Jasper – IoT just needs to work

At the end of its first year as part of Cisco, Jasper reflects on the progress it has made and the development of the IoT industry as a whole.

We spoke to Macario Namie, Head of IoT Strategy at Cisco Jasper, at ‘Innovation City’ MWC 2017 and he revealed that the business has accelerated under the stewardship of Cisco. Key metrics such as number customers and number of devices supported have all multiplied and the company is adding 400 new enterprises per month (see slide below).

However he was also keen not to over-hype IoT, reflecting that we’re only now at the beginning of the exponential growth phase after years of eager anticipation. Namie also stressed that IoT is simply an enabling technology for getting loads more stuff connected to the internet. “IoT just needs to work,” he said.

With the number one real-world business case for IoT being just getting data from devices to the internet and back again, the main growth over the past year has been from the automotive sector and logistics, such as the constant messages you get from Amazon telling you how your delivery is progressing. Another fast-growing area is retail and point-of-sale, where wireless payment units are being empowered to do other CRM-ish things.

The acquisition itself seems to have been handled in a similar way to the Softbank ARM one, in so much as Cisco has been in no big hurry to fully integrate Jasper into the rest of the business and has been happy to let it remain quite autonomous. Integration is happening on a case by case basis as and when there is a coherent business case for it, which seems very sensible.