Cisco struck a deal to acquire Working Group Two (WG2) from Telenor Group for $150 million, beefing up a mobility services platform to help operators launch new offers across IoT and industry verticals.

WG2 was a development project within Telenor before it was spun out in 2017, when the operator teamed with Cisco to launch the company.

Telenor held a 44.6 per cent share in the company, which offers mobile operators a cloud-based core network designed to increase product innovation and reduce time to market for authentication, provisioning, voice, messaging and data services.

Masum Mir, SVP and GM of provider mobility at Cisco Networking, stated in a blog that WG2 “pioneered a cloud-native mobile services platform” which is “fully API consumable and highly programmable”.

He explained WG2’s platform uses web-scale architectures and operating models, “which makes it a natural fit with our mobility services platform”.

“The end result is a mobility services platform that can dramatically simplify mobile network deployments, provide enhanced edge experiences, enable new and advanced use cases, as well as support simple application development.”

He added “WG2’s expertise in the mobile space brings capabilities crucial to the enterprise market including complete authentication, provisioning, voice, messaging, and data services, all of which will be rolled into our existing Control Centre offers”.

In addition to Cisco and Telenor, WG2 also lists Amazon Web Services and Hawaiian MVNO Mobi among its customers.

The acquisition is slated to close in Cisco’s fiscal Q1 2024, which runs to end-September.