Nokia Takes Over the IoT Sphere with SpaceTime Insight Acquisition

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by Alexandra Sayapina · 3 min read
Nokia Takes Over the IoT Sphere with SpaceTime Insight Acquisition
Photo: Wagner Fontoura / Flickr

The Finnish company seems to have chosen IoT as a new area of focus; SpaceTime is expected to bring not only new technologies but influential customers to the company.

Nokia has officially announced the acquisition of SpaceTime Insight, a major player in the IoT market. The California-based company is working in the sphere of Industrial Internet of Things. The company was founded in 2003 and has proved to be one of the leaders in the sphere. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The latest news from Nokia proves the attempts of the company to diversify the business and IoT seems to be one of the priorities in the nearest future. The Finnish company has just sold Withings, the consumer-focused Nokia Health division. The combination of these decisions indicated the change of priorities of the company. SpaceTime Insight is sure to stimulate the development of IoT in Nokia, it can also boost its expand into other industries such as logistics, energy, and manufacturing.

At the moment IoT can hardly be called a crucial part of Nokia’s business: the revenue of Nokia in 2017 exceeded €23 billion, but the contribution of software division in the total result was less than 7%. And IoT is just a small part of that.

SpaceTime Insight is expected to change the situation. Nokia hopes that this acquisition will influence the development of IoT within 18-24 months. And the company has all the potential to promote the IoT to the leading positions.

Nokia has chosen one of the leaders working for the asset-intensive industries. SpaceTime Insight has developed a number of situational intelligence and visual analytics applications to maximize the efficiency of various companies. The company is not giving lots of details on its  financial state: the estimated valuation in 2016 was over $103 million. But the acquisition of SpaceTime Insight is bringing Nokia not only the technologies and assets of the company.

SpaceTime Insight may be not one of the well-known names to the public, but it has created outstanding brand awareness in the IIoT sphere. Nokia gets not only the expertise in IoT application development and predictive analyses – it also gets the customers. And there are lots of notable companies.

FedEx, Entergy, NextEra Energy, Union Pacific, E.ON, American Water – this is just a little part of the impressive list of the SpaceTime Insight’s clients. The most important fact is that Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software, has already confirmed that most of these companies are to continue working with SpaceTime Insight becoming a part of Finnish company. However, this is a mutually beneficial deal: Nokia has already created credible relationship with some business giants who are demonstrating interest in the development of IoT, like Verizon.

Even though the acquisition has just closed, Nokia has already found a way to express its recognition to SpaceTime Insight. The ex-CEO of SpaceTime Rob Schilling is to take the position of the head of Nokia’s IoT unit.

Internet of Things News, News
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