Amazon buys a startup that can monitor your electronics

Amazon has made a rare acquisition in the form of 2lemetry, a startup that helps its customers make sense of all the data brought in by connected devices in the workplace or retail store, VentureBeat reports.

Terms of the deal weren't announced, and Amazon loves its secrecy.

Cutting through the buzzwords, 2lemetry brings "actionable insights" on so-called "Internet-of-Things" data. If you're using NFC beacons in your store, a talking freezer that reports on inventory levels, or smart sensors to detect the amount of oil left in a pipeline, or whatever other internet-connected stuff you have in the workplace, you need a tool to actually work with all the massive amounts of data they can generate.

2lemetry takes the data from those devices, organizes it, makes it into something useful and readable, and lets you see analytics and make predictive models based on it. Using the beacon example, you can see where in the store people are standing at different times of day, which may be useful for putting product displays or impulse buy items.

The company received $4 million in funding from Salesforce Ventures just this year, and the relationship with Salesforce shows: 2lemetry supports building custom applications on top of the data in Salesforce's Heroku platform, among other options. 2lemetry customers include Honeywell and the Demeter energy group.

We don't know yet where 2lemetry will fit into the Amazon portfolio, but it seems a natural fit for Amazon Web Services, which already supports doing things with big data sets by way of its Kinesis service.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.