When Cisco bought IoT device management platform vendor Jasper roughly one year ago for $1.4 billion, Constellation viewed it as a wise move.
For one, Jasper's platform is one of the most mature of its kind, given the company was formed in 2004 and at the time of the deal had 3,500 enterprise customers. The technical synergies were obvious as well, with Cisco bringing its ample array of networking hardware together with Jasper's software. That broadened Cisco's footprint in IoT from the network to also controlling sensors and devices.
Moreover, Jasper brought years of experience working in the area of industrial automation, a trend that helped form the foundation of how we conceive of IoT today, while Cisco came from the enterprise IT perspective.
The combination seems to be working swimmingly from a go-to-market standpoint, as Techcrunch reports:
According to numbers supplied by Cisco, from when the acquisition went final last March until today, the unit’s customer base has grown 157 percent from 3500 to 9000 enterprise customers. The number of devices under management has grown from 17 million to more than 40 million, an increase of 135 percent and the number of service providers running Jasper’s Control Center product has grown from 35 to 50, an increase of 42 percent.
Under Cisco's ownership, Jasper is also looking to set the pace for innovation in its area of IoT. This week, it announced that it had completed live trials of NB-IoT (Narrow Band IoT), a new standard for LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networking). The standard is expected to help existing mobile network infrastructure lower power usage while keeping coverage strong, and is relevant in IoT areas such as smart cities, building automation and agriculture.
Cisco has long been criticized for making far too many acquisitions, overpaying for them, and ultimately seeing them underperform or even fail. It does not appear so far that Jasper will go down as a flop.
"At the time of the Jasper acquisition, many Industry pundits commented that Cisco was paying a high price," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "These results suggest that Cisco got something of a bargain."
Other developments of late, such as the release of draft specifications for 5G networks, "show how hot the telecom connectivity market has become with Cisco now positioning as a serious player," Mulholland adds. "The picture of industry sectors demanding a mix of physical network types to support their IoT deployments keeps coming up as a market driver, and we should not forget that Cisco Digital Network Architecture provides a cohesive capability to bring everything together in a low-latency secure network."
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