Cisco to buy Sentryo of France for its edge sensor used in industrial IoT

Cisco will acquire Sentryo, a French company that provides industrial IoT and operational technology for companies in the energy, manufacturing, oil and gas and transportation sectors.

Sentryo provides monitoring and security software for industrial control system (ICS) networks. Part of Cisco’s interest is to help IoT customers protect against cyber security attacks on systems.

While IoT projects hold great promise for productivity gains, attaining project scale is a problem, Cisco said in announcing the deal. “Many organizations struggle with deploying IoT projects because they can’t scale production and find it difficult to manage and secure a rapidly expanding infrastructure,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco investments, in a June 6 blog.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Cisco said it is expected to close by the end of October.  Sentryo is based in Lyon, France.

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Cisco will incorporate Sentryo’s Edge Sensor with Cisco’s industrial networking hardware and its IOx application software framework.  The combined effort will allow Cisco to offer engineers of control systems deep insights into their companies’ assets to optimize and secure their networks and to detect irregularities. 

In January, Cisco announced a set of IoT networking products, developer tools and design guides that set the stage for the Sentryo acquisition.  The announcement included new Catalyst industrial switches and industry Integrated Services routers for IoT. Both are powered by Cisco’s IOS XE, an operating system that works across campuses, WANs and branch offices.