Steve Rogerson asks Semtech senior vice president Alistair Fulton why his company wants to buy Sierra Wireless.

Sometimes a news item takes you by surprise. That happened to me this month when I saw the announcement that Semtech was planning to buy Sierra Wireless. Now, I know Semtech is not unknown for growing through acquisition, but Sierra Wireless is a whole new ball game.

This, if and when it goes through, probably later this year or early next year, should at a stroke double Semtech’s annual revenue. This is a big move for the Californian firm and reflects what is going on in the IoT world in general. I will let Alistair Fulton, a Semtech senior vice president, explain that. When I spoke with him this week, I asked why Semtech was doing this.

He said the company’s big focus had always been LPWAN and more recently making LoRa easier to use.

“One of the reasons there are not more IoT applications out there is it can be pretty complex,” he said.

This has always been a problem for new technology breakthroughs, with different standards, protocols, whatever you want to call them. Simply, there are multiple ways of doing the same thing and nobody agrees which is the best. The IoT has become an alphabet city of abbreviations and acronyms, but one of the big questions is still cellular versus the likes of LoRa and Sigfox.

Now, we know Semtech lives in the LoRa world and Sierra Wireless is a big player in the cellular field with modules for just about every flavour. This merger puts these two sides of the coin into the same bed.

In reality, they always have been sharing the sheets as many IoT applications are a combination of islands, such as LoRa, wifi, cellular and so on. For the designer, it can be a nightmare.

“The acquisition of Sierra Wireless is to stop this complexity,” said Fulton. “It allows us to pull it all together under a single platform.”

He said this would be good news for developers who didn’t want to spend time sticking things together and ending up with something that was less than perfect. While, in the past, the major players have seen the battle between licensed and unlicensed spectrum as competition, the poor developer just wants it all to be compatible.

“This is one reason there are not a lot of IoT applications out there,” said Fulton. “This is very important for our future. We need IoT to be cheaper and easier to deploy.”

We are already seeing that to a degree with the recent takeover of Sigfox by UnaBiz, whose co-founder Henri Bong said he wanted to make Sigfox more open and build bridges between it and LoRa.

Fulton sees this as a good move. “Developers don’t want to care about the technology,” he said. “They just want to do it. I hope UnaBiz is successful because we want more openness not less.”

He also said Semtech was seeing a very rapid uptake of satellite for LoRa, using low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. He sees this as an option for agriculture and applications in remote areas.

“Satellite is the ultimate sledgehammer,” he said. “You are going to get the signal out, but it may not be a low-power option.”

So, back to Sierra Wireless, who Fulton said was very good at designing modules and high-end routers whereas Semtech’s strength was in low-power, high-reliability silicon.

“Between us, we have all the bits of the jigsaw and we now have to stick them together,” he said. “You can’t build a single chip that does cellular and LoRa. But there are places for a hybrid device that uses LoRa with a cellular fallback if there is no LoRa network.”

The task now is to have the R&D departments of both companies working together.

“It is a merger of two teams on very similar journeys,” he said. “We are now starting the process of how to move forward. We have to maintain the momentum of both companies and get the benefits of working together. We have to get the teams aligned with one another. I see several opportunities for bringing innovative products to market and I will talk about them when we are ready.”

I am ready to listen.