Google to buy IoT business of LogMeIn

Search giant Google on Thursday said it plans to buy Xively, an Internet of Things (IoT) business of cloud-based service provider LogMeIn, Inc., for $50 million (Rs 319.4 crore).

The move comes amid several steps taken by the internet giant to raise its game in hardware, cloud and IoT businesses. As part of its expansion plans, Google said in September 2017 that it would pay $1.1 billion (Rs 7,026 crore) to buy a part of Taiwanese smartphone-maker HTC’s smartphone biz. In another step last week, in an effort to outgun Amazon's Alexa products and services portfolio working towards connected devices, Google merged smart device-maker Nest's unit with its hardware team. Google had acquired Palo Alto, California-based Nest Labs in January 2014 for $3.2 billion (Rs 20,565 crore). 

As part of its efforts to accelerate machine-learning models, Google's has started offering new artificial-intelligence chips on cloud to other companies for advanced testing. The company also has a partnership with British chipmaker ARM Holdings to help Google's neural networks in new machine learning and object-detection chip designs.

Subject to the closing conditions of the deal, Google said that the acquisition of Xively is going to complement Google Cloud's effort to provide a fully-managed IoT service that "easily and securely connects, manages, and ingests data from globally dispersed devices”.

"With the addition of Xively’s robust, enterprise-ready IoT platform, we can accelerate our customers’ timeline from IoT vision to product, as they look to build their connected business," Antony Passemard, product management, IoT and pub/sub, Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

Further, he said the acquisition will help its Cloud IoT Core gain deep IoT technology and engineering expertise from Xively, including its advanced device management, messaging, and dashboard capabilities. 

This week, LogMeIn released its new artificial-intelligence-driven Bold360 product portfolio for enterprises that includes chatbots for customer-engagement platforms.