Altair acquires, extends its Carriots IoT the the edge

The pace of news this week … Altair Engineering just announced that it has acquired the intellectual property of CANDI Controls, Inc. and hired CANDI’s software and technology team. I hadn’t heard of CANDI Controls before, so did a little digging. CANDI, founded in 2009, built a cloud-based service for machine-to-machine communications (M2M). CANDI appears to have initially targeted smart buildings, integrating legacy building systems as well as modern IoT devices via commercially available gateways. These are then connected via CANDI’s cloud operations center to multiple locations and assets. In other words, CANDI connects edge computers to IoT devices on the raw-data end of IoT and serves it out to building management systems for processing and interpretation.

Altair’s announcement says that CANDI’s platform supports multiple data protocols and that CANDI developed relationships with important players in IoT, including Google, Microsoft, and Intel.

James Scapa, CEO of Altair said that the acquisition extends its Carriots IoT offering: “Altair’s vision is for digital twin simulation and predictive/prescriptive analytics solutions to run in the cloud or on edge gateway computers to optimize performance of both industrial equipment and consumer devices. We believe this acquisition is important to help our customers’ digital transformation and enable their products to thrive in today’s rapidly emerging connected ecosystems of smart devices.”

The press release didn’t give any specifics of the deal but since Altair is now publicly traded, we might learn a bit more when the company discusses its fiscal first quarter, 2018, on May 14.