It’s been a year for technology-driven acquisitions. Significant moves brought mega-brands together, while others demonstrate the expansion plans of familiar brands, as they acquired companies that may be less familiar to our industry.
At Infocomm, we saw the first fruit of the Blaze acquisition by Sonance in the shared demo room.
In July, in one of the most newsworthy acquisitions, Hall Technologies acquired substantially all assets of Atlona’s product portfolio from Panduit. Hall CEO Ken Eagle was well familiar with Atlona products from being Global Training Director at Atlona through 2021 before joining Hall as VP of Technology. He emphasized that Hall and Atlona products would continue to be supported with more customer support and technical resources, and the acquisition would lead to a broader range of products from both brands.
Just a month before, Audinate had acquired Iris to help fuel the Dante AV expansion with a control systems play, and NETGEAR acquired cybersecurity company Exium.
In August Kinly merged with Yorktel in a workplace experience and collaboration move. In September and October Ross Video acquired two companies that both support live, experiential audio and video. LAMA which brings innovation to live audio workflows, and ioversal which has a unique live production platform for interactive exhibits, live entertainment, large-scale productions, and projection mapping.
Last month, Imagine acquired Pixel Power to drive cloud for broadcast and streaming.
Now as we go to press, Biamp has entered into an agreement to acquire assets of ClearOne, Inc., including intellectual property and brands. The acquisition adds signal-processing designs and patents to the Biamp technology portfolio.
ClearOne has a 20-year track record in audio conferencing technology with contributions in DSP, acoustic echo cancellation, microphone array processing, and beamforming/beam-steering techniques. The run has had its controversy; a long-running and very public patent dispute with Shure was settled in 2022 with a confidential agreement, the dismissal of mutual lawsuits without liability, and a reported cross-patenting agreement that would allow both companies’ products to continue to thrive in the marketplace.
Now, three years later, ClearOne’s R&D, institutional knowledge (and some of the patents) will integrate into Biamp. The acquired assets include designs and several significant patents associated with beamforming microphone arrays and related audio signal-processing innovations.
Unlike the Hall/Atlona acquisition, where Hall is keeping Atlona products available and supported, Biamp “does not assume any obligations to continue selling, supporting, or developing ClearOne-branded products as a result of this transaction. The company’s focus is on thoughtful integration of selected IP and designs into future Biamp solutions.”
For me, this brings to mind an acquisition in my own personal history. In 2010, my husband was CEO of Electrosonic and sold the products division of the company to Extron. This was significant not for specific products or product lines; it was materially about the underlying wavelet technology developed under the great Electrosonic engineer Peter Smith, whose industry innovations date back to 1975. Smith went with the deal to Extron, and that technology remains part of Extron’s portfolio today, where it has been further evolved, and influenced Extron products for now 15 years and counting.
