Avnet Seize IoT Opportunity With Witekio Deal
Semiconductor giant Avnet has purchased over 100 companies in its 98 year lifespan, and is now buying French Internet of Things (IoT) company Witekio to help enterprises more easily bring IoT products to market.
Founded as Adeneo Embedded in 2001, Witekio has since branched out from embedded electronic components to IoT technology, and provides a range of Fortune 500 companies with software for embedded systems and IoT objects.
The expertise of Witekio’s 120 employees, who are spread across offices in the US, the UK, France and Germany, will now be put to use developing an end-to-end strategy for IoT at Avnet.
This follows several smaller IoT projects that were launched in 2018, including a cloud-based software platform for the developing of IoT products and services, and a Sound Capture platform for AI and industrial IoT applications developed in collaboration with Aaware.
With Witekio onboard, Avnet aims to develop an IoT solution spanning both hardware and software:
“The combination of Witekio’s embedded software and design expertise with Avnet’s already robust technology ecosystem further strengthens our overall solutions strategy, which is unparalleled in the market today,” said Pete Bartolotta, President of Business Transformation at Avnet. “With Witekio’s expertise, we can more rapidly deliver a complete hardware, software, cloud and middleware solution that delivers insights based on the customer’s specific business case.”
The acquisition of Witekio follows a series of deals made to help Avnet gain a firm foothold in the IoT market, which Gartner forecasts to grow to 5.8 billion endpoints in 2020 – a 21 percent increase from 2019.
In July last year, Avnet made a significant investment in London-based IoT innovator Hanhaa, and then in December purchased AI and IoT software company Softweb Solutions.
These deals come as technical developments in 5G and edge computing lay the foundations for broader adoption of IoT. As the technology is put to use more widely, the acquisition scene is heating up, putting IoT startups like Witekio in hot demand.