Guavus update

My former colleague Dave Norris has blogged about Guavus on several occasions in the past, most recently in 2016. He liked the company because it was focused on providing solutions – especially within the telecommunications sector – rather than products. However, the world moves on and things change. Perhaps most notably, in that the company was acquired by Thales Group, the French multinational.

Historically, Thales has been involved with aerospace and space systems, defence, transport and related industries. However, in 2016 it started acquiring software companies, with the aim of supporting its own digital transformation and to enable its clients’ transformations. In particular, it has focused on two areas: security and real-time advanced analytics. In the former case, it acquired Vormetric (data protection solutions) in 2016 and, this year it has completed acquisitions of Ercom (communication and device security), Suneris (supervision and control of telecommunication network traffic) and Gemalto (digital identity and security).

As far as advanced analytics are concerned, Thales acquired Guavus in 2017 and, in turn, Guavus – which is part of Thales’ digital business unit – has itself acquired SQLStream in December 2018. The rationale behind this takeover was that it provides Thales with IoT based capabilities across all implementations, and it no doubt wants to build (streaming) analytics capabilities – capabilities like predictive and prescriptive maintenance into its various offerings. From a technical perspective, Guavus now offers analytics from the edge through gateway devices to central processing, with SQLStream positioned as providing the former and the Guavus Reflex Platform in the analytics core. I imagine that some elements of SQLStream, which is the technology behind Amazon Kinesis, will make it into the Reflex Platform in due course, as the product wasn’t targeted only at the edge when it was independent. However, the takeover is relatively new, so we’ll have to await developments on that front.

As far as Guavus itself is concerned, the reason Dave liked the company so much was not necessarily its technology and how good it was – though it is – but because of its focus on solutions. Although the company has extended its coverage beyond telecommunications, notably to areas such as security intelligence, marketing insight, smart industry and the Internet of Things, it is notable that if you look under the “products” tab on the company website then the Reflex Platform is listed last. In other words: yes, it’s the underpinning of everything else but no, it’s not really what we sell. I can see why Dave like that approach, I do too.