Quantum has agreed to acquire Pivot3’s video surveillance portfolio and assets, which will be added to Quantum’s existing products and solutions as the company moves to solidify its position as a "serious player in the video surveillance market."
The purchase price totals approximately US$8.9 million in cash and stock for the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions. The parties expect to close by July 22, Quantum said in a news release.
The announcement marked yet another acquisition deal amid the ongoing security market consolidation trend. In fact, this Quantum-Pivot3 deal sounds eerily familiar. Last year when reports of Pivot3 layoffs due to COVID surfaced, Curt Wittich, VP of Sales and Strategic Markets at Quantum,
commented to
asmag.com: “Consolidation has been ongoing in the fragmented physical security market for years. The current global crisis will likely accelerate that. Any time a smaller company pulls back in the market there is a natural tendency by customers to re-evaluate the risk/reward of dealing with smaller companies and a trend to then rely more on the larger, more stable companies.”
Quantum VS-Series gets a boost
Pivot3 is billed as a leader/pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which enable customers to consolidate multiple workloads – surveillance, analytics and security operations centers, etc. – across on-prem, edge and cloud environments. With the acquisition, Pivot3 surveillance portfolio and assets will be added to Quantum’s VS-Series, which already has NVR server, surveillance recording appliance and analytics server solutions.
This will then expand Quantum’s video surveillance offerings and boost its standing in the video surveillance market, especially at a time when higher-resolution cameras and longer retention periods trigger the need for more advanced storage solutions. While
cloud storage has gained much traction in the industry, Wittich said in the earlier interview their onsite-based object storage offers certain advantages as well.
“While the proliferation of high-resolution cameras continues, there is also a trend to require longer and longer retention times for video as well as analytics metadata. This combination puts even more pressure on the cost, scalability, and manageability of storage solutions for video surveillance. While the continued increase in drive capacities helps with this, new technologies will be needed to put these capabilities on a new curve. Object storage and cloud storage are the most likely candidates for this. For larger video surveillance deployments, the cost of bandwidth to transfer video to the cloud is prohibitive, so the demand for reliable and scalable on-site storage will continue to grow,” he said.
“Cloud storage remains an emerging technology for surveillance. There remain concerns around cost, manageability, and security with cloud storage. Object storage is a proven technology that has had slow adoption for surveillance because of the incompatibility of the native S3 interface. Quantum has solved that problem with its StorNext technology in conjunction with its ActiveScale object storage as proven with a 40PB implementation at a major airport in Asia,” he added.
‘Another key step in Quantum’s transformation’
Jamie Lerner, Chairman and CEO of Quantum, echoes Wittich, saying in the announcement: “Surveillance cameras are the biggest data generator on the planet, and Pivot3 has established themselves as one of the leaders in this space by pioneering the use of hyperconverged software for surveillance recording. This acquisition represents another key step in Quantum's transformation, solidifying the company as a serious player in the multi-billion-dollar video surveillance market.”
The acquisition is also expected to expand Quantum’s global customer base with “over 500” new surveillance customers from Pivot3’s key markets, which are mostly mission-critical in nature including campuses, cities, casinos, airports, transit systems, and federal facilities, the news release said.
Lerner added: "We are excited to welcome Pivot3's surveillance customers and partners to Quantum. We are committed to making sure that they receive excellent service and support throughout this transition, and we have an innovative and compelling roadmap planned that builds on the proven Pivot3 product line with Quantum's intellectual property and expertise in video.”