Syncsort completes acquisition of the Pitney Bowes software and data business to maximize the value of their data

Syncsort closed on Monday the acquisition of the Pitney Bowes software and data business, creating a powerhouse data management software company with more than 11,000 enterprise customers, $600 million in revenue and 2,000 employees worldwide. The company brings together scale, agility and breadth of portfolio to empower enterprises to gain a competitive advantage from their data.

The transaction is backed by affiliates of Centerbridge Partners and Clearlake Capital. Debt commitments were provided by Jefferies Finance, Credit Suisse, Golub Capital, Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, SunTrust Bank and UBS AG Antares Capital LP. 

Credit Suisse and Jefferies LLC served as financial advisors to Syncsort. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP served as legal counsel to Syncsort.

The combined portfolio brings together capabilities in location Intelligence, data enrichment, customer information management and engagement solutions with powerful data integration and optimization software. These end-to-end capabilities will empower enterprises to overcome ever-increasing challenges around the integrity of their data so that their IT and business operations can integrate, enrich and improve data assets to maximize insights.

“The ability to derive actionable human intelligence from data requires ensuring that it has been integrated from all relevant sources, is representative and high quality, and has been enriched with additional context and information,” said Paige Bartley of 451 Research. “Syncsort, as a longtime player in the data management space, is further addressing these issues with the acquisition of Pitney Bowes' Software Solutions assets – technology that complements existing data-quality capabilities to provide additional context and enrichment for data, as well as leverage customer data and preferences to drive business outcomes.”

Cloudinary releases AI-enabled video management platform to deliver engaging, dynamic video at scale in minutes

Cloudinary announced Tuesday key enhancements to its video management solution, including new AI capabilities to accelerate the entire video workflow process and help companies improve customer experience and engagement. 

Cloudinary’s modern approach to video management eliminates traditional limitations and pain-points, enabling brands to enhance and deliver dynamic video experiences quickly and cost effectively at scale, no matter where their content is viewed.

Nearly 90 percent of consumers rely on videos to help make their purchasing decisions, and landing pages with video see higher conversion rates of 80 percent or more. Video has long been a favorite of marketers for its storytelling power and effectiveness, but traditional video platforms weren’t built to support the volume and scale of today’s digital experience needs.

Cloudinary’s new video capabilities allow users to automate for format and quality at scale. It also eliminates the time-consuming work traditionally required to select the right codecs, formats and quality. This allows any user – marketer or developer – to deliver each video optimally for any browser, device and location. 

Deep learning capabilities dynamically re-frame landscape mode videos to any aspect ratio requested on-the-fly with intelligent content-aware cropping to automatically focus on the most engaging story in the frame.

By utilizing a single media platform, Cloudinary users can seamlessly create engaging product pages that include both video and images without the hassle that come from working across two or more disparate systems. 

The platform also simplifies search, improves team workflows and optimizes storage. AI-based auto-tagging, structured metadata, and advanced search capabilities let users more easily manage, store and search video libraries. Streamlined media workflows help ensure that all asset stakeholders are in sync. 

By creating a single source of truth, Cloudinary helps users manage a single video asset, no matter how many derived assets they create, which greatly streamlines storage management and discoverability.

Cloudinary further simplifies the process of moderating, optimizing and delivering many thousands of user-generated videos at scale by automating functions like cropping, resizing, branding, overlays, quality and more.