Malvern-based Scala, pioneer in digital signage, sold to Ohio competitor

Tom Paine

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Scala, Inc., the Malvern-based company that's been a global leader in the digital signage industry, has agreed to sell a controlling majority interest in itself to Dayton, Ohio-based Stratacache, it was announced Monday. Terms were not disclosed.

The website Sixteen-Nine.com, which covers the digital signage industry, noted that "the deal is not all that big a surprise, as Scala has been known to be on the market, for the right price, for the last few years. The executive house-cleaning that saw CEO Tom Nix and several other execs leave in June was a bit of a signal that things weren’t going all that swimmingly for the company."








While Scala had long been the gold standard in the industry, it had suffered in recent years from its attachment to a proprietary architecture in a market that was increasingly moving to open source, among other factors. But Scala's value to Stratacache is in its unmatched global partner network.

"Combining the largest U.S. digital signage company with the largest international digital signage company will provide significant operational synergies and allow both firms to deliver enhanced solutions and services to customers across the globe. Stratacache’s strong balance sheet and large-scale operations will enhance Scala’s competitive edge – and Scala’s global channels and significant reseller and partner network will fuel Stratacache’s growing business outside of the United States," Stratacache’s release announcing the deal stated.

Scala was founded in 1987 by a Norwegian entrepreneur, and as I understand it landed in West Chester to be close to Commodore International, as its initial platform was based on the Amiga. However, Commodore soon thereafter folded and Scala eventually switched to Windows, but remained in West Chester until moving to Malvern in recent years.

But Scala continued under largely European ownership and board oversight.

While Scala was never a huge local employer (59 according to the latest count on LinkedIn), its force multiplier was its large international partner network. And I'm sure that if that network wasn't getting the product or support it needed, those issues found their way back to the board.

Stratacache has 270 employees, presumably not including those joining from Scala, according to the Dayton Business Journal.

Links 8/16: Jet.com's 'mafia' to live on in Jersey; Anonymous fund manager oversees $800 Billion for Vanguard

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LiquidHub to Enhance Design-Thinking Capabilities with Electronic Ink Acquisition to Strengthen Human-Centered Research Expertise

LiquidHub to Enhance Design-Thinking Capabilities with Electronic Ink
Acquisition to Strengthen Human-Centered Research Expertise

PHILADELPHIA – August 12, 2016 – LiquidHub, a customer engagement company, today announced the acquisition of Electronic Ink, a human-centered design consultancy, with a client roster that includes such brand names as Penske, Morgan Stanley, Johnson & Johnson, and Ford Motor Company. With the addition of Electronic Ink, LiquidHub brings expanded design-thinking resources under one roof to deliver compelling customer experiences faster and at greater scale.

“Companies who enjoy the most successful business transformation solutions are those who go beyond examining customer preferences or patterns of behavior; they dig deeper to understand customers as people and study how they interact with technology,” said Jonathan Brassington, CEO of LiquidHub. “The addition of Electronic Ink’s research expertise will bring insights of human context to all aspects of our clients’ businesses. Having worked on assignments over the years with their talented team, I am thrilled to welcome them to our organization.”

Electronic Ink will strengthen LiquidHub’s digital marketing and creative capabilities, adding focused research on the human effect of technology on people. Their design skills allow them to create impactful visualizations that enable clients to easily understand the output of that research for greater ideation and solution development. Electronic Ink’s core competencies complement and integrate nicely with LiquidHub’s structured innovation solutions and customer engagement capabilities, providing even deeper insight into the human experience.

“Design that is rooted in human insight is foundational for success in today’s digitally-driven economy,” said Harold Hambrose, founder and CEO of Electronic Ink. “That foundation must be grounded in understanding the human effect on technology across the consumer ecosystem, including operations. That’s what we uniquely bring to LiquidHub and that’s what is so exciting – our ability to build on the already outstanding talents of a leader in the customer engagement space. The opportunities for our employees and clients on both sides are tremendous. I am thrilled to be joining the team.”

“I am proud of the groundbreaking work Electronic Ink has created and the reputation we have established over the course of our more than 25 years in the design industry,” said Joe Weiss, chairman of Electronic Ink. “I know this next chapter will be equally successful as we join forces with another industry leader dedicated to raising the bar on innovation and delivering human-centered solutions that help businesses become brand leaders.”

