Internet of Things data management company Buddy Platform Limited has announced its intent to acquire Zentri. The deal will bring Zentri’s device connectivity, security and management technology to Buddy’s cloud-based platform for collecting, processing and visualising IoT data.

While both companies are headquartered in the US, they also have significant presences in Australia, with Buddy having an office in Adelaide, and Zentri’s engineering division located in Sydney.

Buddy’s CEO David McLauchlan told IoT Hub the acquisition came about because of an urgent need among the company’s customers to effectively manage the expected exponential growth of their connected devices over the next few years.

“[Device management] was something that every customer deploying connected devices in any scale needed and wanted,” he said. “We also believed that it was not simple technology to roll out, not something that you wanted to gamble on.”

McLauchlan said that Zentri was initially chosen as a partner, because of its robust device management platform and strong customer base, before Buddy then decided to make the acquisition offer.

“Zentri’s customers were also saying that they really wanted to have flexibility to do more with their data, while our customers wanted to manage the actual devices a lot better, and so we just saw a perfect fit,” he said.

Seamless connectivity between platforms

The partnership already provides seamless connectivity between Zentri’s operating system and the Buddy’s cloud platform.

Zentri’s Secure Connected Platform for IoT is designed to accelerate go-to-market for an organisation’s connected devices by leveraging ZentriOS, a device operating system compatible with a wide range of IoT chipsets.

The operating system also supports secure device authentication, over-the-air software updates, remote device diagnosis and analytics integration into cloud platforms.

McLauchlan hopes that the pedigree and relationships that Zentri has in the embedded computing space will bring further opportunities to Buddy.

“Having folks [from Zentri] that have colleagues in the silicon, hardware and embedded software areas and the relationships and connections in that world that will come with the Zentri transaction will be phenomenal,” he said.

“By the same token, nearly everyone at Buddy has come from either Google, Amazon or Microsoft. We’ve all built software-as-a-service products for many years, we’ve all built enterprise products for many years and so they are also getting an incredibly well-connected set of software engineers from the heart of the cloud movement.”

McLauchlan said that Buddy is set to benefit greatly from the expertise that Zentri will bring, and will accelerate development and deployment of IoT solutions for its customers.

“For a company [like Buddy] that doesn’t have deep, embedded engineering experience, deploying the ZentriOS on the silicon platforms that are compatible with it can reduce the time to develop a product from months or years to weeks,” he said.

“Having a system that is not just deployable on those silicon platforms but also automatically sends data into [Buddy’s] system that can visualise and process it, and provide real value and financial benefit without the customer having to do anything more than that is the goal of the exercise.”