Inside Codemill’s acquisition of Cantemo

The deal coincides with the Initial Public Offering of Codemill onto Nasdaq First North Growth Market, planned for mid-June.

According to both companies, the acquisition will result in benefits for customers, most notably closer integration between the Cantemo Portal MAM solution and Codemill’s Accurate.Video web-based video platform. It will also enable Cantemo to offer a more hands-on service to customers when needed.

The two companies have enjoyed a close working relationship for many years, as Rickard Lönneborg, CEO at Codemill, explains: “Codemill has been around since 2008 when we started out with professional services, development, interaction, design and taking on projects supporting various customers. Quite early on we started working in the M&E business and we became a partner of Cantemo.”

In recent years, Codemill has been pivoting away from professional services to become a more product-focused business, creating clear synergies between the two businesses. Parham Azimi, co-founder and outgoing CEO of Cantemo, expands: “We come in with a very long background of being a products company and not providing professional services.

”We didn’t necessarily want to be involved in those very large projects that define the traditional media asset management landscape, we wanted to build a solution that could independently be deployed and customised for end customers. That’s one of the key areas where we see Cantemo being a great fit for Codemill.

“In fact, it’s a two-way synergy as there’s been a need from some of our customers for us to be involved in projects in a more hands-on way, but traditionally we’ve not been part of that. We very much rely on our partners to provide those services and many of our partners are savvy enough to be able to do that without needing us to intervene.

”But there are some cases where customers would gain a lot by us being more hands-on. With this sort of marriage, we’ll be able to participate more in those scenarios and be able to lead more projects to guarantee even more success than we have been able to traditionally.”

Partnership approach
Partners have been crucial for Cantemo along the way and Codemill’s Neil Anderson will become partner manager to make sure this continues to be the case. Anderson has been involved with both companies for at least a decade and has experience of working with Cantemo’s channel and technology partners on complex projects.

When it comes to go-to-market strategy, Azimi is clear that this will not change as part of the deal. “Cantemo is still going to be heavily working with its channel partners and the fact that Cantemo and Codemill will all of a sudden have a lot more resources to provide to the end customers, that is only in the cases where it’s absolutely needed; it’s not in any way for Cantemo to take more of the value chain from our partners.”

“The Codemill products that are on the market today are a great fit for what could be plugged into Portal to provide a broader value proposition,” Parham Azimi, Cantemo

The deal also highlights clear product synergies between the two companies. Azimi adds: “Portal is usually deployed as a base MAM solution for end customers managing all their content and their media lifecycle. One of the key aspects of Portal is its ability to integrate with complementary products, and the Codemill products that are on the market today are a great fit for what could be plugged into Portal to provide a broader value proposition.

“Also, as Cantemo is a smaller company than Codemill we’ve been in the position where the demand for new features and new capabilities has been bigger than what we’ve been able to address. I think this acquisition will mean we’re much more able to scale up the R&D team and produce more and be able to deliver more to the end customers.”

Anderson says: “The exciting thing is this bringing together the tighter integrations and that will give customers more choice, it’ll give partners more integrations and it’s quite exciting to combine these technologies together. They are quite complementary and we have next to no overlap so really it’s just going to be enhancing the overall suite of applications that we have.”

“We have next to no overlap so really it’s just going to be enhancing the overall suite of applications that we have” Neil Anderson,  Codemill

Azimi adds: “In addition, we’re both Swedish companies and we both have the majority of our customers abroad. Within the company we have a very Swedish philosophy so it was important for us to merge with a company that had a similar mindset and who we can trust will be a great fit not just for our product and our customers, but for the team as well. We believe Codemill is an excellent fit for that.”

Tighter integrations
In terms of current products and the workforce, it’s very much business as usual, as Lönneborg explains: “Short-term we’ll keep it much as is in terms of existing products and personnel. We’ll make use of Codemill’s resources for Cantemo and Cantemo’s customers and we’ll work on tighter integrations between the products. Longer term we’ll see about merging them more.”

In the meantime, Azimi and the board of Cantemo will transition to sister company iconik, a platform that enables organisations to securely manage and share their media no matter where it’s stored. Martin Fellbrink will remain as Cantemo CTO and the development team will continue as normal. No redundancies will be made and both companies will continue to trade under their existing names.

Lönneborg concludes: “For us, this is really exciting because we see synergies with Cantemo Portal and where we could add value with our Accurate.Video products to Cantemo customers. By combining Cantemo Portal more with our Accurate.Video products we hope to give more complete solutions to customers. We’d also like to become more of a strategic partner by having more interactions with companies in the industry.”

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