Quantum Acquires Square Box Systems Ltd, Maker of CatDV, to Help Businesses Get More Value from Unstructured Data

Quantum Corp. has announced it has acquired Square Box Systems Ltd, a specialist in data cataloging, user collaboration, and digital asset management software. The acquisition builds on Quantum’s recently expanded portfolio that classifies, manages, and protects data across its lifecycle by adding technology advancements to further enrich video, digital images and other forms of unstructured data. This acquisition will strengthen Quantum’s ability to provide software solutions to help companies unlock the business value contained in their data, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Square Box Systems’ flagship product is CatDV, an agile media management and workflow automation software platform that helps organizations with large volumes of media and metadata to organize, communicate and collaborate more effectively. CatDV leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to make it easier for businesses of any size to catalog and analyze digital assets such as video, images, audio files, PDFs, and more; enable advanced search across local and cloud repositories; and provide access control across the full data lifecycle for secure sharing and data governance.

“There is huge untapped value contained in video, digital images, and other valuable file data,” said Jamie Lerner, president and CEO at Quantum. “This acquisition will not only help our customers make better business decisions based on their data, but it represents another key step in Quantum’s transformation by adding data enrichment technology to our portfolio. We are also adding a growing, profitable software business unit with strong gross margins that is in the late stages of transitioning to a cloud-based SaaS business.”

Expanding into New Markets

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Square Box Systems grew by more than 20% in the last year and has over 1,500 commercial software deployments and tens of thousands of individual users worldwide, including many customers that use CatDV with Quantum StorNext™. CatDV is used today in post-production, corporate video, sports, government and education markets, and has potential to expand to other markets using specifically designed plug-ins for expanded use cases such as genomics research, autonomous vehicle design, geospatial exploration, and any use case dealing with large unstructured data. CatDV is integrated with a broad ecosystem of storage vendors and other technology providers, and Quantum is committed to maintaining this open ecosystem and multi-vendor support.

“As CatDV grows and becomes a bigger player across the industry, there’s more we want to do, building on CatDV's success and taking it to a new level,” said Rolf Howarth, founder and CTO at Square Box Systems, now principal architect at Quantum. “I am very excited at the prospect of working with Quantum, taking CatDV into new markets and solving new business problems, at the same time as continuing to work with our existing customers and partners.”

Dave Clack, former CEO of Square Box Systems and General Manager, Cloud Software and Analytics at Quantum, adds: “Joining forces with Quantum makes CatDV much stronger: becoming part of a larger organization with its visionary leadership team, whilst gaining access to an amazing pool of talent, gives CatDV more opportunity to better serve our existing and future customers. The direction of both firms is already aligned; a clear focus on data management, orchestration at scale, cloud, and automation of service delivery, all unlocking amazing returns for our clients.”

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