IBE Feature | Senior Executive Interview
QUESTIONING... RICHARD SCOTT
A couple of hours before the show opened in Vegas for a very busy day 2, Richard Scott updated IBE Magazine about the recent acquisition of Harris Broadcast Communications by The Gores Group, a Los Angeles based investment firm.
Monica Heck, Deputy Editor, IBE
So, what did this news really mean for the company, now rebranded Harris Broadcast?
Richard Scott felt that this year’s NAB was one of the most important shows the company has had in many years. “We are effectively relaunching ourselves. Some people are saying we’re the newest 91 year-old company at NAB and the new branding is of course important, but the message we are sending to our customers is: it’s really business as usual. There are a lot of familiar faces, several new products launched as promised, so we continue to innovate and the reaction from customers and dealers has been positive. We’ve more or less confirmed that
the majority of the market haven’t really noticed any changes, apart from a change in the colours and the branding.
Further back inside the company there’s a lot of change going on. The Gores Group bring a huge amount of operational expertise, they are not just a fund or a bank. They actually have real experience of the things you can do to improve the efficiency and the agility of a company once you carve it out of a big corporation.
They’re very focused on our supply chain, our manufacturing and all things that go with that like product quality and the procurement of our materials and our services and so on, our back office systems like our IT systems, our finance organisation and how our internal financial reporting is structured, which historically quite frankly with Harris Corporation was very complicated. That constrained us in a number of ways, it meant it was difficult to move quickly and to be responsive. There were a lot of inefficiencies in terms of impact on the profitability of the company. So those are the things that Gores are very focused on.
At NAB we’ve got I think as many as 8 of the Gores executives here and unlike so many other investment firms they are meeting our customers, doing that deliberately to get a better understanding of the business to watch how we work and what we do, so they can really understand where they need to invest and
« Platinum Router Family
Monica Heck | Deputy Editor
IBE Deputy Editor Monica Heck caught up with Richard Scott, senior vice president of global sales and services for Harris Broadcast, during NAB 2013.
improve and to get a better understanding of our business. Overall the reaction internally and externally has been really really positive, we are really enjoying working with them.”
Are there any particular areas of interest that drew the Gores Group into the Harris process?
“The way we like to describe the choice is that we chose each other. We had a chance to influence which type of “parent” we were going to be working with as indeed they, of course did. They very quickly recognised the breadth of our portfolio, which is a differentiator. That there has been a lot of good progress made on integrated solutions, especially in the software space where so many of our competitors are focused on point products and they understand that these days many customers don’t have the resources or the skills to be able to do the integration themselves. They could see there was a lot of value in that.
They could also see there was a lot of opportunity for further investment in a lot of those products. The work that we had done recently to develop some of our first platform products like the Selenio and more recently the Versio and a new IP3 Platinum router were all things that they saw were really innovative and with the right amount of investment and coaching we could yield many more new products on these platforms.”
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| May/June 2013
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