About Electronic Ink
Electronic Ink is a research and design consultancy dedicated to improving the effectiveness of human capital and bringing insight to the way people interact with technology, environments and one another. We improve the design and usability of business processes, the software that supports these processes, and customer and employee experiences for Fortune 500 clients around the world. Connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About LiquidHub
LiquidHub is a customer engagement company that partners with businesses to improve customer experience and drive growth. Headquartered in Philadelphia, with operations in North America, Asia, and Europe, we serve companies globally, helping them solve their most complex challenges through design expertise and technology innovation. Our customer successes are the result of a culture rooted in thought leadership and delivery excellence. For more information about LiquidHub, please visit www.liquidhub.com or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Links 8/15: LiquidHub buys Electronic Ink; Honeywell nearing deal for supply chain software vendor JDA, says WSJ

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TPG has agreed to buy cable television providers RCN and Grande Communications for about $2.25 billion

Tom Paine

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Private-equity firm TPG has agreed to buy cable television providers RCN and Grande Communications for about $2.25 billion including debt, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night. The seller is Abry Partners.

RCN, a so-called 'overbuilder' that provides competitive cable services in some areas, serves parts of Delaware County and the Lehigh Valley. It began existence by acquiring a controlling interest in C-TEC of Wilkes-Barre, and Twin County Cable in Lehigh Valley in the 1990s.

An interesting aspect of the deal, which may be announced on Monday, is that Google Capital, Alphabet Inc.’s growth-equity investment fund, is taking a minority stake in the companies. Perhaps its trying to learn more about the cable business, as reports have indicated that Alphabet is reassessing expansion plans for Google Fiber.








The two separate deals were announced Monday.

RCN, based in Princeton, had more ambitious plans prior to the 2000-era tech bust, which resulted in a period of bankruptcy.

Grande Communications provides similar services in portions of Texas. RCN and Grande will be integrated after their acquisitions, though its unclear what that means.

According to SNL Kagan data, RCN has about 289,000 video subs, and Grande 88,000. The combined companies say they service over 640,000 residential and business customers. RCN would not provide subscription numbers for its Pennsylvania locations.

Princeton-based Patriot Media Consulting, which has managed the two companies for Abry, is part of the new ownership group and will continue in its management role.

Dentsu Aegis Network to acquire majority stake in Columbia, MD-based marketing agency Merkle, valued ~ $1.5 billion

Tom Paine

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In the late 1980s and early 90s, database marketing was one of the hot buzzwords, and a great deal of effort went in to trying to figure what it actually consisted of. Was it a product or a service? What did it look like? There wasn't really a model to build from.

The truth was that database marketing was a difficult, often rather messy business that typically involved crunching together data from different sources, when the data was not as good and the data crunching tools weren't nearly as good as today. And disk space was at an incredible premium, governing almost every operational consideration.

David Williams

In 1988, a small Maryland data processing shop named Merkle was acquired by a 25 year old entrepreneur named David Williams.

Williams built Merkle both organically and later through strategic acquisitions, adding proprietary tools such as a cross-device identity management system, a CRM-matching database for publishers, and a database known as the M1 audience platform.






All this led Japanese holding company Dentsu Aegis Network to acquire a majority stake in Columbia-based Merkle this past week in a transaction that values Merkle at about $1.5 billion. Dentsu Aegis replaced Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) as Merkle's primary owner, although obviously its interest is more strategic than simply financial. Merkle had $436 million in revenue in 2015, up 14% over 2014.

Merkle was originally a direct marketing play, and though that still applies today it is known more for its ability to feed hungry CRM systems, both on the consumer and BtoB sides. The term it uses to describe what it does is 'performance marketing,' as well as a CRM Agency.

Merkle has more than 3,400 employees worldwide and over 65 employees in its Philadelphia (King of Prussia) office. The Philadelphia office is led by Dean McCarney, a Senior Director within Merkle’s Vertical Markets Group.

Naturally, in Philly Merkle has a bit of a Pharma bent, and in fact is a sponsor of Digital Pharma East 2016 to be held in Philadelphia in October.

Dentsu has 8100 employees in the Americas, headquartered out of New York.

