This summer, Haivision completed the acquisition of CineMassive, the industry leader in delivering innovative, high-performance collaborative visualization solutions for business and mission-critical applications. In this blog post we wanted to share more about CineMassive, what makes the company so unique, the synergies between the two companies, and what the future holds. I sat down with David Minnix, founder and CEO of CineMassive and Haivision’s VP of Sales, Brian Henry to find out more.
First off, let’s learn a little more about CineMassive’s history. Founded in 2005 by David Minnix and Robert Kaufman, the company’s mission-critical visualization solutions have been firmly developed around meeting the needs of its customers. Starting off with high-performance desktop multi-monitor solutions, the company quickly grew to include large format monitors and video wall configurations and eventually turned to developing its own video wall processors and collaborative visualization software, CineNet™. Headquartered in Atlanta, over the course of the last 15 years CineMassive has built up an impressive client list from a diverse range of industries, including every branch of the US Armed Services, the Pentagon, NASA, leading research universities, as well as top Fortune 500 companies.
What makes customers choose CineMassive?
David: First and foremost, when customers come to us for help with their visualization system projects, what they’re looking for is a trusted advisor. They also want a comprehensive set of technologies backed by a single company. In a highly competitive market, a complete turnkey solution from a single vendor is an extremely attractive proposition, so these factors, along with the credibility that our field-proven technology brings are what makes CineMassive stand out from the competition.
What makes CineMassive unique?
David: CineMassive is unique not only because of our innovative world-class technology, but our people and solutions-oriented approach. Our people have deep domain expertise and know-how and they come from the industries that they serve, allowing them to understand each customer’s unique pain points and challenges. This is also the case with our technology and services which are born from industry understanding and addressing customers’ challenges. And it’s this industry knowledge that gives us a very strong competitive advantage.
What are the synergies between Haivision and CineMassive?
David: There are many reasons why Haivision is a good fit. From both a technology and customer perspective, there is overlap in what we do. We are both focused on critical content distribution between endpoints. Our technology is complementary. Haivision technology and solutions specialize in contribution and CineMassive’s expertise is focused on content distribution and display. Beyond innovative technology, commitment to excellence, and entrepreneurial spirit, the companies also share other important common values. They are both employee and customer-focused and share the same ethos and growth mentality. We take care of our people and providing employees with stability is important to us.
Brian: I echo many of David’s sentiments here, both companies take similar approaches to the market, our customers, and our role of trusted advisor which makes for a great fit. In terms of technology, Haivision is a video network company, and we are focused on enabling workflows on top of the video network that we help our customers create. Examples of the type of workflows we enable extend from IPTV for enterprises, ISR for the defense industry, and remote production for broadcasters. CineMassive is just one example of an extremely powerful workflow on top of the Haivision video network enabling visual collaboration in a mission-critical environment. I would also add that the power of our solutions is the technology plus the people and our approaches to the market, our customers, and our technologies are very complementary.
How do CineMassive and Haivision customers stand to benefit from the acquisition?
Brian: The most obvious immediate benefit of this acquisition means that we can offer our customers a much wider breadth of solutions and more resources to help them, both in North America and internationally. Ultimately, it means we will be able to offer customers a single vendor for glass-to-glass workflows for visual collaboration. This is something that no other single company can currently offer. Not only can we help customers design and create their operations center for example, but we can also help them build out the video network to support that operation center and interconnect all their operations centers between global headquarters and regional sites. What’s exciting is that we’re seeing pull-through from both Haivision and CineMassive clients and we’re already working together to help deliver projects from IPTV upgrades through to operations centers.
Any predictions for what the future has in store for Haivision and CineMassive?
Brian: I’m really excited about the operations center market, both the physical and cyber security operations centers. While it’s a very strong market for CineMassive, it’s not one that Haivision has traditionally played in. Together we have a very powerful and compelling combination of technologies that allow us to pull in different data sources from IP cameras to network monitoring tools and web browser information such as maps, and bring it all into one solution from one vendor and disseminate it to regional sites or even people working from home. This is one more mission-critical application that fits right in the sweet spot of what our joint customers really care about – security, reliability, and low latency, so they can make better real-time decisions in mission-critical environments. That’s the power of bringing both of these companies together.