Vanderbilt finalizes acquisition of ACT

WIESBADEN, Germany—Vanderbilt, a global security systems provider, finalized on Nov. 1 its purchase of Access Control Technology Ltd., a Dublin-based company that specializes in cloud-based access control and video management solutions.

Vanderbilt CEO Joe Grillo said the integration of ACT's product line into Vanderbilt's core offering brings significant depth to the company's access control and video surveillance while also bringing a new cloud-based solution to the portfolio. Financial details of the transaction were not released.

“With this deal we add some new products and new technologies to Vanderbilt, and one in particular is ACT's cloud-based access control platform, which was something that was on our roadmap but wasn't developed yet,” Grillo told Security Systems News. “So it gives us a jump on that as it becomes a potentially more important product market segment for the access control industry.”

Grillo said that ACT is in the process of rolling its cloud-based product to the North America market in 2017, and “now we have much greater resources with our Vanderbilt group out of Parsippany, N.J. to help facilitate bringing the new product and technology to the U.S. market,” he said.

In total, 40 employees from ACT will be joining Vanderbilt's approximately 220 already in Europe, as well as its approximately 40 employees in North America, bringing the company's total number to about 300.

The ACT brand name will remain through the well-known products being added to the Vanderbilt portfolio, such as ACTpro, ACTenterprise and ACT365, a software-as-a-service model that brings a recurring revenue model to Vanderbilt and its channel partners, according to the company.

Grillo said that Vanderbilt will capitalize on ACT's market share in Ireland and the UK in addition to introducing the products to North American customers and partners.

“The addition of an integrated access control and video platform is a logical step in the direction of growing our business on an international scale in the areas of access control, video and intrusion,” he said. “Hosted, cloud-based systems are gaining in popularity in the security arena, becoming the logical way forward in future-proofing a facility's security posture.”

In addition to the ACT deal, Vanderbilt's integration of its July 2015 acquisition of the Siemens Security Products line of business considerably expanded the company's presence in the highly fragmented security and access control market, according to the company.