NEWSLETTER PANDUIT ACQUIRES ATLONA Panduit Corp. (Tinley Park IL), known for electrical and network infrastructure solutions, has announced that it has acquired Atlona (San Jose CA), which designs and develops products for a range of commercial AV and IT markets worldwide. Atlona’s product categories include networked AV, signal distribution, wireless collaboration and AV system automation. As part of the acquisition, the Atlona team will join Panduit’s Enterprise business group. Atlona will continue to serve its customers from its global headquarters for all sales, customer support and training-related inquiries. According to Dennis Renaud, President and CEO of Panduit, “[Atlona’s] industry-leading solutions complement Panduit’s extensive physical infrastructure portfolio, which will allow us to offer customers a quality end-to-end solution as they move to increasingly complex network infrastructure systems.” Ilya Khayn, Atlona’s CEO, added, “There are strong synergies between our companies.... This partnership will ultimately provide our market channels with a single-source solution and expand our footprint globally.”
MARCO EXPANDS IN WISCONSIN, PURCHASES ESG Marco (St. Cloud MN), a technology services provider, has announced that it has purchased Enterprise Systems Group (ESG, Little Chute WI), a business IT services company. ESG has been providing technology solutions since 1992. The company has 75 employees, and it provides phone systems, access control and video surveillance, audio/video and data-networking solutions. ESG’s employees have joined the Marco team, and they’ll be serving customers from the company’s offices in Little Chute, Brookfield WI and Madison WI. Marco currently has six other offices in Wisconsin. The company will be operating as ESG for a short time. “We have been serving the state of Wisconsin for the past seven years,” Jeff Gau, Marco’s CEO, said. “This acquisition accelerates our growth in the IT services business throughout the state of Wisconsin and Upper Peninsula. We welcome ESG’s clients to Marco and look forward to being their technology provider.” This is Marco’s seventh acquisition in the past year. Last November, the company expanded to the east coast with its purchase of Phillips Office Solutions (Middletown PA), a copier/printer and document management solutions company. Marco now has 1,430 employees and serves more than 35,000 customers from its 64 locations nationally.
INLINE AUDIO DEBUTS AT NAMM SHOW At the NAMM Show, Inline Audio (Hong Kong), which describes itself as an “audio incubator,” launched. The company’s Founders are Al Walker, who also serves as CEO, and Costa Lakoumentas, who also serves as COO. The company pairs product ideas and audio design talent with a community of investors. Inline Audio offers inventors a safe, secure outlet for their development ideas, along with the cross-functional technical, engineering, marketing and sales support they need to get started. The company invests its own resources in promising ideas, with the goal of bringing the products to market. The first phase of incubation is to get the product to a functional prototype. The second is to present the prototype as a commercially viable product. Having documentation, bills of materials, production schedules and sales forecasts, brands stand a better chance of securing the capital needed. Inline Audio presents funding opportunities in multiple rounds to appeal to a wide range of investors—from those interested in initial seed funding to those looking for fully developed brand and product propositions. Inline will leverage the supply chain that the Guangdong Pearl River Greater Bay Area offers.
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Sound & Communications 11
