Cisco's $1.4 billion (€1.2 billion) acquisition of Internet of Things specialist Jasper Technologies raises questions about the workings of the U.S. vendor's recently announced partnership with Ericsson, analysts at Machina Research said.
In a statement emailed to FierceWireless:Europe, the research company's analysts noted that they will "watch with interest" how Ericsson and Cisco "square this obvious overlap in offerings", after the infrastructure vendors announced a partnership covering routing, data centres, networking, cloud mobility, management and control, and global services capabilities in November.
Despite the question over Cisco's partnership with Ericsson, Machina Research analysts were positive on the U.S. company's acquisition, noting that it is "an excellent deal for Jasper, for whom other options presented challenges, and it's a good deal for Cisco, which wanted to strengthen its SP offering."
The U.S. networking vendor announced the acquisition this week, explaining that the move will boost its presence in the enterprise IoT market.
In a blog post announcing the move, Rob Salvagno, Cisco's vice president of corporate business development, said the company views Jasper "as a unique IoT service platform that is disrupting a massive market ". The IoT specialist "represents the largest platform of scale in IoT today, with over 3,500 enterprise customers and 27 service providers across 100 countries," he added.
Machina Research stated that Jasper's connectivity management capabilities "would fill a gap in the Cisco portfolio" in terms of cellular IoT connectivity.
That view was echoed by Steve Hilton, MD of IoT research company MachNation and a regular FierceWireless:Europe contributor, who said the acquisition will enable Cisco to become a major player in terms of managing networks for "gateway-centric and cellular IoT solutions".
The deal will benefit enterprise customers by removing the need for them to "use multiple vendors to manage the IoT, LAN and WAN environments," while carriers "will no longer have to worry about under-investment in IoT connectivity management," Hilton added.
Ron Lifton, senior enterprise solutions manager at network and application performance management company NetScout, said the acquisition "sends out a strong message about the growing importance of the IoT sector."
He predicted that early movers in IoT "can only achieve exceptional productivity and growth by having an understanding of the relationships and interdependencies between the sheer number of IoT connected generated by sensors, devices and machines."
For more:
- see this Cisco blog post
- view this related Jasper Technologies post
- read Machina Research's statement
- see this MachNation release
Related articles:
Cisco to buy Jasper for $1.4B to pursue IoT
Cisco-style partnerships will fuel Ericsson's push into new markets, strategy chief says
Ericsson and Cisco partner on networks, target $1B in extra sales by 2018
Jasper Wireless signs up two more operators, enhances M2M platform
Cisco: Mobile data traffic to increase 800% within 5 years