To be precise, on the day this is published, it is one year, one month, one week and one day since Dalet acquired AmberFin on the 6^th of April 2014.  It seems like an appropriate opportunity to reflect on the last 13 months.
 
It wasn’t entirely by accident, but we were certainly fortunate, that we finalised the acquisition on the eve of NAB 2014. This not only presented an ideal opportunity for both teams to come together (a rarity with Dalet spread across 18 offices worldwide) and jointly talk to customers, but also established a milestone to annually measure the integration of people & technology.
 
People are at the heart of any business, but given the level of professional services that Dalet provides to our customers, they are absolutely core to our business. It was immediately obvious at NAB 2014 that the AmberFin team were going to merge well with Dalet, and over the past year, we have been able to “blend” skills and start sharing knowledge across the now united organisation. By way of example, Arnaud Elnecave, a long-serving Dalet employee, recently assumed the position of General Manager of Products, taking global responsibility for our packaged product and solutions business, including Dalet AmberFin and Dalet Brio, while Simon Adler, formerly of AmberFin, took over Arnaud’s previous role as General Manager for our West Coast operations.
 
Integrating AmberFin technology into the Dalet offering started immediately following the acquisition, and at IBC last September, we showcased how AmberFin technology could be used in multi-lingual/multi-version workflows, using the transcoder as a render engine under the Dalet Track Stack tool.  At NAB, we showed customers further benefits of the acquisition with the combination of the Dalet Workflow Engine and Dalet AmberFin as a user-intuitive solution for orchestrating media-centric workflows.
 
Of course, we also brought together a huge wealth of knowledge. Following on from the success of the “AmberFin Academy” – the free educational program – and its feature series, “Bruce’s Shorts,” we launched the Dalet Academy in January of this year, featuring a much broader topic set with more contributors (including partners, customers and consultants), as well as more blogs, webinars and live events at trade shows and conferences.
 
In the background, we have of course merged the operations of the two companies. This is never an easy task and I take this opportunity to thank those involved for making that happen so smoothly.
 
So, what’s next? I can’t reveal too much of the roadmap, but it is safe to say that our investment in AmberFin will continue to reap benefits for our customers, whether they come to us for a standalone transcoder or an enterprise-wide media asset management system.
 
Acquisitions aren’t necessarily easy to get right; in fact, one article from Business Review Europe sites a Harvard Business Review report showing M&A failure rates as high as 90%. We like to consider ourselves a part of the 10%. One year on, Dalet, our partners and our customers are seeing and will continue to see the benefits of an excellent match in vision, technology and people.