It is the largest cash takeover in the company's history, says Dipesh Patel, President of ARM's IoT Service Group. However, he did not say anything about the actual takeover price. There had been talk of 600 million dollars in advance, a figure that ARM has not confirmed.

The acquisition fits perfectly into the overarching strategy of Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, who acquired ARM in 2016, and his 100 billion dollar vision fund. Son wants to implement his global IoT strategy.

According to Patel, it is not only important to integrate chips and sensors into end devices in order to collect data, but also to be able to analyze the data and do something useful with it. Only then would it make sense to talk about smart cities, smart energy and smart manufacturing (Industry 4.0). However, the markets are fragmented at the device, networking, platform and data analysis levels.

For a chip manufacturer such as ARM, the question also arises as to how it intends to earn money in the future if the prices for chips and the achievable margins fall. It is therefore important to be able to offer more than just chip IP in the future. This is why ARM recently bought Stream Technologies.

With the now completed acquisition of Treasure Data, ARM can now complete the IoT puzzle, Treasure Data is exactly the element that would have been necessary to build an end-to-end IoT system. Treasure Data can collect and jointly analyze large amounts of data from various sources, which today often live out their lives relatively uselessly in silos - for example from CRM and IoT systems as well as data from external jellyfish. This allows users to draw valuable conclusions from this data.

The Pelion platform from ARM.

© ARM

ARM now also wants to integrate Treasure Data's activities into the new SaaS (Software as a Service) platform called Pelion IoT Platform, which should be ready in six months. This platform would differ from the previous vertical IoT platforms, which were mostly geared towards specific devices and data categories. Patel even speaks of a turning point in IoT evolution, as the Pelion platform is a horizontal platform that can handle any number of devices and any type of networking, as well as all types of data and any cloud system.

At the same time, ARM intends to continue the Treasure Data platform as an independent technology so that existing customers can continue to work as usual and new customers can be acquired for this system.

According to Dipesh Patel, President of ARM's IoT Services Group, the ultimate goal is to make IoT simple for the user: "They must not feel the complexity." As an example, he cited connected cars, which require a global connectivity platform and data management platform.