Google agreed to an acquisition of Xively, a British IoT platform owned by Boston-based cloud company LogMeIn, the tech giant said Thursday. The deal has yet to be completed, being subject to closing conditions which are yet to be specified. CNBC reports Google will pay $50 million for Xively but no specific figure has yet been provided by Alphabet’s subsidiary in an official capacity. The firm is primarily interested in the platform in order to bolster its Cloud business and do a better job at competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
By absorbing Xively, Google Cloud is looking to evolve its offerings into an end-to-end platform for deploying and managing Internet of Things devices and services. Xively’s framework is already being used by various enterprises and will be pitched to Google’s existing and potential customers as a way of accelerating their IoT projects regardless of their scale. Approximately 45 Xively employees will be joining Google as part of the acquisition, with the company touting their engineering experience and expertise as a valuable addition to its operations. The ultimate goal of the deal is to add robust IoT capabilities to Google Cloud’s platform without compromising on its security and while retaining the accessibility of its solutions that are still advertised as being extremely versatile and suitable for a broad range of applications.
Xively started as a data infrastructure service provider called Pachube, having been founded in London in 2007. LogMeIn acquired the company in the summer of 2011 for an undisclosed fee and renamed it to Cosm, whereas the name Xively was introduced after the platform exited its beta phase of development in mid-2013. Google has been making significant commitments to its cloud business in recent times, having even developed its custom-built Tensor Processing Unit, an application-specific integrated circuit designed for facilitating server-based machine learning. CEO Sundar Pichai repeatedly said the cloud market is one of Google’s key focus areas that’s highly compatible with the company’s general focus on artificial intelligence technologies, suggesting the Internet juggernaut will continue pursuing major investments in the segment going forward. Its acquisition of Xively is likely to be officially concluded by mid-2018.