The time is right

IT Reseller spoke with Peter DiMaria, president and founder of Accu-Time Systems, about Amanos recently announced agreement to acquire the company, and what this means for product development, the sharing of resources, geographical expansion and ongoing relationships with the channel.

Amano USA Holdings, Inc. (AUH) the time recording, access control and automated parking systems provider recently announced an agreement to acquire Accu-Time Systems, Inc. (ATS) based in Ellington CT.  ATS is a developer, manufacturer, and supplier of biometric and non-biometric terminals to the time & attendance and workforce management industry in the US, and more recently in Europe and other export markets. ATS will continue to be led by president and founder Peter DiMaria and his management team. DiMaria provided his take on the news. If you look at Amano and ATS one of the attractions in terms of our individual product lines is that there is very little overlap, he pointed out. Amano does a lot of excellent work in the electrical/mechanical area. However, at least in the US and Europe, the company doesnt offer products like we provide in our global series. So, it really made a lot of good sense to tap into their resources, and for them to tap into ours. Its a two-plus-two-equals-five type of equation.

Roadmap

In terms of product development, DiMaria explained that ATS has a product roadmap in place that Amano has urged the company to continue with. He added that, similarly, Amano has a development programme that ATS likes. In fact, we are now starting to share some of our individual technology strengths between us in order to develop products that offer even greater speed and cost-effectiveness, he said. For example, we have an access control product line that we developed through out UK subsidiary a number of years ago, and Amano also has experience of product development in this area. In fact, you can hardly go into a parking lot in the US without seeing an Amano parking gate control system. So this is the type of experience that we are looking to leverage in order to refresh our own access control product offerings.

And how does DiMaria think the acquisition will impact on ATSs channel partnerships in Europe and the UK? Before the acquisition announcement, we contacted every individual business partner both to let them know the news and to gauge their initial reactions, he said. The two main questions they had were what does it mean for their relationship with ATS, and what does it mean for them in terms of added business advantage. We explained that the relationships remain much the same, but with a number of added advantages; including the ability to take advantage of some of Amanos own technical resources. The channel partners that I personally have spoken to dont see it as a competitive situation because ATS and Amano have been in two quite different markets. They also see the announcement as a win-win situation in terms of how both ATS and Amano can cooperate in order to provide the best possible solutions to the end user via the channel. So, everyone that Ive spoken to, including our strategic alliance managers, see the move as very positive. Additionally, working together means there are potentially more leads for our partners.

Market scope

In terms of geographical scope, DiMaria pointed out that early on during discussions between ATS and Amano, he visited Amanos website, looked at its global map and the places the company serves and compared that with the ATS global map. I quickly realised that there was virtually no overlap, so we are now talking about cooperating in areas where we historically havent had a presence; such as parts of Latin America, the Pacific Rim and Asia, he said. Global expansion has been one of my focuses over the past four or five years, and this relationship is a nice way to cross that chasm. 

DiMaria further reflected on the ATS/Amano relationship and its benefits. We admire the Japanese focus on quality; Amano is truly passionate about it. This is going to provide our partners with the assurance of constant developments; such as process improvements and a more quality products. We believe this is really positive news for the channel.