Cisco announces intent to acquire Working Group Two

IoT has come of age. Early adopters have proven its worth as the Internet of Things has made organizations more efficient, sustainable, and capable of realizing new business models and revenue streams. The sky is the limit in what we can do with IoT, as millions to billions to trillions of connected devices come online making this the single greatest digital business transformation that most of us will see in our lifetime. And now, more than ever, Communication Service Providers must scale to support it, which means connectivity must be simplified for both deployment and management, and the mobile business service must evolve to become a much more lucrative offering.

To turbo charge our recently announced Mobility Services Platform, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire Working Group Two (WG2), a Norwegian company that pioneered a cloud native mobile services platform that’s fully API consumable and highly programmable. Built for simplicity, innovation, and efficiency, WG2’s platform uses the web-scale playbook and operating models, which makes it a natural fit with our Mobility Services Platform. WG2’s technology and team beautifully align with the same approach: simplifying the Mobile network architecture to deliver a radically innovative mobile service. And with WG2 and the Cisco Mobility Services Platform, we’ll be able to boost our service edge deployment and API first strategy for application development partners, Enterprise customers and Service Provider partners.

WG2 and Cisco have a unique synergy. We share a common ambition to deliver a global, programmable mobile core as a service, and are remarkably aligned to this shared vision. The goal? To enable our Communication Service Provider customers to cover ground faster, as we work together to monetize their 5G investments. The consumption model is simple and comprehensive, supporting all stakeholders. The end result is a mobility services platform that can dramatically simplify Mobile network deployments, provide enhanced edge experiences, enable new and advanced use cases, as well as support simple application development.

WG2’s expertise in the mobile space brings capabilities crucial to the enterprise market including complete authentication, provisioning, voice, messaging, and data services, all of which will be rolled into our existing Control Center offers. Together, our Mobility Services Platform, and the Cisco Networking Cloud, Assurance, Security, and Collaboration portfolios, deliver remarkable value to our Service Provider partners and address business critical use cases for our enterprise customers.

We can’t wait to welcome the WG2 team to Cisco and work with them to deliver the most advanced mobile IoT use-cases at scale. WG2 will join my Provider Mobility organization within Cisco Networking. The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of Cisco’s FY24.