Sony acquires IPIX's intellectual property for $3.6 million

Last year, we quoted Clara Conti, the CEO of Reston, Virginia-based IPIX remarking on the growth of the video analytics business: “When I started, there were only two companies doing video analytics,” she said. “Now there are thirty companies doing this or at least claiming to do this.” Perhaps by now there are more than thirty, but IPIX is not one of them any longer. The company is now in bankruptcy court, and the vultures are circling to snatch up the remains. One of these scavengers is Sony, which SecurityInfoWatch reports has acquired IPIX’s core intellectual property at a price of $3.6 million. The portfolio includes IPIX’s gigapixel camera for situational awareness software — a good move for Sony which recently launched its own suite of video analytic technology with the DEPA product line. Our good friend Steve Hunt of 4A International had this to say:

“The IPIX technology is going to be worth a thousands time more to Sony Corporation than it ever could have been to IPIX. Sony is a company made up of engineers, and they make their money not only from their own branded products, but the biggest part of their revenue comes from all of the Sony components that they sell that other people put in their products. So the IPIX technology could appear in a number of cameras, processor, TVs and high-end video equipment. It could go in a thousand places once you rip it apart for its parts.”

Why did IPIC go under? Hunt explains:

“They didn’t have the right partnerships, and they didn’t play the game right, such as playing nice with other video management systems. Their sales channel also didn’t work. You have to make your product available in a way that customers want to buy it, and they didn’t succeed in creating that successful sales channel.”

-read more in this SecurityInfoWatch report