Boxborough Firm A Natural Fit For Cisco
You could call him a local boy done good.
Conrad Clemson, co-founder of BNI Video, a venture-backed startup firm, lives in Northborough and has two kids who go to school in Worcester.
And he just sold his Boxborough-based video software company to Cisco Systems for $99 million.
BNI Video makes software for video service providers (VSPs) to manage their content, particularly as more and more customers access it from a variety of different platforms. Customers now - and increasingly so in the future - don't want to just watch content on their television sets anymore, but also on their smartphones, tablets and other devices.
Software from BNI Video helps VSPs manage that transition.
Match Made In Tech Heaven
Clemson is no stranger to the tech market.
He's a former senior director of engineering at Motorola, which he joined after the company purchased his former employer, Broadbus Technologies.
He left after two years at Motorola and joined Charles River Ventures, a Waltham-based technology venture capital firm. While there, he saw a demand for better back-office software to help cable companies and other VSPs better serve the viewing habits of next-generation viewers.
"It was time for some disruptive software for the industry," he said.
So he founded BNI and within a year the company received $16 million in funding from a handful of investors, including Cisco, Charles River Ventures and Comcast.
The BNI Video software specifically allows VSPs to better manage their content. For example, it will handle billing, make sure customers that are requesting certain videos are entitled to that content, and ensure the video is in the correct format for the device it's being delivered to. Many VSPs use Cisco's network to actually deliver that content to the device, while using the BNI Video software to manage the requests for the video. The system also has a powerful set of analytics, allowing VSPs to track trends in what viewers are watching.
Cisco, the California-based networking company that has major operations in Boxborough, saw the value in the BNI software from the beginning as one of the original investors, said Kip Compton, vice president of strategy and service development for Cisco, who works out of a California office.
Cisco and BNI worked closely together throughout BNI's development, and recently it came to an "inflection point" where BNI's services needed to be scaled up beyond a point that the company could handle on its own, Compton said. So Cisco bought the company for $99 million.
Compton and Clemson have worked together for the past few years, another factor that led to completing the deal.
BNI expects to fit in with Cisco's strategic initiative around Videoscape, a platform to help VSPs through this transitional period, Compton said.
"Customers want to be able to access content from all different devices wherever they are, and there's an architecture that's needed to support that," Compton said.
As for BNI, the actual move to become part of Cisco should be relatively easy: The two businesses work in Boxborough offices about 200 yards from one another.
All 72 BNI employees, including its research and development engineers in Beijing, are set to transition to Cisco.
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