Cisco acquires cloud-based IoT service platform
This week, Cisco announced their intention to acquire Jasper, a company which delivers a cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) service platform for millions of connected devices.
Jasper enables enterprises to simplify and automate the management of IoT services across a wide range of connected products such as cars, printers, vending machines and many others. Cisco’s acquisition of Jasper is aligned to its aim of making IoT simple, scalable and interoperable.
Robert Salvagno, Vice President, Cisco Investment and Corporate Development, said:
“I’m incredibly excited about this news and believe it will help accelerate the digitisation journey of our enterprise customers. 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 uses a build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop approach to innovation to identify and capture key market disruptions such as IoT. Cisco Investments is one of the most active IoT investors globally, with over 50 companies in their portfolio. Providing them with, as Salvagno puts it:
“A front row seat into the disruption and opportunity that IoT promises.”
Jasper, a unique IoT service platform with over 3500 enterprise customers and 27 service providers across 100 countries, is disrupting a massive market and has strong strategic alignment with Cisco.
Salvagno continued:
“Jasper’s ability to build strong relationships with both enterprises and service providers makes them distinctive in the IoT industry. Jasper recognised early on that in order to support its enterprise customers, it needed to tightly integrate with service provider networks.
“This strategic decision was game-changing – it helped them create an expansive recurring revenue-based business model that offers more breadth and reach than any other IoT player today.”
Salvagno credits Jasper’s CEP, Jahangir Mohammad, with tremendous foresight in building a unique business to capture the opportunities available in IoT. It was this visionary approach that has led to Jasper having the largest platform of scale in IoT with many millions of things connected to the network.
Salvagno concluded:
“More importantly, Jahangir and Cisco share a common vision of how to best serve the opportunities presented by IoT by connecting everything in a way that is simple, scalable, and interoperable. Jahangir will be leading a newly formed IoT Software Business Unit under our IoT and Collaboration SVP/GM Rowan Trollope.
“By joining Jasper with Cisco we will help our customers move faster to truly realise the value of IoT.”
(Adapted from the original blog post by Robert Salvagno, published 3rd February 2016: https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-iot)