DataCore Acquires Workflow Intelligence Nexus to Accelerate Decisions at Scale with Edge AI

Solidifies leadership in M&E after acquisition of Object Matrix also this year.

This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on October 24, 2023 at 2:02 pm

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DataCore Software Corp. acquired Workflow Intelligence Nexus (WIN), a seasoned workflow services and software firm that helps customers deploy and automate media workflows using the latest cloud-based and AI-powered solutions.

This acquisition extends DataCore’s Perifery business unit, which specializes in managing data across the core to the cloud and edge for high-growth markets, including M&A and health care. This strategic transaction marks the 2nd acquisition of the year, following the announcement of Object Matrix, further solidifying Perifery’s position in accelerating workflows at scale with AI.

“The addition of Workflow Intelligence Nexus aligns with our strategy to develop leading technologies that deliver significant customer value across high-growth markets,” said Abhi Dey, GM and COO of Perifery. “WIN has deep roots in the M&E sector; combined with our existing core technologies, we will deliver an even more powerful solution portfolio to transform the industries we play in.”

Global data is exploding with organizations creating and storing more data. Gartner predicts that by 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge, and public cloud locations, compared to 2023. With the anticipated growth, removing stifling manual processes and operational obstacles are key to optimizing business outcomes. Organizations need to evolve with automated workflows using constructs like AI that enable faster decision-making and accelerate the execution of their goals.

With deep automation workflow capabilities and a strong track record of delivering value, WIN has built partnerships with global M&E customers like Iconic Media and Simple DCP.

The firm’s expertise, depth of knowledge, and pioneered solutions helped integrate with media asset management systems that can automate over 400 workflows previously done manually. With WIN and Perifery solutions, media organizations can evolve from using repetitive manual processes to automated workflows that enable faster decision-making and accelerate the execution of their workflows.

“We’re excited to join forces with Perifery, who shares our vision to help customers harness the of their data through optimized workflows,” said Jason Perr, CEO, WIN. “By bringing our AI capabilities to Perifery’s arsenal of tools, we’ll be able to provide an even more robust offering on a global scale.”

Perifery will showcase its portfolio of solutions for the M&E industry at the 2023 NAB Show New York.

Read also :

DataCore Acquires Object Matrix
Object storage pioneer and media archive specialist
Top News | January 25, 2023 | Press Release

Comments

AI and storage are a hot topic when you couple both of them, nothing new here as we saw so many announcements and movements from storage companies for a few years now.

We can even say that if a company doesn’t speak or mention somewhere the magic acronym they’re out. But the reverse is true as well, saying that AI is distilled throughout the product line finally doesn’t create any differentiator as we see this almost everywhere. So, for users and go-to-market partners, it creates a certain inertia to understand real values and gains and true stories behind these solutions. So delivering strong integrated solutions with real market footprints is just key.

We already mentioned this but this AI/storage domain is covered by 2 approaches: Storage for AI or AI Storage and AI for Storage or AI in Storage.

The first group is not covered with this acquisition. In fact solutions come more from players active in HPC or more globally high performance storage - especially file aspect of it - as AI can be considered as the new HPC, stressing storage subsystems to new levels and really pushing the hardware resource limits. But this is a different story we won’t dig here.

Back to the second group - AI for or in Storage - and more globally to data management is perfectly aligned with this DataCore announcement. We also see AIOps with AI fueling IT Operations.

This WIN acquisition is the 6th made by DataCore since Dave Zabrowski leadership started a bit more than 5 years ago.

The table below summarizes all acquisitions since the inception of the company.

	Acquired company	Activity
1999	RTware	SRM software
2000	Demand Technology Software	Monitoring software systems
2021	Caringo	Object storage
2021	MayaData	Cross-cloud control plane for data, based Kubernetes and OpenEBS
2023	Object Matrix	Object storage pioneer and media archive specialist
2023	Workflow Intelligence Nexus	Workflow automation tools for media professionals

(The company never revealed the price of any of these storage software acquisitions, especially because it is a private firm since its inception in 1998, having raised a total of $117 million in financial funding and never trying IPO).

This deal feeds the Perifery edge IT business and clearly the goal to boost the valuation of DataCore is confirmed once again. The NEW DataCore is really a different animal, offering various rich products and solutions.

We spoke with Abhi Dey, GM and COO of Perifery, a division of DataCore, and Jason Perr, CEO of WIN, to learn more about this deal.

WIN is a very small self-founded company founded in 2000 according to Crunchbase (LinkedIn shows 2007 for same entity) in California with just 2 entries in LinkedIn. We understand that the firm works with external consultants and skilled contributors aligned to projects.

The firm appears to be a digital asset management consulting entity, doing system and software integration, specific developments and of course associated training.

The team has developed a real expertise in AI having added specific engines to their developments and integration. What we saw as advanced content indexing with metadata discovery and other data "extensions", tagging, dynamic text update ... is really cool, it seems very well integrated and mastered.

Jason Perr, recognized expert in the M&E IT domain, is CEO since 2011 even if he collaborated with various other companies in the meantime: BASE Media Group from 2021 to 2023, Symply from 2016 to 2017 and Levels Beyond from 2011 to 2014, among others.

For Perifery, with already significant investments in M&E, this is key to penetrate accounts and deliver not only platforms but also data logic and AI oriented engines on top of them across acquisition or production sites. This is perfectly illustrated by the WIN portfolio supporting 20+ ready-to-deploy workflows displayed below with the support of Adobe, Archiware, Asana, Aspera, Avid, AWS, Brigthcove, Data Expedition, Iconik, MASV, Quantum StorNext, Telestream, Youtube, to name a few. Perr told us that WIN has developed more than 250 utilities in the domain.