Quantum Acquires HCI Pioneer Pivot3’s Video Surveillance Tech

‘[Pivot3’s] technology completes our surveillance portfolio. It becomes the core now, covering SMB to mission-critical requirements including software and tape,’ says Eric Bassier, Quantum’s senior director of product marketing.

Storage technology developer Quantum unveiled a big play for video surveillance storage supremacy with the acquisition of nearly all of the intellectual property and assets of hyperconverged infrastructure technology developer Pivot3.

With the acquisition, valued at about $8 million in cash and stock, Quantum gets Pivot3 technology with a focus on storing and managing video surveillance data, as well as over 500 new surveillance customers, over 40 personnel and Pivot3’s erasure coding technology, said Curt Wittich, vice president of sales for strategic markets at San Jose, Calif.-based Quantum.

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This will allow Quantum to build a complete infrastructure on which to run video analytics, Wittich told CRN.

However, he said, Quantum is not acquiring all of Pivot3.

“We’re buying the video surveillance portion,” he said. “But that is the bulk of the company.”

Pivot3 was an early pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure technology for the video surveillance industry, said Eric Bassier, senior director of product marketing for Quantum.

“Its technology completes our surveillance portfolio,” Bassier told CRN. “It becomes the core now, covering SMB to mission-critical requirements including software and tape. We have a unique broad portfolio from capture to retention. This leads us to an end-to-end solution for video and other forms of unstructured data.”

Unstructured data accounts for about 80 percent of all data created, Bassier said. “And the bulk of unstructured data is video, and the bulk of that is camera data,” he said. “It’s the biggest creator of data on the planet.”

As the unstructured data environment has grown, companies have more surveillance data than they can manage and need better ways to manage it to get value from the data, Wittich said.

“In the market, most suppliers have a single approach to surveillance data,” he said. “They have no way to store video according to required performance and price points. With Pivot3, they don’t just get a great product, but we now have a complete solution to put video on the right platform.”

The acquisition of the video surveillance business of Pivot3 is only the latest in a string of acquisitions Quantum has made to beef up its technology for this part of the IT business.

Quantum in early 2020 unveiled the acquisition of Western Digital’s ActiveScale business, which gave it access to a solid object storage technology that complemented its higher-performance StorNext file storage.

Shortly thereafter, Quantum acquired Atavium, a developer of business intelligence software.

Quantum in late 2020 also acquired Square Box Systems, developer of the CatDV media management and workflow automation technology.

The 40-plus Pivot3 people coming to Quantum with the acquisition have domain expertise in video security but will now be working with a company that has greater resources, Wittich said.

“We are 100 percent committed to fully supporting Pivot3’s existing customers,” he said. “We’re much larger than Pivot3. Those customers will also see an accelerated value through our upcoming road map.”