Digi “steals” MobiApps for $3.5M

Digi Inter­na­tional announced the pur­chase of Mobi­Apps and began their bid for the satellite-​​based M2M mar­ket. Accord­ing to Larry Kraft, VP of Sales and Mar­ket­ing, Digi had been look­ing to enter the satel­lite space for some time and found the per­fect part­ner in MobiApps.

In addi­tion to the tech­nol­ogy sur­round­ing the cus­tom designed ASIC, Digi also inher­its a team of engi­neers famil­iar with satel­lite tech­nol­ogy, a man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­ity located in cost-​​friendly India and a sig­nif­i­cant pipeline of busi­ness. Logis­ti­cally, this will give Digi an imme­di­ate pres­ence in India and a stronger pres­ence South­east Asia.

With lit­i­ga­tion between Mobi­Apps and their top com­peti­tor Quake Global resolved, the only ques­tion appears to be how or if Digi plans to main­tain the rela­tion­ship estab­lished between Mobi­Apps and Wave­com (now Sierra Wire­less) to develop a dual mode cellular/​satellite track­ing device called the Q52. Although ques­tions have been raised as to the sta­bil­ity of the Intrin­six designed ASIC, Digi is pre­pared to begin assim­i­la­tion into its own prod­ucts to address cus­tomer demand. 

With an estab­lished Orb­comm rela­tion­ship and $150M in hard assets, Digi is well posi­tioned to lever­age this acquisition.

Source: Telematics Weekly