Vodacom has disclosed on Monday that it could pay as much as R1 billion to acquire Internet of Things (IoT) innovator IoT.nxt.
In May, Vodacom announced plans to buy 51% stake in IoT.nxt for an undisclosed amount to enhance its current IoT offering.
The Vodafone-owned mobile phone firm disclosed on Monday that it bought the 51% stake in IoT.nxt for R1 billion, of which R469 million was settled in cash, with the remainder being contingent on the future performance of the business.
IoT.nxt creates data-connectivity between new data sources and legacy systems which allows for real-time data availability across a wide business segment.
The effective date of the acquisition was 23 August 2019.
“The acquisition of IoT.nxt will help in accelerating the Group’s internet of things (IoT) strategy, and take advantage of the significant opportunities within the IoT space,” Vodacom said.
Looking ahead, Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub, said the company expect the benefits from its acquisition of a strategic stake in IoT.nxt will become increasingly evident in both Consumer and Enterprise businesses.
Vodacom also reported that its IoT connections rose 14.2% to 4.6 million for the six months ended 30 September 2019.
IoT technology is transforming the world of business, retail, heavy industry, and our personal lives.
Research from Gartner has estimated that there will be over 6.4 billion connected things in use in 2016, increasing to around 20.8 billion by 2020. Business will need to adapt their practices on a mass scale to accommodate the deluge of connected solutions.
IoT.nxt is South Africa’s fast-growing innovator in IoT technology.
The IoT firm, which was founded by Nico Steyn and partners Bertus Jacobs and Terje Moen in Centurion at the end of 2015, opened its first fully-fledged office in Europe in The Hague, the Netherlands. This follows its associate office established in London in January 2017 and then firmly starts the company’s global expansion. For more read: South Africa’s IoT.nxt sets up shop in The Netherlands
IoT.nxt has developed an edge to cloud IoT platform that enables rapid IoT implementation as the main underpin for enterprise digital transformation. IoT.nxt’s unique Raptor edge gateway technology and gateway management software integrated into its end to end Web-Commander software stack clearly differentiates it from its competitors.
The platform allows for a top down or bottom up digital transformation approach and is an enabling technology for all of the large IoT platform and big data players, as is evidenced through the company’s many commercial applications across many industry verticals where customers were using MS, SAP, IBM or GE, to name a few.
IoT.nxt’s agility and ability to rapidly connect all ‘things’ from legacy analogue to latest digital devices in the edge ecosystem, to abstract-normalise-aggregate and filter data intelligently at the edge, visualise in 3D and intelligently control the ecosystem through a multi-directional rules based engine supporting a big data subscription based consumption model in one natively developed platform, is what sets it apart from competitors.
