Cisco has made a significant cellular IoT play by wholly acquiring specialist mobility and M2M vendor Jasper.

Jasper is one of the best known names in IoT, and provides cloud-based SaaS to support enterprise and telco management of autonomous machine communications. Jasper claims its software has now been implemented by more than 3,500 enterprise organisations around the world, covering enterprise mobility device management and IoT.

Cisco will pay $1.4bn in cash and assumed equity awards for the acquisition, and will incorporate its existing IoT services onto the Jasper cellular IoT platform, including enterprise wifi, security for devices and advanced analytics to better manage device usage, it claims. Both companies released heartfelt statements of platitudes and mutual-praise upon confirmation of the deal, and confirmed Jasper will now form part of Cisco’s newly-created IoT Software Business Unit, following a major trend in the industry for tech vendors developing dedicated IoT arms such as Intel and IBM.

Speaking about the deal, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins expressed his excitement.

“I am excited about the opportunity for Cisco and Jasper to accelerate how customers recognize the value of the Internet of Things,” he said. “Together, we can enable service providers, enterprises and the broader ecosystem to connect, automate, manage, and analyze billions of connected things, across any network, creating new revenue streams and opportunities.”

This deal represents the latest in a sustained IoT expansion strategy from Cisco. In October last year it acquired analytics specialist ParStream, with Cisco saying the new acquisition will bring instant analysis of masses of data at the network edge with minimal infrastructural or opex repurcussions.

Jasper provides solutions for more than 27 service providers across 100 countries with its IoT solution being largely based on cellular connectivity. With that being the case, Cisco may still be in the market for non-cellular, low power specialists, with LoRA and Sigfox taking off as significant parallel IoT networks.