Quantum has acquired Square Box Systems, a small UK software developer of media asset management software. Terms are undisclosed.
The Warwickshire company is “a growing, profitable software business unit with strong gross margins that is in the late stages of transitioning to a cloud-based SaaS business,” Quantum CEO Jamie Lerner said today in the press announcement about the acquisition.
Square Box’s main product – CatDV – provides media management and workflow automation, and uses AI and machine learning techniques to catalogue and analyse video, images, audio files, and PDF digital assets. It enables search across local and cloud repositories, and provides access control across the data lifecycle.
Square Box has over 1,500 commercial software deployments and tens of thousands of individual users worldwide, according to Quantum, which says many customers use CatDV with Quantum’s StorNext media file management.
Quantum intends to combine CatDV with StorNext in an all-in-one workgroup appliance and better serve the needs of smaller workgroups. These could be in corporate video, education, and houses of worship.
CatDV customers are to be found in post-production, corporate video, sports, government and education markets. Quantum says the software has potential to branch out to other use cases dealing with large volumes of unstructured data – such as genomics research, autonomous vehicle design and geospatial exploration.
Quantum said it will continue to maintain multi-vendor support for CatDV.
Rolf Howarth, founder and CTO at Square Box Systems, now Principal Architect at Quantum, said in his statement:
“As CatDV grows and becomes a bigger player across the industry, there’s more we want to do, building on CatDV’s success and taking it to a new level. I am very excited at the prospect of working with Quantum, taking CatDV into new markets and solving new business problems, at the same time as continuing to work with our existing customers and partners.”
Square Box CEO Dave Clack is also joining Quantum as GM for Cloud Software and Analytics.
