Cisco reaches into the IoT space with its latest acquisition in Jasper Technologies
Cisco has announced their intent to buy Jasper technologies, a company involved with developing a platform that facilitates the Internet of Things (IoT). The value of the acquisition has been pegged at $1.4 billion.
IoT, a terms that has quickly become a buzzword in the technology space, is a technology trend in which various objects--from everyday appliances like toasters and refrigerators--to industrial equipment can connect with each other and exchange information. This can lead to higher levels of automation and better analytics of physical trends ranging from domestic to city-wide applications.
With IoT being a fledgling space, companies in the space have been developing their own methodologies while implementing IoT, leading to proprietary standards that do not always interchange information with each other. Also as the proliferation of these devices becomes widespread, they have the propensity to generate huge amounts of granular data over time. This data needs to be processed so that it can be understood in a manner that helps decision makers identify the information being measured.
Jasper a platform on that connects these devices , and it does so in a way that enables IoT device manufacturers to process, manage and comprehend all of the data being fed by these products. Given the scale of this data, the platform lends itself to being cloud-based, enabling it to accommodate ever-growing numbers of connected devices.
While Cisco has traditionally had deep strengths in the networking infrastructure space, this move marks a natural extension into a lucrative area that is likely to experience much growth.
In a blog post announcing the acquisition, VP of Corporate Business Development Rob Salvagno wrote, “Cisco views Jasper as a unique IoT service platform that is disrupting a massive market with strong strategic alignment with Cisco. Jasper represents the largest platform of scale in IoT today with over 3500 enterprise customers and 27 service providers across 100 countries.”
Jasper has to date raised over $200 million in venture funding, with the most recent being a $50 million round in September 2014.
Gaurav Garg, founding partner of Wing Venture Capital and a Gasper board member said of the deal, “We are still in the very early stages of the IoT revolution, which I liken to the spread of electrification in the late nineteenth century. Just as the creation of the electric grid sparked a vast outpouring of innovation, so the ability to connect physical devices to the internet will trigger many decades of new applications, a few of which we can already see in the shape of drones and driverless cars.”
Jasper’s client base includes ABB, Amazon Kindle, Ford,GM, Heineken and more.
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