40 TVBEurope Feature
Fitting like a glove M
George Jarrett talks to Quantel CEO Ray Cross about acquiring Snell, the chances of a second acquisition before NAB and the growing importance of technology partners
ost fans of British broadcast technology will have thought “Logical, preferable” when they heard in March that Quantel had broken its acquisition duck.
Snell and Quantel had similar origins from back in the 1970s, and remarkably similar technology cultures without any close duplication. In the current maelstrom of consolidation in the media markets, was Snell’s acquisition by Quantel a matter of CEO and executive chairman Ray Cross wanting to get his company into better technological shape for exploiting IP, 4K and 8K, and the power of software in general? “It was probably a bit simpler than that,” he says. “We were of a size where it was not always easy to be global. We needed to be larger and we needed scale. We were also more ‘niche’ than we wanted to be, and wanted to deliver products across the value chain, which is what we are doing now, but for cameras. “So for us it was about being the right size to properly service our customer base on a global scale. That is easier today than it was six months ago, and it is the same for the Snell customer base too,” he added. “They are all pretty much of a mind that they see the strength of the combined entity, the extra resources and skills, and the extra breadth of product as being all good things for them. So it is about listening to the market and delivering what it wants us to deliver.”
How long was this acquisition in the pipeline? The timing was crucial, because both companies might have become targets for bigger corporate prowlers. “We were in dialogue for well over a year,” says Cross. “The funding of Snell was done in part through a venture capitalist and the fund was maturing. That VC wanted to realise the asset it had in Snell. At that point we were able to agree a deal that was acceptable to both parties.” The two companies were not directly competitive in any product lines, so was it easier to identify cross-fertilisation opportunities and what Quantel might prefer to drop? “There was no area of technology that we could see that we wanted to drop, and that is still the same. There are some small areas: codecs is an example where we might have one common codec rather than the two we have at present. And the application of an MXF standard is another example: we have two libraries where we should really have one,” says Cross. “That is really on the edge. The technology and the products that Snell had developed attracted us, and we thought they were complimentary to what we do. Moving forward, we have got one technology vision that merges those two things together, because there are lots of things Snell was doing that we were not doing, and vice versa. It just seems to make sense to me that there is no area where we would want to lose a technology.
Ray Cross
“Hopefully by NAB I’ll be able to talk about another acquisition”
“All of it is additive,” he adds. “We have got a much better hand of cards because one plus one actually gives us more than two. For example, being able to use our LiveTouch product with the Kahuna switcher gives us a much better solution than the two products on their own.”
Open chequebook for engineering recruitment IBC visitors will probably spot several areas where the Snell and Quantel teams are going to be matching technologies, so how will R&D
www.tvbeurope.com September 2014
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