The Week in Review: IoT

Finance

Automile, an Internet of Things company involved in field-service businesses, has received $34 million in Series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $47 million. Existing investors Dawn Capital, Point Nine Capital, SaaStr Fund, and Salesforce Ventures also participated in the new round. Automile will use the money on marketing, product development, and sales, opening sales offices in Europe and the U.S.

ForeScout Technologies priced its initial public offering at $22 a share, expanding the offering to 5.28 million shares and raising about $116 million. That sounds like a lot, and investors have bid up the stock price to $26 on Friday afternoon, but ForeScout had $125 million or more in private funding from Amadeus Capital, Accel, Pitango, Meritech Capital Partners, and Wellington Management, among other private investors. The IoT security company’s stock trades as FSCT on the NASDAQ Global Select Market.

Market Research

Forrester Research reports that 55% of telecommunications decision makers it surveyed say they are using or plan to use IoT applications, while 40% say they are interested in IoT apps.

Almost 20 billion connected devices will be deployed around the world by the end of this year, according to Strategy Analytics, with smart home systems driving the total to 50 billion devices in the next decade. Smart home devices will overtake smartphones by 2021 in the global share of the deployed connected/IoT devices, the market research firm predicts, with IoT growing by 17% this year, but only 9% per year by 2021.

Cybersecurity

Arm this week debuted its Platform Security Architecture at Arm TechCon 2017, providing a common industry framework to promote increased cybersecurity for IoT device developers and hardware manufacturers. The PSA will be released during the first quarter of 2018. Amazon, Cisco Systems, and Google have pledged to adopt the Arm architecture.

M&A

NXP Semiconductors remains committed to its proposed acquisition by Qualcomm, yet the company acknowledged this week that the deal may not conclude by the end of this year. “We believe that working together with Qualcomm, given the complementary product portfolios of the combined company will enable us to better support our customers’ long-term requirements in both autonomous driving and secure IoT. We are working diligently with Qualcomm and the various regulators towards a successful close this year. However, at this point the timetable is very tight and there is a possibility for the closing to occur in early 2018,” NXP CEO Richard Clemmer said in a statement.

Financials

For the third quarter ended September 30, National Instruments reported net income of $33.4 million on revenue of $320.9 million, compared with net income of $24.5 million on revenue of $306.4 million in the year-earlier quarter. For the first nine months of this year, NI posted net income of $76.7 million on revenue of $939.6 million, up from net income of $53.6 million on revenue of $899.65 million for the same period in 2016. NI President and CEO Alex Davern said in a statement, “We have seen record revenue and record profit and have made significant progress toward our target business model. With strong alignment and focus throughout our organization, we have seen continued success in the key focus areas of semiconductor test, 5G, the electric and connected vehicle, and the Industrial Internet of Things.”

Commentary

Steve Brumer, a partner at 151 Advisors, had this to say about the Industrial IoT deal between Apple and General Electric. “This is a major announcement for GE Predix. They did not have a way for people who had Apple iOS products to access their software and system. As more Apple iPhones and Macs are used by people in the field within the industrial space, access to a highly successful and largely deployed Predix system is critical and now possible. The new expanded dev kit will allow technical field service groups who use Predix the ability to interface their Apple products and that is a good thing. And to have GE commit to Apple products for its field groups is huge for Apple. But I believe that Android products already work with Predix.

“With IoT, the ROI is not always evident and Apple predicts that the system will mean faster repair times and less overall downtime, BUT is that greater than a Windows 10 or Android tablet? Additionally, Microsoft and GE recently announced a joint effort focused initially on oil-and-gas and mining companies (which are drivers of IoT adoption and positive ROI use cases). This will further solidify Microsoft within the Industrial IoT market.”

Deals

Russia’s MTS selected Ericsson to supply the Ericsson Radio System and core network infrastructure over the next three years to prepare for 5G wireless communications and the IoT. Deployment will begin in this quarter. The contract is worth than €400 million (exceeding $466 million).

Cubic Telecom is teaming with Telstra Wholesale to provide connectivity to the automotive industry in a deal that is said to be worth €20 million (about $23.3 million).

Cirrent and AirTies completed an agreement, pairing Cirrent’s ZipKey technology with AirTies’ Mesh Extenders and set-top boxes. The combination will provide automatic Wi-Fi provisioning of ZipKey-enabled devices, such as appliances, home security systems, printers, streaming audio and video systems, and toys.

Initiatives

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility awarded a $300,000 Digital Economy Initiative grant to Georgia State University, which will use the money to encourage students, especially those underrepresented in the tech industry, to go for a technology career. The three-year grant will support a Digital Learners to Leaders program for IoT technology, from sensors and machine learning to smart-city software.

Israel-based mPrest is expanding into the North American utility market with its IIoT offerings. The company has an expanded production contract with the New York Power Authority and looks to pick up more customers from U.S. utilities.

Services

MachNation estimates IoT platform revenue will hit $65 billion by 2026. To help companies compare the capabilities of IoT platforms, the company is offering the MachNation IoT Test Environment, a test lab for IoT platforms. MachNation has tested Amazon’s AWS IoT, the Bosch IoT Suite, GE Predix, IBM’s Watson IoT Platform, and Microsoft IoT. Its test-lab data is currently available for $395.

Products

Green Hills Software brought out version 2017.5 of its Optimizing C and C++ compilers for 32-bit and 64-bit embedded processor architectures, including Arm, Intel, and Power Architecture. The company also made available its INTEGRITY real-time operating system, with related products and services, for Xilinx’s Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC.