Software industrial giant Honeywell Inc. said today it’s buying life sciences software company Sparta Systems Inc. for $1.3 billion in order to expand the reach of its Honeywell Forge platform.

With annual revenue of more than $36 billion, Honeywell manufactures industrial equipment and related products primarily for the aerospace industry. The Honeywell Forge platform is a suite of cloud applications that help companies to analyze sensor data from “internet of things” systems so as to improve their day-to-day operations. For instance, manufacturers can use Forge to analyze diagnostics logs from their production line machines to identify any issues.

Sparta Systems sells regulatory and quality management software primarily for the pharmaceutical and biotech, medical device, food and beverage, chemical and agrochemical industries. Its software is provided as-a-service, and there’s also an artificial intelligence component.

Sparta’s main offering is TrackWise Digital, which is built on top of the Salesforce platform and provides reporting and analytics capabilities to help customers ensure quality and compliance. Sparta also sells QualityWise.ai, which adds natural language processing, signal detection and confidence levels for recommendations to TrackWise Digital.

The plan is to integrate those tools with Honeywell Forge, thereby expanding that platform to life sciences and adjacent industries, Honeywell said. The company already offers automation technologies, systems and services for life sciences customers through its Fast Track Automation suite that’s used by developers of new vaccines and therapies.

Honeywell Connected Enterprise Chief Executive Que Dallara said Sparta’s tools will help to enhance the link between quality and production data for life sciences manufacturers. “Our combined offerings will make it easier for customers to gain critical insights from manufacturing and quality data that can improve their manufacturing processes while ensuring product quality, patient safety, and supply chain continuity,” he added.

Honeywell said it will enhance TrackWise Digital with some of its own AI and machine learning technologies and connect the platform with operational data from other areas of its customer’s businesses.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE it makes sense for Honeywell to add quality management system capabilities to the Forge platform.

“Sparta Systems has a strong footprint in the pharmaceutical industry and this will certainly help Honeywell to expand its wallet share in that sector,” Mueller said. “Not surprisingly, Honeywell is also optimistic that it can bring Sparta’s QMS capabilities to more use cases and verticals, but that is more difficult and only the future will tell how successful it will be. The other inflection point is that Honeywell is now moving beyond analytics and insights, getting into transactions and actions with QMS.”

Honeywell said the acquisition will close by the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Photo: Honeywell Aerospace/Flickr