In late February, I joined a few of my industry analyst colleagues at an X-Rite/Pantone briefing at Pantone’s New Jersey Offices. X-Rite President & CEO Tom Vacchiano was in the building and took time out of a busy schedule to provide us with an update on the company’s strategy.

WTT: Tom, it has been some time since your last two major acquisitions, GretagMacBeth and Pantone. Can you give us some background on why those acquisitions were important to the company’s overall strategy?

TJV: Sure. First a little background would probably be helpful. In 2006, GretagMacBeth merged with X-Rite, and there was a definite plan behind that merger. We felt we could substantially reduce the duplication and overlap the two companies had in the marketplace and use the intellectual know-how of the two companies to transform the industry. To be perfectly frank with you, the concept of PantoneLIVE, which we announced on March 1 of this year, is part of what we dreamt about in 2005 and 2006 when we brought the companies together. The color industry and the instrument companies all had a lot of the same offerings for the same customers, and the customers were telling us at that time about all the cool new things they would like to do. We thought it would be great to support these customer requirements, and began working out how we could do them, and how best to allocate R&D and marketing resources. We were constrained by the competition and replacing old products, and we didn’t have enough of our imagination targeted toward taking those next big steps.