Building a Best-of-Breed Synergy

by Rashid Skaf,
AMX President and CEO

Well it’s been a while since my last article but, as you might have heard, I've been finalizing a few small changes to our company infrastructure.  

In the past 45 days, we welcomed not one, not two, but three new companies to the AMX Family. I’m back this month to explain what it’s all about, why we did it and why this is such an exciting move for AMX, Endeleo, AutoPatch and our latest arrival, Matrix. 

Committed To Being The Best
One of the philosophies that defines this company and continues to drive my passion for it today is the mission to offer “best-of-breed” solutions. Best-of-breed means one thing – committing yourself and your company to be the best at one thing. For AMX it has always been about creating the world’s best control and automation solutions. Control systems, user interfaces and the accessories and software that support them are the products that we’ve consciously chosen to design, build, perfect, and be the best at for nearly 25 years.

Specializing In Greatness or Mild Satisfaction
What we ARE NOT is a company that attempts to be the best at building many things but more often than not spreads their focus, energy and resources too thin. This usually results in having many mildly satisfactory products. It’s just like being able to choose a restaurant that specializes in a region or style of cuisine like Italian, Seafood or Thai or a restaurant that says they specialize in all three. We all know which restaurant we’d prefer to eat at and which one we might not feel so good from eating there. 

Being the best at what you do presents a quandary for companies that want to grow and capture a larger share of the market without sacrificing their mantra. But it can be done through acquisitions of other best-of-breed companies that you believe can join your company and, together, you can be the best at serving the market.

The acquisition of these companies allowed us to be able to offer (for the most part from day one) our dealers three entirely new families of products and solutions to market and our end users, one-stop shopping in control, automation, matrix switching, distributed media and distributed audio.

Meet The Family
I invite you to meet and learn about each of our new companies in this month’s newsletter by checking out “Meet Endeleo”, “Meet AutoPatch” and “Meet Matrix”. Each of these articles provides an overview of the company, its history and an in-depth look at its core product families. But let’s discuss the strategies behind these acquistions.

Endeleo is a young, amazingly progressive company that has become a real trailblazer in the Content Control sector in just the past few years. They are made up of a non-traditional group of forward-thinkers. We knew that they were poised for big things and we wanted to be a part of it. By acquiring Endeleo, we could expand our capabilities in Content Control by providing a way to distribute multimedia content from a central location to many displays.

Additionally, Endeleo’s solutions are a value-add to today’s institutions because they use easily-installed, dedicated and cost-effective Cat5 cable, which is becoming more and more pervasive throughout the industry. Their products will further broaden our penetration into the financial, education, entertainment and digital signage markets, which require both the integration of video distribution technology and traditional control solutions produced by AMX.

The largest of the three acquisitions was undoubtedly AutoPatch, which has become an industry leader, household name and best-of-breed standard in switching. For a long time now, when asked if there were any companies I’d like to partner and do something special with, AutoPatch has always been at the top of the list. Their employee knowledge base, talent and experience in the areas of product design, implementation and support of intelligent switching platforms has always been second to none and will now move AMX to the forefront of this very critical area for overall systems operation.

AutoPatch products are used in the majority of installations where AMX control systems are also used. By combining the advanced capabilities and product lines of two industry leaders, we are providing customers with greater flexibility, more options for their installations, and easier integration.

And most recently, we acquired Matrix Audio, an impressively talented and innovative group of individuals. Matrix diversifies the AMX product portfolio by adding distributed audio products that strengthen our content and device control segments.

With Matrix products in our portfolio, we will be able to further simplify integration for our customers by making it easier to program distributed audio using our control products. And Matrix products are perfectly suited for our new Residential Builder Program and our MDU and Residential Markets because they offer the complete audio solution for multi-zone audio – from as little as 4 zones and up to 64 zones.

 

Best of All Worlds
From our one R & D Center in Richardson, Texas, we have now expanded to four centers around the world. Each group is focused on expanding their product line and expertise while leveraging the others for theirs. Yet again, this proves to be the best of all worlds.

Having teams that engineer one type of product today such as a touch panel and another type tomorrow such as a switcher makes you lose your focus and expertise. But having a team of engineers focused on touch panels and another team focused on switchers, but sharing their knowledge and expertise to make the other products even better allows you to get the best of all worlds and indeed be best in breed.

A Very Bright Future Indeed
The future for our newly formed synergy is extremely bright and I am thrilled to be a part of it. I want to thank everyone for their dedication in making these acquisitions a reality.

On behalf of everyone at AMX, I would like to welcome our new additions’ employees, dealers, distributors and end users – we appreciate your continued support in making the integration of these companies successful.

For our customers, we will work to earn your business everyday. We are always looking to do more and in the coming years you will certainly see more activity than ever from AMX. As we continue to grow not only our company but the industry as a whole.