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		<title>DOOH Growth Strategies: Horizontal and Vertical Integration</title>
		<description>Discuss DOOH Growth Strategies: Horizontal and Vertical Integration</description>
		<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration</link>
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			<title>Bryan Crotaz says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1303</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Interesting that you mention our acquisition by AMX (my father and I owned Inspiration Matters prior to acquisition). Our thinking as the "small fry" (a 13 man team at the time) was that we were doing pretty well in the UK sales-wise with 6 good resellers, but the overheads of running a development and consultancy team meant that we were stuck around break-even. I can't comment on AMX's reasons for the acquisition for confidentiality reasons, but their intentions were well thought out. The jump to going worldwide through AMX's 2000 dealers was perfect for us as the acquirees - we could take a working product with a good customer base and immediately sell it in all English-speaking regions, and later in foreign language regions after documentation and UI translation.
There was (and still is!) a fantastic fit with AMX's other products - control, IPTV, VGA extenders, and our first work after acquisition was to enable control of Inspired Signage from AMX controllers, and integration with the AMX AV ecosystem. This enabled clients to get a "one stop shop" - everything but the screens, including content generation if there is no agency involved can be purchased from AMX. This fact alone sealed several of our deals as clients had had bad experiences in the past when trying to get software from multiple manufacturers to work together.
I left AMX in March 2010 and now work freelance to help end users understand what they are buying, and interestingly with M&A teams to look at the integration process when buying companies in this market, having experienced it myself and learnt some tough lessons.
I think there are some very interesting opportunities out there for a VC or similar to build a portfolio of signage technologies (playout, IPTV, signal transmission, reporting, monitoring and measurement) that could then be integrated to make the user experience a little easier. I'm looking forward to seeing this happen, and perhaps being involved in those deals. It's an exciting time right now!]]></description>
			<dc:creator>Bryan Crotaz</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:11:31 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1303</guid>
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			<title>John Moezzi says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1302</link>
			<description><![CDATA[I would characterize Netkey's acquisition of Webpavement as vertical I suppose because each platform was well rooted with somewhat similar yet different competencies - self-service kiosks in the case of Netkey and digital signage in the case of Webpavement. The combined technolgy was perhaps more attractive to a much larger player's desire to be a turn-key player]]></description>
			<dc:creator>John Moezzi</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:46:52 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1302</guid>
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			<title>Bill Gerba says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1301</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Ah, NetKey/NCR is a great example of a vertical acquisition. And while they probably would have pitted their own acquisition of WebPavement (was that an asset sale?) as vertical, I'd probably categorize it as a horizontal move, since it was essentially an IP purchase by a company making a similar-ish product.]]></description>
			<dc:creator>Bill Gerba</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:10:24 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1301</guid>
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			<title>Jason Goldberg says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1300</link>
			<description><![CDATA[This is going back a ways, but the first "horizontal" acquisition I remember in the space seemed particularly ill advised to me. There used to be a decent shrink-wrapped software application called "Fred Systems" founded by John Kirkpatrick that was bought by Mercury Online. At the time Fred's only channel were VARs that integrated the product for clients, but Mercury Online was an integrator that competed directly with Fred's customers. So Mercury didn't use Fred's IP, and instantly lost all it's customers (mostly to Scala back then). I remember being surprised to see a deal with such an obvious channel conflict.
I struggle to think of an acquisition that made a ton of sense, but NetKey to NCR seems like an example of a "vertical" acquisition that made some sense to NCR, given NCR's desire to be a turn-key player in the retail and self-service spaces.]]></description>
			<dc:creator>Jason Goldberg</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Fri, 17 Sep 2010 03:54:53 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1300</guid>
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			<title>adrian cotterill says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1299</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Deals that made no sense? Wow, how much space have you got for an answer?
- PlayNetworks buying Channel M
- 3M buying Mercury (especially since 3M did nothing with it)
- Barco buying dZine (this one is yet to play out but we firmly believe thatit makes little sense for ant large display manufacturer to own a software business)
- Navori buying BroadSign (oh wait that hasn't happened yet)
and oh so many more!
On the flip side however we have seen and perhaps we should celebrate more deals that have made sense and are working. Amscreen wouldn't be the Amscreen we all love and hate in the UK for example without the acquisition for example of ComtechM2M
Most of the work we are doing at the moment in the M&A space is with interactive vendors. Expect to see several announcements of money being spent in this sector by many.]]></description>
			<dc:creator>adrian cotterill</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:23:48 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1299</guid>
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			<title>Bill Gerba says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1298</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Agreed, John. And I have to admit I intentionally left off conglomerate-ish deals like 3M/Mercury and Thomson/PRN because the whole notion of conglomerates confuses me. Likewise, hedge funds and private capital companies that buy companies for their ongoing cashflows are hard to get a read on too (e.g. GGC/Symon)]]></description>
			<dc:creator>Bill Gerba</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:36:41 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1298</guid>
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			<title>John Moezzi says:</title>
			<link>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1297</link>
			<description><![CDATA[3M's acquisition of Mercury Online Solutions and Clarity's acquisition of CoolSign were always suspect in my eyes. However, CoolSign may have added value to Clarity's ability to get a pretty good deal from Planar. Planar ended up on short end of the stick on that one and CoolSign and founder reunited once again. Not sure why Planar sold gaming rights only for CoolSign to Bally Technologies either. Planar seems to = bad deals.]]></description>
			<dc:creator>John Moezzi</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:23:20 +0000</pubDate>
			<guid>https://www.wirespring.com/30-legacy-blog-digital-signage-insider/771-dooh-growth-strategies-horizontal-and-vertical-integration#comment-1297</guid>
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