Google is pumping up its efforts in connected devices for homes and businesses as competition with Amazon, Apple, and other big tech companies heats up. In a bid to keep up, Google today announced its intent to acquire LogMeIn’s Xively Internet of Things (IoT) platform. The $50 million acquisition will bring 45 employees to Google’s Cloud platform team.
Announcing in a blog post, Google indicated it wants to use this purchase as a springboard into the growing IoT market, which it believes will reach 20 billion connected things by 2020. Antony Passemard, head of product management for IoT and Pub/Sub at Google Cloud said, “Through this acquisition, Cloud IoT Core will gain deep IoT technology and engineering expertise, including Xively’s advanced device management, messaging, and dashboard capabilities.”
Xively ‘s IoT Platform is designed to help organizations connect almost anything they use to the Internet—from small factory floor smoke detectors and sensors to large shipping containers. The goal is to give organizations a way to collect and use information such as status, usage and error conditions from these connected systems to improve quality, modify existing products, to troubleshoot them and for various other applications, Xively has noted.
Xively’s connectivity technologies include a device-messaging tool, an embedded IoT client agent and mobile SDK for Android and iOS. Besides connecting devices to the Internet, Xively also offers technology designed to help enterprises aggregate and manage the data collected from them. The company’s tools in the management category include one for storing time-series data collected from IoT systems and another one that lets enterprises perform analytics on the collected data.
According to the company, organizations can use its real-time stream processing technology and rules engine to run queries on the data they collect, create visualizations and perform root cause analysis. Xively’s IoT platform supports various other capabilities including identity management, security, and integrations with other Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, and analytics applications.
On the ID management front, for instance, Xively’s tools support capabilities that help organizations manage access and permissions to every Internet-connected device on the enterprise network. On the security side, Xively offers capabilities that the company has claimed make it easier for enterprises to discover and integrate IoT systems so they can be managed securely.
Customers of Xively include Halo Smart Labs, Freight Farms, Lutron, ShadeCraft, New England BioLabs, Watts, and more. As for LogMeIn, it said in a blog post that it is leaving the IoT connectivity platform space, and instead, will invest in its Support-of-Things initiatives for products like LogMeIn Rescue, Bold360, GoToAssist, Central, Rescue Lens, and SeeIt. It said, “We believe that Google Cloud, now armed with Xively’s team and great technology – and backed by their platform and developer heritage and reach – are a far better fit for the future of platform leadership.”
Such capabilities are going to be useful for Google, which hopes to be able to deliver enterprise services that focus on business-value creation from IoT data. Google’s Cloud IoT Core managed service currently offers a range of services for connecting, ingesting and managing data from local and globally distributed IoT devices. Google launched the service in beta last September.
Google has said it wants to also leverage its data analytics and machine learning expertise to help enterprises do more with their IoT data. Organizations signed up for Google’s broader Google Cloud IoT Solution service currently can connect their IoT data to the company’s collection of analytics services including Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery.
“Our customers will benefit from Xively’s extensive feature set and flexible device management platform, paired with the security and scale of Google Cloud,” Passemard wrote.
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