Cisco completed its $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies, bringing the fast-growing smaller company into Cisco's new Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud Business unit.
In a press release, Cisco said the breadth and depth of relationships that Cisco and Jasper have with service providers puts the combined company in a unique position to help service providers meet the IoT needs of their customers.
Cisco and Jasper intend to bring to market a comprehensive IoT service platform to enable service providers, enterprises and ecosystem partners to build IoT service businesses, including things like usage-based insurance for connected cars, predictive maintenance for industrial manufacturing and asset tracking for commercial fleet management.
Jasper grew dramatically over the past year, from 1,900 announced enterprise customers in March 2015 to more than 3,500 enterprises today. Cisco says it will build upon Jasper's IoT service platform and add new services including advanced IoT security, support for additional connectivity options like enterprise Wi-Fi and low-power wide-area network (LPWAN), as well as analytics solutions.
Analytics is one of those oft-cited value adds that companies like Cisco are bringing to the IoT table. Intel also boasts about its ability to offer analytics when it comes to IoT and big data, saying it can help unlock data faster to extract meaningful information and value for consumers and businesses.
Jasper Founder and CEO Jahangir Mohammed is general manager of the newly-formed IoT Cloud Business Unit at Cisco, while Rowan Trollope serves as Cisco SVP and GM of the Internet of Things and Applications Group at Cisco.
Cisco and Jasper plan on providing an industry-wide interoperability platform that ecosystem partners can build on. Some of the world's largest IT solution vendors – including IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP – already integrate with Jasper's IoT service platform. The Jasper platform enables enterprises to integrate technologies from these ecosystem partners to accelerate IoT service deployment.
For more:
- see this blog post
- see this Mobile World Live article
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