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Everything Everywhere is the bizarre name for the joint venture of France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom’s UK mobile joint venture, but the company is already looking out beyond British shores.
It’s the emerging market for machine-to-machine communications that is making Marc Overton, wholesale chief at EE, excited. Machine-to-machine — or M2M as it is unfortunately abbreviated — is being touted as a potentially vast new market for the mobile industry, and Everything Everywhere wants a part of it.
And, while vending machines, electricity meters and car parks are inherently static, much of the M2M industry will be built on the need to track or communicate with movable items, from containers on board ship and hire cars being driven around Germany to valuable packages that are being couriered from Los Angeles to London.
But Everything Everywhere, set up in July 2010, is surely limited to selling mobile services in the UK. What is it doing in the global machine-to-machine business?
“We’re a one-stop shop,” says Overton, who is vice president of M2M as well as wholesale at the company. EE’s joint ownership means it has close relationships will all the members of the France Telecom Orange empire — from the Caribbean to the Middle East via Africa — and all the members of the Deutsche Telekom empire, from T-Mobile USA to eastern Europe.
“We are a credible international player and a credible alternative to Vodafone,” he says. “We can leverage our communications footprints.”
Overton is particularly looking at US companies that are looking for a single international partner to deal with in order to handle global roaming of M2M services. “Large companies want to break into Europe, but they don’t want to have to negotiate contracts in 23 countries. They can deal with us and we can deliver the whole of the US and Europe on one contract.”
