Motorola Solutions Acquires Pelco

And I though I made too many bad impulse purchases when tipsy.

Go home Motorola, you're drunk.

This could be a good thing for them. If they can rebuild the brand to the point where Pelco is a viable option for secure facilities, they could very well own the entire federal and local government space by virtue of being built in the US. And of course Motorola has plenty of experience selling to Uncle Sam. But of course they have a lot of catching up to do, thanks to the mismanagement of Schneider.

Avigilon can focus on the private sector and IndigoVision can be their SMB brand.

After many failed attempts of purchasing their products in the past 10 years there is too much of a bad taste for Pelco. They have literally burned anyone who has used their products in that time. How can anyone even consider trying to get back on the Pelco band wagon again. Fool me once, fool me twice, fool me thrice.... this keeps on going like the energizer bunny.

Pelco was beaten badly by Schneider Electric for over a decade, transforming a market leader into a company dumped for less than 90% of what they spent to acquire it.

Weren't they acquired for 10% of what they spent to acquire it?

I say drop the name and fold Pelco into Avigilon/Motorola's overall solution. Like John says, its not a good track record of big companies managing competing products. I can date myself back to the first failures associated with GE buying Casi-Rusco and Infographics or IFS and Fiber Options and marketing them as competing companies. Let's face it, Schneider wrecked the Pelco name and brand. Pelco cameras were good but they were never great. We integrators sold them because of the support and how well Pelco took care of issues and its partners. That reputation and the people that built it are long gone. Pelco started as a metal bender and perfected the manufacturing of camera mounts and accessories. There's still a market for this and bringing the manufacturing back to the US is a good thing for the quality. Pelco's downhill spiral began when they entered the IP market too late and the wrong strategy with Endura. The name and product don't carry the same weight and reverence it once did, sad but true. I would challenge Avigilon to really evaluate what they bought and simply bring the products together under one offering. There's enough IP cameras in the market! Quit holding on to a name for nostalgic sake.

I think it would be good if they can sell Pelco if manufactured in the US without the dealer requirements that Avigilon has. Would be a good product(hopefully) to point customers towards when discussing ban compliance.

Would be interesting to see Pelco be leveraged as their open platform option with US based production. That’s enough to make me seriously interested in becoming a Pelco dealer.

As an ex AVO/MSI employee I don't see this fitting much into any of Avigilon's strategies and they will have to grow their product management team significantly to be able to manage this amount of products even with existing staff from the other companies. When I left AVO product management was grossly understaffed and did not have enough PM or engineering resources to even come close to their product roadmap deadlines so adding two other very disperate product lines to the mix will only complicate things significantly more. I also highly doubt they will run all of this out of the Avigilon Vancouver office so consolidating the resources is a long way out.

In my opinion MSI has really just bought another portion of the security industry to make a play at dominating the video portion, but none of these aquisitions bring them any closer to taking over the Genetec/Axis/Milestone business that they really need in order to do that.

Whether or not they will be able to execute a paradigm shift in their favour is yet to be seen, but I do think their executive team is either extremely out of touch with our industry, or extremely brilliant and seeing something no one else is.

If Motorola cannot bring any value to Avigilon's business (which has been the case year to date) then why buy other Video Vendor/s?

The biggest issue here is that MSI staff want their cut in commission and are unwilling to get AVO staff involved to bring their "direct" customers to them. I once saw the CEO of MSI on a US morning news program promote his brand Motorola and using its Video Brand as leverage without once using the word Avigilon.

This merge has been very disjointed and i cannot see how the other brands are going to add any value to their business from a very top heavy managed company.

I once heard someone wise say "If you tie two rocks together they're still not going to float."

It was in reference to two companies merging, and I think it's somewhat appropriate here. Not in the Avigilon + Motorola sense, but with regard to IndigoVision and Pelco. Both of those companies were struggling at the least and at worst failing. I don't see the benefit to Motorola. They seem like dead weight pulling the company down.

I'm most shocked that Pelco sold 200m last year.

I am sure Motorola is buying Pelco for the accounts they have, and then Pelco will be systematically disappearing from the map.

Considering Pelco's recent direction, this may be the best solution for the brand and product. After the Schneider fiasco, Motorola may be the last chance for this once great product.

The difference between Motorola and the other acquirers mentioned (JCI and GE) is that Motorola is more focused on markets closer to the video security space. Over 60% of JCI's revenue comes from the Automotive industry and, Security was never more than a a piece of dust on a fly for GE.

I'd be interested in knowing the impact that Motorola has had on Avigilon's performance. More telling though would be the impact on IndigoVision as the latter was a product/brand that was circling the drain a few years ago.

Pelco still has a lot of name recognition in a country like Kuwait and is often found as an approved manufacturer for many tenders. I believe that is common in much of the Arabian Gulf as well.

I believe brand recognition is still worth a lot, especially if it can get you a foot in the door.

Might be a reach, but I think a lot of this is motivated by a focus for Motorola to be the only game in town for federal, state and local government solutions/ NDAA positioning for end to end video surveillance. I think we are watching the early phases of a company laying the framework to replicate their monopoly in radios within the physical security market. Arguably, Pelco was one of the few remaining Enterprise end to end American made video solutions on the market. IndigoVision is/was also a reasonable competitive end to end solution with NDAA compliant options.

Motorola has a successful history of landing into public entities and then winning noncompetitive contracts for questionable reasons(https://www.kansas.com/news/article1138732.html). The more competitive options they remove, the easier the justification becomes. Many of these customer relationships span decades, so if they can replicate this radio market share success in public video surveillance then they can very easily see ROI on the $147M between the two companies.

Saying you're buying for brand and tech helps avoids the antitrust lawsuits, which they've already been through with Hytera. They're buying these brands and tech so they no longer exist. They're limiting options and buying market share in a very lucrative vertical market.

If Motorola successfully raises the government spec bar to enterprise "end to end" video surveillance( to now include Pelco and Indigiovision cameras) that integrate into body cams and radio, then who else is there??

To me, this spells bad news for Avigilon sales reps if they are keeping the businesses separate. They will be competing with a very well known brand that their parent company will heavily invest in and that can leverage the sales force of distribution and manufacturer's reps, something Avigilon can't do.

Motorola has a commendable offering in Public/City Surveillance projects with radios, command and control, video, body worn, etc. With Pelco they now get access to a major chunk of the industrial business (especially Petrochemicals, Oil & Gas) with their Explosion Proof cameras.

They have a huge customer base in the Middle East, Asian markets with a lot of Petrochemical customers (Pelco Explosion Proof + IndigoVision Encoders/VMS).

Apart from this the Metro Rail market is growing in Asia where Motorola has been strong with their radios, etc. Adding an option of Video on the same is a win-win situation - a choice of cameras, a choice of VMS, etc.

Motorola can easily walk in with other value added systems/solutions to Cities, Metros & Industrial with this acquisition.