Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Jasper, a company that delivers a cloud-based IoT service platform for millions of connected devices. With Jasper, enterprises can simplify and automate the management of IoT services across a wide range of connected products such as cars, printers, vending machines and many others.

 
I'm incredibly excited about this news and believe it will help accelerate the digitization 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.

 
At Cisco, we use our build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop approach to innovation to identify and capture key market disruptions such as IoT. Today, Cisco Investments is one of the most active IoT investors globally, with over 50 companies in our portfolio; providing us a front row seat into the disruption and opportunity that IoT promises.

 
Cisco views Jasper as a unique IoT service platform that is disrupting a massive market with strong strategic alignment with Cisco. Jasper represents the largest platform of scale in IoT today with over 3500 enterprise customers and 27 service providers across 100 countries.

 
Jasper's ability to build strong relationships with both enterprises and service providers makes them distinctive in the IoT industry. Jasper recognized 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.

 
When I first met the CEO, Jahangir Mohammad, I was immediately impressed with his visionary approach to the opportunities available in IoT and his foresight in building a unique business to capture those opportunities. 10 years ago, when everyone was focused on flip phones and the early adoption of smartphones, Jahangir and team focused their energies on connecting everything else, including GPS units, cars, security systems and point of sale devices. This early insight has proved fruitful, and now many millions of "things" are connected to the network and working on Jasper's platform. 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 realize the value of IoT.

Find more information about the announcement on cisco.com