Quantum acquires surveillance assets of Pivot3

Quantum Corporation on Monday announced that it has agreed to acquire the video surveillance portfolio and assets of Pivot3, a leading developer of enterprise-class video storage solutions and a pioneer in the field of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), for $8.9 million in cash and stock. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close later this month.

Pivot3’s wide range of video surveillance appliances, NVRs, and management applications along with its scale-out hyperconverged software will now be sold under Quantum’s VS-Series product portfolio, however; the Pivot3 brand will be retained relative to the sale of its “Acuity” HCI software moving forward.  

In an interview with SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW), Curt Wittich, Vice President of Sales, Strategic Markets, Quantum, said they felt that Pivot3, which has branched out beyond video surveillance in recent years into other businesses like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), has been lacking the “right financial business model” and that they will provide stability in that regard.  

“We have been in the video surveillance market for a while and we felt like this gave us an opportunity to really accelerate that presence,” Wittich explains. “We are getting a significant number of customers, we’re getting an established brand in that market, we’re bringing across salespeople, engineering people, and so it is really giving us an opportunity to accelerate our presence in the market and we think we’ve got the right strategy with them to help make that business successful as well."

Specifically, the acquisition adds more than 500 new customers, including airports, mass transit operators, casinos, educational institutions, and smart cities to Quantum’s base. A little over 40 people from Pivot3, including sales, engineering, and support personnel are being brought over to Quantum with the transaction.

Having brought HCI into the video surveillance market, Wittich says Pivot3 provides an ideal solution for mission-critical applications, especially considering their shared storage, erasure coding technology, however; one of the challenges that the company as well as others in the market have had is that it is a one-size fits all approach that does not appeal to broader industry.

“The reality is you have many kinds of video surveillance environments – small, five-, 10-, 20-camera deployments all the way up the largest tens of petabytes and tens of thousands of cameras,” Wittich adds. “One of the things this (acquisition) does when combined with the Quantum technology is allows us to manage that whole lifecycle. This gives us a primary HCI technology to manage that whole lifecycle from initial ingest until the retention period falls off and so it allows us to have a whole series of platforms and technologies that maximize the value of that video and allow us to match it up to the right critical storage and cost structure for that storage as well.”     

With Pivot3 dialing back its international presence last year, Wittich says that Quantum will be able to ramp those efforts back up again and provide increased support for overseas end-users and integrators and extend their technology offerings with the combination of the companies’ solutions.  

“As we bring that larger portfolio – whether it is the object storage or our large petabyte tape backup – we can also offer integrators more options around how they can work with customers to deal with storing data, especially around that lifecycle,” Quantum Chairman and CEO Jaime Lerner told SIW.  

Although the acquisition is only for Pivot3’s surveillance assets, Wittich says they are encouraging customers using the company’s VDI and datacenter solutions to contact Quantum, so that they can put them in touch with their account teams and have a conversation with them about how to move forward.

“Our focus is on the video surveillance side, so we’re going to have a robust roadmap for those customers and for that industry,” Wittich says. “On the datacenter side, we don’t want to abandon those customers, but on the other hand, our focus is going to be on the surveillance side and that’s what we acquired.”

“We’re 100% committed to the entire video surveillance customer base and we’re supporting them unconditionally,” Lerner adds. “As it relates to the datacenter customers, I think we have the option of supporting them, but we just need to engage with each one and understand their expectations. Based on what they are trying to achieve, I think we going to go on a case-by-case basis, because again, our focus is really surveillance and I think there is a much smaller community of Pivot3 customers that are doing these mixed workloads and we just need to understand what those mixed workloads are and make a case-by-case determination if we can support them in a way they will be happy with.”

Wittich says one of the biggest mistakes that Pivot3 made, despite having a great technology for video surveillance, was trying to pursue several different markets as an early-stage company and they do not intend on repeating those same errors.

“We’re going to make this successful and make these customers successful as well going forward,” he adds. “This is going to put us in a really unique position for solutions in this particular segment of the market.”

Lerner encourages customers with questions or concerns about the acquisition to drop by the Quantum booth (#11093) at this week’s ISC West tradeshow in Las Vegas.

 About the Author: 

Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].