GMO buys Finland’s Ubisecure for $12.3M to lay groundwork for Internet of Everything

Online infrastructure service provider GMO Internet Group reached out of Japan and into the European Union for its latest acquisition. Ubisecure, an access management software company from Finland, is now a subsidiary of GMO Global Sign, an authentication service. The price tag was approximately JPY 1.34 billion (US$12.3M).

Ubisecure, founded in 2002, was appealing to GMO Global Sign for its applications in the growing Internet of Everything (IoE) industry, noting that anything which is connected to the internet will need to be verified for safe use.

Though not obvious at the time, signs of this acquisition popped up in August. When GMO Internet Group founder and CEO Masatoshi Kumagai sat down with Tech in Asia, his interest in IoE was palpable. “Right now seven billion people can be connected to the internet. But in the future cats, dogs, horses, cows, lights, buildings will all be connected, they will need servers and domains. That would be tens of billions of things but really there is no limit,” he said at the time.

Ubisecure shares his forward thinking. In a blog post from late August, the company notes that things connected to the internet do not just send information out, they also take commands. Without proper access management, the wrong individuals can send commands to those items, potentially for untoward purposes.

The business opportunities coming from this deal will not be limited to Japan, a GMO Internet Group spokesperson confirmed with Tech in Asia. “Global Sign has offices in Japan, Singapore, Philippines, China, and India. We will use the offices in Asia to offer this service by the end of the year,” she said.

IoE is still in its nascent stage, making this acquisition both a gamble of sorts. That said, GMO Internet has a decent betting record. Back in 1999, it became Japan’s first commercial registrar for domain names. 15 years later it acquired the rights to .tokyo – a highly sought after name for businesses in Japan.

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