Private equity firm Inverness Graham has taken a controlling interest in RACO Wireless, a leading M2M service provider that connects machines like parking meters and smart cars to mobile broadband. RACO says it hopes to use the capital infusion for acquisitions and organic growth. The company now has 550 M2M partners, and has won industry awards for its Omega Management Suite, a single pane of glass that allows customers to control the SIM cards in their remote devices.
RACO Wireless spun off from T-Mobile in 2010 and remains the carrier’s preferred partner for M2M solutions. The company has a similar relationship with Everything Everywhere in Europe. But other carriers are direct competitors to RACO, as they aggressively market their own M2M solutions. Their advantage, of course, is their existing relationship with their enterprise customers. For example, Sprint Nextel is currently testing an M2M application for insurance providers that enables agents to check driving habits of potential clients using a handheld device.
“Our main competition is the carriers,” says RACO Wireless president John Horn. “It is a land grab with M2M we are taking a disporoportionate share.” Horn says RACO has an advantage because it can move much more quickly than the carriers can. “We take down as many barriers to entry as possible,” he says. “Spending months to onboard with a carrier costs [customers] valuable time and money. We can have them on the network in as little as a day. We have compressed a process that takes weeks to months with other carriers down to one day.”
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