Digi acquired Particle this month. Steve Rogerson talked to the bosses of both firms to find out what that means for the IoT industry.

Relaxing in a hot tub isn’t what first comes to mind when one thinks of enabling IoT connectivity in the latest product. In fact, a lot of banging of heads, shouts of frustration and general stress are more in keeping with the development process. Well, all this could be about to change following a well-publicised acquisition this month.

No, I am not talking about Texas Instruments taking over Silicon Labs, though that was a real biggy, but rather the smaller but still very significant acquisition by Digi of Particle (iotm2mcouncil.org/iot-library/news/connected-health-news/digi-acquires-particle-for-50m/).

To find out more about what this means, I had a chat this week with Digi CEO Ron Konezny and Particle founder Zach Supalla.

Particle was founded in 2013 and was called Spark in the early days, changing its name to Particle three years later.

“What we sell is infrastructure for those building connected devices,” said Zach. “We do that for you. We wanted to make IoT easier for developers.”

Particle’s central product is a hosted cloud service, but it also sells developer boards and can handle software updates and so on.

“We provide developer kits that can be used in production,” said Zach.

For Digi, which has been selling reliable connectivity products for decades, the attraction of buying Particle was that it could then offer a complete package, with the product and the connectivity and, and this is important, bring in a recurring revenue by selling connectivity as a service.

“There is something very beautiful about what Zach and his team have done,” said Ron. “This will let our embedded division do better for where people want to embed our devices into their products. We anticipate integrating the Digi products into the Particle cloud. Instead of just selling Digi devices, we are looking at having the device wrapped up in the Particle cloud. We are selling as-a-service for a recurring fee.”

So, rather than buying equipment from Digi and using connectivity from someone else, users can buy the whole lot in one and focus instead on what to do with their data.

“If I want an elevator in my house, I wouldn’t build it from scratch,” said Ron. “I would buy one from someone else, let then install it and I would just use it. That is what it should be like buying an IoT product.”

Zach had a different example, and that brings us back to the hot tub. People who buy a hot tub don’t want to be stressed out, they want to relax. It is the same when you buy an IoT product. You don’t want your problems to start there, dealing with all the stuff behind the scenes.

“We want to make it straightforward for our customers, so we handle all the stuff under the hood,” he said.

And he is speaking for experience, because when hot tub maker Jacuzzi (www.jacuzzi.com) wanted its products connected, it turned to Particle. This brings in features such as remote control, predictive maintenance, diagnostics and so on. You can read more about it at www.particle.io/offers/jacuzzi/.

“If somebody buys a product from Digi, there are a bunch of problems they are about to take on,” said Zach. “You can outsource that to us. They might buy something that works, but are continuously firefighting. We say we can do it better than you, not because we are smarter but because that is all we do. We can give you a reliable infrastructure so you don’t need to deal with all the problems.”

For Particle, this gives the company a stable long-term home at a time when many IoT companies have come and gone and even the big boys have shut down or put on ice some of their IoT offerings.

“Digi is a long-term company so now people know we will be around for a long time if they come to us,” said Zach.

Zach sees the acquisition as a merger of the DNA of the two companies and he sees the initial task of the Particle (www.particle.io) team being to infect their new Digi colleagues with the benefits of what Particle can bring.

“We will go around and sneeze on everybody,” he joked.

For Digi (www.digi.com), this is not new, being the company’s 11th acquisition.

“We treat everyone differently,” said Ron. “We are very sympathetic to what the Particle team are going through. We have to earn their trust.”

Can I suggest a team-building exercise in a Jacuzzi? A Particle-connected one of course.