AUSTIN, TX – Brian Modoff, Qualcomm’s EVP for strategy, mergers and acquisitions, addressed a standing-room only crowd on the opening day of the Enterprise IoT Summit in Austin, Texas. His remarks focused on the chipmaker’s internet of things strategy, and how the company’s $39 billion purchase of NXP Semiconductors will inform that strategy.
“We spent the last 30 years interconnecting people,” Modoff said. “We’re going to spend the next 30 years connecting their things.” He said NXP plays into that strategy because of the company’s enormous footprint in the market for microcontrollers.
Modoff said his team is looking at many other potential acquisitions and that there are many areas into which Qualcomm could expand, including power amplifiers, switches, filters and artificial intelligence. He said that software is the part of the IoT ecosystem in which he hopes to see the most progress, but when it comes to software acquisitions and software development, Qualcomm must tread carefully.
“We want to have software but we don’t want to interfere with our customers,” he said. “How far up the protocol stack can we go without interfering with our customers?”
Internet of things priorities
Qualcomm projects that the internet of things will ultimately create at least $4 trillion a year in economic value, with healthcare as the market that is poised to benefit the most. The chipmaker foresees the IoT creating $400-$700 billion in the healthcare market.
Modoff said Qualcomm is investing in artificial intelligence and is highly focused on security solutions. He said deployments will not succeed if customers are not comfortable with security.
Cellular networks can provide the security that customers want, and Modoff said Qualcomm is working very hard to bring down the price points for LTE modules designed for IoT use cases. He said that in order to bring the price points down Qualcomm wants to integrate radios and microcontrollers into one solution.
“We need sub-$5 price points for LTE and in order to do that you need to integrate,” he said. He added that Qualcomm’s recent introduction of the Snapdragon 200 for feature phones is a move in the direction of less expensive LTE chipsets, which is a priority for Qualcomm.
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