Battery, NICE deal is done, business renamed Qognify

BOSTON—Battery Ventures on Sept. 20 closed the NICE physical security business unit deal and renamed the business Qognify.

Battery Ventures announced its intention to acquire the business in August for $85 million in cash and up to an additional $15 million. Final terms have not been made public, however, Monroe Capital in Chicago announced that it was the sole lead arranger and administrative agent on the funding of a $57.5 million senior credit facility to support Battery Ventures' acquisition.

Monroe Capital did not immediately return a call from Security Systems News.

Moti Shabtai, president of Qognify, told Security Systems News that “nothing is going to change in the near future as far as the company's operations, our go-to-market strategy, the customers we service, or our DNA of innovation, however, with Battery Ventures we get access to capital [that we didn't have before],” he said.

Shabtai said Qognify may look to acquire a traditional security product company, such as access control, a capability that is not in its current portfolio, or it may acquire a complementary technology such as data analytics. He said it will be at least a few months and possibly up to a year before Qognify starts acquiring.

Shabtai said the growth opportunities for Qognify “are endless” and identified two “domains” of focus for the company: video analytics and situation management.

He said Qognify enables end users to use “video analytics as a decision support system,” particularly with its “Object Origin,” a new analytics tool it announced Sept. 21 and will be showing at ASIS. Object Origin will work in concert with Qognify's “Suspect Search.” Object Origin will enable end users to determine under what circumstances a bag, vehicle or other object is left somewhere and then, with Suspect Search, they can track the person who left the object “between cameras to see where this person came from, who they met with, to understand the real story of what is going on,” Shabtai said.

He added that the tools are helpful for operational issues as well as security and safety issues.

Shabtai said Qognify's Situator  “takes PSIM to the next level … to provide situation management and operational intelligence.” End users can “take KPIs and put them into the technology to determine how they're performing, how they're trending and also to give them predictive analytics,” Shabtai said. All of this enables automation, which Shabtai said is “a big value in the equation.”

The next version of Qognify Situator will enable integrators to use APIs to integrate with other partners on their own. That version is in beta now with a limited number of partners, Shabtai said. It will be released in early 2016.

What about the name of the new company?

Shabtai said the name is a play on the word cognify, and the notion of being cognitive and alert. “It's about our ability to crunch a sea of data and provide insight into what happened,” he said. The Q in Qognify signifies intelligence. “That's what we do, we take data and turn it into information and we take information and turn it into intelligence,” he said. In the logo, the Q is square which signifies a frame. “We frame for you the situation,” Shabtai said.