MS16 Sep 2020 12:20
I'm not sure people quite grasp the significance of that sweepie post quoting Darron Anthill, the CEO of Device Authority.
Tern are an incubator and DA was bought into as an investment. It is for sale. It's not like a situation where a company might be approached to sell a division or a subsidiary... it is a given that Device Authority will be sold as that's the whole idea.
Microsoft have been taking an increasing interest in DA for the last few months. Co-hosting demos , both with their techies and with their Head of the IoT division. The latter referred to Device Authority's Keyscaler product as 'best in class'.
Now, according to Darron Anthill's missive, DA have been working with Microsoft's IoT Azure team (Azure is the central plank in MS's IoT offering) to integrate Keyscaler into Azure for use by MS's customers.
This has to be because KS does things Azure doesn't and is protected by patents.
Nothing is guaranteed, and this isn't a ramp. Merely pondering reality and possibilities. But given that DA is for sale and given that MS are now so close to them, and apparently relying upon KS to embellish their Azure IoT ecosystem, it has to be a possibility that MS would elect to buy DA. The cost would be pocket money to MS but life changing for Tern shareholders. And MS wouldn't be working together with such a small company if they didn't absolutely need to.
Tern is something of an all-or-nothing share. Nothing much happens, but the sale of an asset would be many times the current mcap of Tern as a whole, with all its assets. And such a sale could suddenly happen out of the blue. Which is why what seem to be signals coming from the Microsoft camp are of such interest.
Of course all this might be a red herring. But one thing seems certain... that MS would not dedicate development resource to working with DA if MS didn't want KS to work with Azure. And they can only want that because they see it as offering benefits to their customers. From the point of view of a Tern shareholder, that can only lead to musings about a possible MS buyout of DA.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
