In a year that has seen acquisition after acquisition, Comcast has just acquired PowerCloud Systems. The deal is speculated to be fairly small, under $50 million, and Comcast will not be resurrecting Skydog, according to TechCrunch. It seems the cable company instead plans on gutting PowerCloud for parts and people. The endgame is to create their own version of a broadband monitoring system.
Comcast plans to use what is salvageable from PowerCloud Systems and create its own hardware and software that will allow total monitoring and managing of all hardware in the home. The speculation of Comcast’s future with their new acquisition has those in the tech industry buzzing. As of now, Comcast is only planning on using the monitoring system for its current cable and Internet-providing operations.
“The question is whether Comcast would want to own this asset only to use it in service of its limited network or whether it would try to scale it beyond Comcast’s network,” explained James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. He continued by saying he sees this buyout as an opportunity for Comcast to compete with heavyweights such as Google, Apple and Amazon.
PowerCloud Systems began as a spinoff of Palo Alto Research Center, and it raised $122,000 on Kickstarter to create Skydog. Skydog was a package sold for $149 that included a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi router, a mobile app and a three-year subscription to Skydog’s cloud service. On Skydog’s website, visitors are greeted with a notice that the company had been acquired but that customers would still be supported through the extent of their subscriptions.
Even if Comcast does not expand beyond home consumers, the acquisition will most likely turn out to be a good move. The service has already become widely popular, with many of Skydog’s subscribers turning to TechCrunch to provide answers. Comcast is already one of the largest Internet providers, so even if the Time Warner deal does not go through, the company will still have plenty of customers to pitch their new service to.
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