Japan’s information technology systems company NEC Corp. said today it’s acquiring Denmark’s KMD Holding in a deal valued at 8 billion Danish Kroner ($1.22 billion).

The deal, which is NEC’s second-largest acquisition ever, is expected to be finalized in February and will help the firm to tap into the growing public-sector demand for digital services.

With European governments said to be accelerating a shift toward digital services, NEC said the plan is to make KMD’s software a “common platform” by combining it with its own biometric and artificial intelligence technologies.

KMD does big business in Denmark, where it’s helped that country’s government implement a range of digital services. It’s said to have a 17 percent share of the market for government IT systems and a 43 percent share of the market for local governments.

“with the help of this acquisition, one of the largest IT company NEC will acquire a business model that uses and works on the principle of platforms in the form of a domain which is having a digital transformation,” Chief Executive Office revealed and said in a statement. The deal would also bring NEC closer to its goal of “lifting annual sales in its safety business overseas to 200 billion yen ($1.81 billion) in the year ending in March 2021,” Niino added.

NEC had previously outlined plans to spend 200 billion yen on foreign acquisitions. In January, it acquired a U.K.-based IT services firm called Northgate Public Services Ltd. for about $600 million.

Related:

• The AWS Cloud Goes Underground at re:Invent
• Digital Goods Refund Policy
• Stablecoins Hype After Raising $133M Basis Project Shuts Down with No Warning
• IBM’s Fingernail Sensor Could Evaluate New Parkinson’s Medications
• Bitmain Lays Off 50 Percent Of Its Employees
• Network Switch and Router Market hit $11bn mark
• Huawei Revealed that they are Ramping 5G Wireless Development Efforts