If you follow me on Twitter (@rowantrollope) you might have followed along this past Christmas as, home with the family, I started writing some code and building some hardware devices to connect more of the things around my house. After all, these days anything can be a smart device; from a toaster that delivers perfectly browned slices to a Christmas tree that automatically waters itself, the ideas are endless.

As a hacker at home, writing some simple code or building a connected hardware device is easy with today's software and hardware platforms. But moving from a side project at home to building a business is quite another matter. How do you collect and analyze data from these connected devices, scale to manage more and more connected devices, and eventually find a way to monetize your connected devices? In other words, how do you turn a good idea into a great IoT business?

That's why I'm so excited by yesterday's news about our intent to acquire Jasper. Jasper's approach is unique because it is so simple -they manage connectivity of IoT services for any device, from connected cars to connected printers, all through the cloud. It's not just about connecting devices, but helping our customers to collect data, act on that data and deliver services to their end customers based on that data.

For example, a car with a computer becomes an intelligent device that can now track your engine's health and warn you when it's time for maintenance updates. It's an undeniable fact that more and more things are being connected to the internet, from a windmill farm to a sensor in your shoe. The power and the potential of these connected devices come not just in connecting these things to the cloud, but having them receive informationfromthe cloud. This will open up entirely new streams of revenue for our customers and make the promise of IoT much more real.

The shift to IoT is already happening, and our customers are asking us how to take advantage of the benefits of a world of connected things. They're facing the same questions I had with my IoT experiment over the holidays. And now we have an answer: with today's announcement, we'll help our customers to connect more things, deliver more smart services and vastly accelerate their move to IoT. To learn more about our news, you can watch a replay of our webcast about our intent to acquire announcement.