SeaChange International is selling its broadcast server and storage business to an investment group; the standalone operation will be renamed XOR Media.
A divestiture of those operations was all but a foregone conclusion after SeaChange minority investors, who had been insisting on selling the server and storage business for years, won seats on SeaChange’s board of directors. That was shortly followed by the retirement of company founder Bill Styslinger and the appointment of a CEO long allied with the new board members, Raghu Rau.
The only question was whether SeaChange would be able to find somebody to buy the operation. Several vendors in the industry confirmed off the record that they had evaluated the purchase but decided against buying it.
SeaChange ultimately identified several investment firms as buyers. The group includes VantagePoint Capital Partners. The purchase price was not disclosed.
Rau said, “This divestiture is an important part of our strategy to transform SeaChange into a pure-play software company, significantly reduce our overall cost structure and strengthen our ability to compete in delivering next-generation multi-screen video solutions while generating cash.”
Moving forward, SeaChange will be able to offer its customers their choice of servers, including those from XOR Media.
Zheng Gao, president of SeaChange Storage and Servers, will stay on with XOR Media as its CEO. He said the new company will have available the resources to “bring to market storage platforms representing the next-generation NAS-SAN convergence.”
VantagePoint Capital Partners’ Terry Chen, whose portfolio companies have participated in this investment, added: “The proliferation of digital media presents a huge upside potential for XOR Media. We are excited about the synergy the new company brings with our other holdings, including the Blue Whale File System utilized by XOR Media’s high-performance Universal MediaLibrary storage. We see this as a key investment with the tremendous potential of XOR Media’s products, technologies and people resources, operating independently and in partnership with SeaChange.”