Following Google’s acquisition of smarthome startup Nest in January, it was clear that 2014 was going to be the year that the Internet of Things dominated corporate takeovers.
This week has shown that with Blackberry announcing a stake in medical technology firm NantHealth, obstensibly as an Internet of Things play as CEO John Chen explains;
The NantHealth platform is installed at approximately 250 hospitals and connects more than 16,000 medical devices collecting more than 3 billion vital signs annually. Think about the possibilities when an enormous amount of data and computing power is accessible to doctors in the palm of their hands.
As Chen points out, the possibilities for this data are huge which raises questions about the privacy and security issues for patients along with the importance of having stable software and networks.
The other big Internet of Things acquisition yesterday was Zebra Technologies buying Motorola’s enterprise division for over three billion dollars, again the buyer cited the opportunities in connecting machines.
An interesting aspect is these acquisitions aren’t being made by the big players – Cisco, Google, Microsoft or Apple – but by smaller, but still substantial, players. It shows just how wide the Internet of Things’ applications are.
Blackberry and Zebra won’t be the only big acquisitions this year.