News & Updates

_Cisco and Jasper - the lowdown on the IoT acquisition

By Terry Hughes / February 15, 2016

In a $1.4 Billion deal, last week Cisco acquired Jasper Technologies. What's the skinny on the deal? Here goes...

• Jasper provides a platform to build connected devices on and deliver them to the market much more quickly and with less friction. Jasper is described as “Developers of an IoT cloud platform" so with Jasper, Cisco gets a company that understands the growing Internet of Things market

• Jasper’s platform enables systems/devices that generate a ton of data to manage and understand all the data so it's a data play for Cisco too

• Jasper represents the largest platform of scale in the IoT market today with over 3500 enterprise customers and 27 service providers across 100 countries

• Cisco acknowledged they weren't too strong in IoT. To fight off disruptive market forces, this acquisition positions them extremely well

• Jasper gives Cisco an industrially focused company with a broad international customer base including Ford, GM, Heineken and Boston Scientific

• The cultural fit is also huge and analysts believe that both Cisco and Jasper share similar visions for the future of IoT

• Jasper’s platform is designed to automate the management of IoT services across devices connected to cellular networks. As stated in analyst coverage of the deal, “The battle of IoT is about the network”. Sensors, stacks and platforms are nothing without a stellar network

• As the hardware side of IoT becomes commoditized and beings to lose value, Cisco’s software will be a viable way to grow Jasper's business

• Jasper has raised $200 million by themselves through 6 funding rounds

• Jasper’s telco customers include AT&T, China Unicom, Claro, O2, KPN and NTT DoCoMo. AT&T chose Jasper for its AT&T Drive connected car solution

• Cisco now plans to add new IoT services such as enterprise Wi-Fi, security for connected devices and advanced analytics

• Jasper CEO (Jahangir Mohammed) will run Cisco’s IoT software business unit

• Cisco sees 4 parallel tracks of IoT: devices, network, apps and service platform (Jasper brings the service platform aspect to Cisco). Jasper is the leading IoT service platform in terms of number of enterprise and service providers

• Jasper connects any device (cars, jet engine to implanted pacemakers) over a cellular network and manages the connectivity through Jasper’s SaaS platform so the acquisition allows Cisco to offer a complete IoT solution that is interoperable across devices and works with IoT service providers, application developers and ecosystem partners

• Interestingly in November 2015, Cisco acquired ParStream, a company based in Cologne Germany that provides an analytics database, enabling customers to analyze large amounts of data and store in in near real time anywhere in the network

• As IoT grows to 50 billion connected devices (by 2020) valuable data will be created at a faster pace than companies can manage and ParStream is at the forefront of ensuring data can be stored and analyzed in an efficient manner. Their database is built for IoT by using innovating compressing and indexing capabilities to help access data faster and at scale

In summary, the IoT market will be worth $19 trillion over the next decade, representing $1.7 trillion for service providers. IoT could impact up to $6.2 trillion on the global economy by 2025. There will be a move from 10 billion connected devices today to 20 billion (some say 50 billion) by 2020. So you can see why Cisco's acquisition of Jasper makes total sense.