Cisco Acquires Jasper Technologies To Boost IoT Capabilities

The deal enable Cisco to offer more complete solutions that could works with any IoT service providers and developers.

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Networking giant Cisco has acquired Internet of Things startup Jasper Technologies Inc. for $1.4 billion in cash.

The acquisition will enable Cisco to offer more complete IoT offerings that is interoperable across devices and works with IoT service providers, application developers and technology partners. Cisco sees Jasper as the industry's leading IoT service platform in terms of the number of enterprises and service providers it serves.

Based in Santa Clara, California, Jasper Technologies is a privately-held IoT firm that delivers a cloud-based IoT service platform aimed at helping enterprises and service providers launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. The company develops and provides a cloud-based IoT service platform that automates the management of IoT service across devices and enables companies to create new business models. Jasper’s IoT platform connects any product via mobile networks run by service providers, and then offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) to manage those connections. The company has more than 3,500 enterprise customers and 27 service provider partners groups globally.

Rob Salvango, Cisco's vice president of Cisco's Corporate Business Development, said in a blog post:
"Jasper understands that enterprises making connected products need a simple, scalable and interoperable IoT service platform that can support the billions of connected devices estimated to be connected to the network in the next five years. Together, Cisco and Jasper will deliver exactly that to our customers."

"Cisco views Jasper as a unique IoT service platform that is disrupting a massive market with strong strategic alignment with Cisco," Rob Salvango added.

Cisco has been aggressively beefing up its IoT capabilities for the past few years through strategic acquisitions, partnership and in-house development. In July 2015, Cisco unveiled its IoT System, a collection of new and existing products that touch everything from networking and security to management and analytics. The IoT System offers users a complete set of tools to manage not only complex and diverse set of systems, endpoints and platforms needed for the IoT deployment, but also the massive amount of data they will generate.

In November 2015, it announced a partnership with telecommunications giant Ericsson that will help both push deeper into a range of emerging market segments, which include the IoT space, software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV).

And last year, it bought Cologne-based startup ParStream, which provides a database for analyzing large amounts of IoT data in near real time anywhere on the network.

The IoT market is expected to grow rapidly over the next several years. Research firm IDC predicts that total spending on the IoT will jump from $698.6 billion last year to almost $1.3 trillion in 2019. Cisco officials are betting big on IoT as the next big thing. Cisco predicts that by 2020, there will be 25 billion connected devices worldwide, from cars and home appliances to industrial systems, medical appliances and baby monitors. Cisco also said that the economic impact of IoT could hit $19 trillion worldwide by the year 2020.