Williams, by the way, began his career at Butcher & Singer, a Philadelphia-based investment bank, and holds a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Shippensburg University.

Sunday highlights: More on the reported Oracle MICROS breach; Hill International postpones annual meeting

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Saturday Highlights: Where is the EMV card 10 months later?; Meet the low-profile VC firm that invested in tech’s last two billion-dollar sales

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Accolade Raises More than $70 Million, Led by Andreessen Horowitz, to Transform Healthcare

Accolade Raises More than $70 Million, Led by Andreessen Horowitz, to Transform Healthcare

SEATTLE – August 11, 2016 – Accolade, Inc., an on-demand healthcare concierge for employers, health plans and health systems, announced it has raised more than $70 million in new Series E funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Madrona Venture Group and others. Accolade will use the capital to expand its technology platform, R&D, and sales and marketing initiatives as it reinvents the healthcare experience for millions of Americans.

“Accolade is simply the best tool we’ve seen to help companies simultaneously improve both the quality and the cost of healthcare,” said Jeff Jordan, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s delivering magical results—the service makes employees healthier and happier with their benefits, while at the same time driving big savings to employers and insurance companies. We are proud to be supporting Rajeev Singh and his team to build a big, important company.”

Accolade improves the healthcare experience for consumers by applying a proprietary engagement and influence model that guides them through the healthcare system in a deeply personalized manner. This unique model blends personalized service with clinical support and consumer engagement technologies to uncover inefficient healthcare utilization and its substantial impact on healthcare costs and outcomes. Accolade’s multi-modal approach is built from the ground up to combine human touch, science and technology, which leads to market-leading consumer engagement levels, extraordinarily high consumer satisfaction scores and cost savings ranging from 5-15 percent.

“We’re leading a movement to reinvent healthcare to better serve and support employers, health plans, health systems and the hundreds of millions of people in their networks,” said Rajeev Singh, Accolade CEO. “To bend the cost curve in healthcare while significantly raising consumer satisfaction, you need a deeply personalized model for the consumer that blends human touch with clinical expertise and state of the art engagement technology. Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona, two of the top investors in the world, have studied the space and come to the same conclusions we have about the market need and the advantages of our approach."

The Accolade model is powered by a data science strategy that combines deep datasets culled from hundreds of sources, along with personal insights gleaned from unique relationships between Accolade Health Assistants® and the individuals and families they support. Accolade’s relationship-based approach, mobile offerings, analytics tools and clinical models present a data-centric view of the whole person, not just one condition, to create a level of personalization and engagement that is not seen elsewhere in healthcare.

“Technology, through big data, analytics and machine learning, is changing healthcare -- how it is delivered and how patients find the right providers and treatment. It’s a complicated problem, but with a team led by Rajeev Singh, the company has the ability to blend cutting edge technology with a human touch to improve how tens of thousands of employees and health plan subscribers receive their healthcare,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director, Madrona Venture Group.

Including the current financing, Accolade has raised more than $90 million in its Series E round, which began in July 2015 with $22.5 million invested by a subsidiary of Independence Health Group and McKesson Ventures. As part of this investment, Accolade will add Jeff Jordan, Andreessen Horowitz general partner and former CEO of OpenTable, to its board of directors.

About Accolade
Accolade is an on-demand healthcare concierge for employers, health plans and health systems. Accolade’s team of compassionate, trusted professionals is supported by breakthrough science and technologies to guide people through the healthcare system in a deeply personalized manner. Accolade customers experience industry-leading engagement levels, satisfaction scores unseen in health care, better health outcomes, and cost savings of 5-15 percent. Accolade has been recognized as one of the nation’s 25 most promising companies by Forbes magazine, the fastest-growing private healthcare company by Inc. 500 and a Top Workplace for five consecutive years.
We're Boldly Reinventing Healthcare
We're Boldly Reinventing Healthcare
As an on-demand healthcare concierge that's focused on employers, health plans and health systems, we're taking on the enormous task of reinventing healthcare.
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Link 8/12: SAP ditches annual reviews; has Wal-Mart "just flushed $3 billion down the drain"?

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Links 8/11: Accolade adds $70M to Series E round to expand healthcare navigation

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