Cisco's Strategy for the Jasper IoT Service Platform

Jasper IoT dashboards. (Image courtesy of Cisco.)

Now that the dust has settled from Cisco’s USD$1.4-billion acquisition of Jasper technologies, the organization has released its strategy for the Internet of Things (IoT) service platform technology.

The Jasper IoT service platform helps companies add IoT functionality to their product designs. This allows large, medium and small organizations to launch, manage and monetize their IoT devices around the world.

The Jasper IoT service platform has multiple applications from predictive maintenance in factories and commercial fleet management to tracking supply chains and compiling product usage-based data to help guide future designs.

Some of the technological improvements Cisco hopes to bring to Jasper include increasing the software’s security and connectivity options. Currently, Jasper connects devices to the IoT over a cellular network. Cisco plans to expand connectivity to technologies like low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) and enterprise Wi-Fi.

The post-acquisition plans also include expanding the interoperability of the platform in order to increase the size of the ecosystem of partners. Current ecosystem partners include IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP.

As for the company’s structure, the Jasper team will become the IoT Cloud Business Unit at Cisco. Despite the integration, it appears that Cisco will try to maintain a hands-off approach to Jasper’s product roadmap and ecosystem of partners.

IoT industry could be worth USD$11.1 trillion a year by 2025. (Image courtesy of McKinsey & Company.)

The merged organization also plans to take advantage of both Cisco’s and Jasper’s combined relationships with service providers, which are looking to get onto the IoT industry bandwagon. A good strategy as the IoT industry is forecasted to be worth USD$11-trillion by 2025 according to the McKinsey & Company.

“IoT is a key piece of enabling digital transformation for today’s enterprises. Cisco already has the network equipment, cloud, analytics and security layers and the addition of Jasper brings critical IoT service platform layer needed to provide enterprises with a complete digitization strategy,” said Carrie MacGillvray, vice president of Mobile and Internet of Things at International Data Corporation (IDC), a market intelligence provider. “This acquisition provides value for both Cisco and Jasper’s enterprise customers, their service provider partners and broader IoT ecosystem partners.”

For more on Cisco’s acquisition of Jasper and how it compares to other recent engineering IoT software acquisitions, follow this link.