Quantum has acquired Square Box Systems, a specialist in data cataloguing, user collaboration and digital asset management software. The acquisition builds on Quantum’s recent developments into classification, management and protection of data across its lifecycle with functionality to enrich video, digital images and other forms of unstructured data. This acquisition will strengthen Quantum’s ability to develop software that helps companies discover the business value contained in their data, on-premises and in the cloud.
Square Box Systems’ main product is CatDV, media management and workflow automation software that helps organisations with large volumes of media and metadata to organise, communicate and collaborate more effectively. CatDV uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to make it easier for businesses of any size to catalogue and analyse digital assets such as video, images, audio files and PDFs. It enables complex searches across local and cloud repositories and gives access control across the full data lifecycle for secure sharing and data governance.
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 most use cases dealing with large unstructured data. CatDV is integrated with a broad ecosystem of storage vendors and other providers, and Quantum is committed to maintaining this open ecosystem and multi-vendor support.
Many of the world’s largest studios, broadcasters and content producers have complex workflows, and have the budget and infrastructure to deploy customized and integrated media asset management (MAM) systems to manage their complete workflows. In these larger environments, Quantum has deep integration and will continue to partner with these MAM vendors to provide the best solutions to these customers.
However, smaller workgroups such as those in corporate video, education and houses of worship have a need for a simpler turnkey system with basic functionality to be able to index, search and manage their content on a shared storage platform. Quantum intends to combine the CatDV software with StorNext to supply an all-in-one workgroup appliance and better serve the needs of this market. www.quantum.com
