ACRE acquires video powerhouse Razberi

LAS VEGAS—With the recent acquisition of Razberi Technologies, ACRE not only strengthens its video and communications business and product portfolio, but also adds technology options on the access control side.  

ACRE CEO Joseph Grillo told Security Systems News he is excited to bring on a company of Razberi’s caliber.

“Razberi is a company that is focused on adding value and participates in one of the fastest growing parts of security, which is video surveillance, and we have always been actively participating in the video surveillance market through mostly our ComNet brand,” Grillo said. “So the attractiveness for us is having another, and in some ways more sophisticated technology and set of products, allows us to deepen and broaden our penetration in the video space with the ability to now do storage and other management of video, as well as the cyber hardening of a video system or an access control system.”

Imperial Capital Managing Director Bill Lynch, who Grillo said was instrumental in getting this deal done, told SSN this transaction is important “because it will give Razberi technology broader access to global markets through the portfolio of ACRE businesses, and it further validates to immediate importance to have elegant solutions to manage and monitor edge devices that will all be protected by Razberi’s award winning cyber-security hardening platform.”

ACRE Chief Product Officer Kim Loy told SSN that ACRE will leverage the technology and expertise of Razberi beyond video across its access control brands for providing server builds, cybersecurity and system health monitoring.

“The cybersecurity and the system health monitoring that they have are modular,” she explained. “When we looked at that technology, although Razberi had been focused on the video space, we felt there was a great opportunity for us to add those two sort of functions/features, which is the software that they wrote, into our access control platforms, broadening Razberi’s business as well as adding some good technology feature sets to our access control offerings.”

Razberi, based in Farmers Branch, Texas, was founded in 2011, and has developed a portfolio of products that enable enterprises to deploy a simple, secure video surveillance system. Razberi’s open product platforms work with third-party video cameras, video management and video analytics software, providing increased cybersecurity protection and threat response times.

“We are excited to join the ACRE organization with its strong global reach that will open new opportunities for the Razberi product range,” said Razberi Founder and Chief Product Officer Tom Galvin, who will remain as the general manager of the business post-acquisition, and will be instrumental in integrating Razberi into ACRE.

Grillo noted that with more people working remotely and businesses looking to manage things off-premises, interest in cloud-based solutions is increasing.

“There has been some positive momentum to the increase in off-premises-based systems, managed access systems or cloud-based systems, and we certainly have seen an increase from the channel and end users for those types of solutions,” he said, adding that ACRE is excited to “continue to grow both organically and through acquisition activity in 2021.”