NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced the acquisition of EcoDigital (formerly known as Front Porch Digital) from PE firm Ten Oaks Group. The deal brings the popular Diva archiving platform under the Telestream umbrella. The deal to acquire EcoDigital has been completed.
In 2014, Oracle acquired Front Porch Digital and in 2019, divested the division, selling it to EcoDigital.
EcoDigital’s Diva Content Management Software (CMS) solution manages the archiving and retrieval of a customer’s assets. Diva automates the process and provides transcoding to and from the archive repository. The storage repository can be on-premise, utilizing almost any vendor’s physical storage (online, nearline or deep storage on LTO tape) or in the cloud (Google, Microsoft, AWS, Alibaba or Oracle).
Telestream shares a number of customers with EcoDigital, and the companies said the considerable overlap between Diva and Telestream’s flagship Vantage Media Processing Platform highlights the potential efficiencies created by the company integration. This attention to content creation companies is what helped drive the deal, according to Dan Castles, Telestream CEO.
“We cater to content owners, they cater to content owners and we want best of breed companies,” said Castles. “They just released version 8 of Diva, it's very current, very strong.”
After five years under Oracle ownership, it became evident that the companies were going in different directions regarding media asset management for M&E, according to Geoff Tognetti, CTO of EcoDigital. However, those years were not wasted, he added.
“One of the good things that's happened over the years at Oracle though was there was a lot of attention paid to the architecture of the product and a lot of attention paid to security,” Tognetti said. “There was a lot of attention paid to scalability so there were a lot of behind-the-scenes fundamental changes to deep archive that made it better. The vast majority of our customer base is actually on a current version or within the last three years versions of Diva today. So they're actually using versions of Diva that were developed in many cases during the Oracle time period.”
“The acquisition of EcoDigital provides more workflow solutions, especially Vantage-related, which facilitate tighter integration for the production, archive and restoration of raw and finished assets,” Castles said. “Once the integration is completed, our customers can be even more efficient in the management of their production assets.”
They add that EcoDigital’s cloud strategy is consistent with Telestream’s, with both companies investing in the cloud. Both are cloud agnostic, enabling customers to choose the best cloud platform to fit their business needs. Also, both companies recognize that customers are going to be in a hybrid environment where both on premise and cloud-based solutions co-exist and an integration with both is key.
“This company integration is entirely positive news for EcoDigital and our customers since the technology synergies between our two product ranges are considerable,” said Tognetti. “This integration has been well thought out—the end result will create greater efficiencies within customer operations and will be beneficial for their businesses.”
EcoDigital’s CEO, CFO and CRO will not make the transition. Tognetti will stay on to lead the Diva division at Telestream.
