Google has announced plans to acquire LogMeIn’s Xively business unit for $50 million in a move that should help bolster Google’s capabilities in the IoT device management space.
Xively’s IoT management, messaging and dashboard technologies will become part of Google’s Cloud IoT Core, a managed service for connecting and managing distributed internet-connected devices.
Antony Passemard, a member of Google’s IoT team said the acquisition would allow Google’s cloud business to gain “deep IoT technology and engineering expertise.”
“Our customers will benefit from Xively’s extensive feature set and flexible management platform, paired with the security and scale of Google Cloud ” Passemard said in a blog announcing the planned acquisition Feb. 15.
Xively says its 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.
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.
“With the addition of Xively’s robust, enterprise-ready IoT platform, we can accelerate our customers’ timeline from IoT vision to product,” Passemard said.