Earlier this month, Phybridge, a Canada-based provider of long reach transmission solutions for the communications market, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire IP and PoE transmission products maker NVT.
While it is not exactly a household name in the security industry, Phybridge specializes in developing switch technology using the Broadcom chip and has been heavily focused on the transition from digital to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) in the telecommunications industry. The company recently entered the security market with its’ CLEER (Coax Leveraged Ethernet Extended Reach) switch, which is designed to enable users to make the migration to IP while leveraging their existing coax infrastructure.
According to Guy Apple, vice president of marketing and sales for NVT, the acquisition will bring almost “instantaneous revenue” to Phybridge in the security market.
“They were making efforts to start to penetrate the security market with the CLEER product which is aimed at the same business we’re in which is the retrofit business from analog cameras to IP camera systems on a legacy coax cabling system,” explained Apple. “They had started into that marketplace; I watched them for a while just going, ‘Ok, what’s this new company doing from Canada?’ I looked at their product and decided that it was something to watch, but nothing to be overly concerned about because they were a small company and they had their hands full with the VoIP business.”
Eventually, however, Apple said they approached Phybridge to see if they would be open to providing the CLEER switch as an OEM product to NVT.
“I saw it as being a really nice intermediate product for our range as far as our positioning. We have a long transmission distance, premium retrofit product line, but we really needed a lower cost, medium distance, enterprise level switch product,” said Apple. “It was a make-buy decision on our part. We could engineer it internally or we could have somebody else make it and I wanted to explore a quicker route to market. I approached Phybridge and we started talking.”
During the course of those conversations, Apple said that it really started to make more sense to have Phybridge buy NVT rather than have the company sell their product under the NVT brand.
“From a Phybridge point of view, NVT has a global footprint. We have a fully-staffed sales and support office in Sunbury-on-Thames in England, a sales office in Belgium and a similar setup with staff members in Mexico City, Bogota and Singapore, so we have global sales presence that would enable us to sell their product,” added Apple. “For them it is also a make-buy decision. They could make the effort to come into the security business which is a small, close-knit community. They didn’t know anybody, but we’ve spent 25 years building a name and relationships.”
Further, Apple said that it would have taken Phybridge at least two to three years to really build up a presence in the market had they decided to go it alone. Although the go-to-market strategy is still being developed, Apple expects the NVT logo and brand to be retained when the deal closes at the end of May.
"Phybridge's innovative solutions will allow NVT to continue its existing dominance in the analog market and carry it to the IP world,” Phybridge CEO John Croce said in a statement.
Once the companies combine operations, Apple said Phybridge will soon supply NVT with product and almost immediately provide more world class solutions for our customers.
