just this kind of work. The AMS PTE, gives developers access to APIs, sample code, “code inspect” features, white papers, case studies, FAQs, and other tools and resources that improve quality and speed to market.

In the PTE today, developers are experimenting with a wide variety of options – designing prototype solutions and testing out solution features and functionality of the featured mobility solutions – all for free.

If you’re a developer, you can join others experimenting with four products (and a roadmap to bring on several more), including Global Smart Messaging Suite (GSMS), Location Information Services (LIS), Mobile Barcode Solutions, and Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). Visit the PTE and engage with one of our enterprise specialists to learn more about speeding time to innovation without added cost.

As a developer, does the idea of trying before you buy appeal to you? What other techniques are you using to drive speed and accuracy into the development process? We look forward to your comments below.

During her five-year tenure with AT&T, Meredith has been responsible for various integrated marketing programs, particularly vertical industry programs for executive reach into AT&T’s customer-base and outreach programs into the analysts community, industry publications, and industry councils, including the Manufacturing Executive Leadership Council.

Key to her role is creating outreach programs for the AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions M2M community. This includes oversight of the M2M platform portfolio, vertical offers, and SmartGrid/Utility Solutions.

Prior to her current role in marketing, Meredith was part of AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions product organization during which time she spearheaded product marketing initiatives, such as the creation of The Manufacturing Ecosystem at Your Fingertips tri-fold – the first piece of AT&T literature to capture the wireless and traditional wireline product solutions – targeting audiences from the C-suite to the customer frontlines. She is also responsible for developing the first Manufacturing Maturity Index for gauging a company’s wireless maturity. Fortunately for Meredith, her diversified experience of more than 20 years in product management and technology and marketing has enabled her to deliver integrated marketing solutions that deliver high ROI for AT&T and its customers. Her previous successes included developing an end-to-end smart container chain of custody solution called the Powers Secured ®System (PSS), while serving as a partner in a business she co-founded.

An overachiever, Meredith is the recipient of the 2012 President’s Award for Outstanding Partnership from Manufacturing Enterprise Communications. She holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Queens College in Charlotte, N.C., where she graduated magna cum laude.

With so much responsibility, one may wonder if Meredith has any free time. However, she remains very active outside the office, with rock climbing, and teaching pilates and re-publishing her mother’s historical fiction works. She also has had the responsibility of creating centerpieces and topiaries for her daughter’s wedding – as she commutes between Atlanta and her home in Charlotte.