Exacq Purchase Was ‘Talent Acquisition’

Tyco Security Products‘ Steve Carney has told IFSEC Global that the company’s purchase of Exacq Technologies was a “talent acquisition” and that it has gone to “great lengths” to ensure the company remains as Tyco found it.

Speaking last week in an exclusive interview, director of product management Carney was speaking about the $150 million purchase of VMS manufacturer Exacq, which has now been completed.

Responding to critics who have questioned whether Exacq’s service level and innovation will be impaired by becoming part of Tyco’s global business, Carney said that it was something his firm expected:

Well, I think that’s [criticism] something that we certainly anticipated and, for my part, being part of the acquisition, I can say that we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that organization operates and has the autonomy that it needs to do what made it successful. At the end of the day, we recognize that this is a talent acquisition, and the important part of a talent acquisition is to keep the talent in place and enable it to continue to do what it’s doing that made it successful.

I think if there’s some scepticism about that, you don’t have to look much further than the fact that the three key leaders there and all of their personnel are fully retained and will be there for quite some time…

We’re not changing the structure fundamentally; we’re not changing the people. This is really about talent as much as anything else, and we hope to keep that exactly in place as we found it.

But will the talent stay?

Without divulging the details of the deal, let’s just say that that was part of the arrangement for them to stay. As they built that company, one of the things that was clear to me was that it wasn’t just an asset that they intended to nurture and then sell off. The technology mattered, the people mattered, and the brand is very close to them — they’re passionate about that. And so we trust that they are going to continue to push that forward in the manner that made it successful originally.

Carney explained that Exacq will benefit from the global marketing power of Tyco, seeing significant growth in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions. The majority of Exacq’s business has been conducted in North America so far. He is also hopeful that technology such as ExacqVision Edge will help Tyco sell more of American Dynamics’ Illustra IP surveillance cameras.

Art of simplicity

Carney said that Exacq has “mastered the art and science of simplicity” and the opportunity to add that simplicity to their portfolio was “pretty exciting for us.”

Basically there are the users that are in active surveillance like enlarged department stores, casinos, or airports. And then there’s the 70 percent of the market where the user of video is somebody who has something else to do with their day job — office manager, store manager, a small business owner — and they’re going to the video as part of their job, and the needs of those users are very different. While our product portfolio was originally catered towards the active user, we’ve found that there’s overwhelming success with the Exacq product in catering to the event-driven user of that second profile.

Open platform

We asked whether Exacq will continue to develop open platform VMSs, or, as part of Tyco, will it become more insular?

I think they will remain open platform, and that’s certainly one of the key reasons why they are selected by many integrators. But on the other side of that, they have recently released Exacq Vision Edge, and that is a compilation of their VMS software that can run directly on an IP camera. What they’ve done differently, because of the nature of their architecture, they have compiled their entire solution down to a camera. Where other VMS manufacturers are beginning to get into that edge functionality, their architecture doesn’t really permit them to miniaturization, so they top it up and put limited functionality on the edge.

And so it was very exciting for us to acquire that particular technology, and we hope to do a lot with it. But they are also enabling anyone who wants to integrate that into their camera. So Axis, Vivotek, and others will put their edge recording software directly onto camera, so they will continue to work for manufacturers in an open manner.

The $150 million acquisition of Exacq Technologies is likely to remain one of the most significant of 2013, but Carney also reminded us that Tyco is an organization that continues to look for bolt-on acquisitions that make “strategic sense” — so we’ll see whether anyone else makes it into the shopping cart this year.