Omnicom Engineering bought by Balfour Beatty

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Balfour Beatty announced today that its UK rail business has acquired Omnicom Engineering for an undisclosed sum.

Omnicom Engineering, founded in 1995, provides the rail industry with hardware and software for conducting infrastructure surveys and for monitoring assets from on board a moving train. Products include OmniVision, which uses high-speed video to replace manual track inspection with automated machine vision from a high-speed vehicle.

The company has customers in the UK and Australia, which it supplies from bases in Derby and York.

Balfour Beatty already offers high-speed laser and inertial measurement systems for monitoring track geometry and infrastructure gauge. These products, such as LaserFlex and ClearRoute, are developed at offices in Matlock, Derbyshire.

Commenting on the acquisition, Balfour Beatty rail business managing director Mark Bullock said: “Omnicom Engineering is a true innovator which is benefiting from over twenty years of investment in research and development.

“We will leverage this expertise, alongside the high-speed laser measurement technology that already exists within Balfour Beatty, to provide unrivalled technical solutions to clients in the growing high-speed and unattended data collection market in which we see opportunities for increasing our business.

“Together, Omnicom and Balfour Beatty’s range of asset management solutions will offer an unrivalled richness of information to support the maintenance of roads and railways across the world.”

Report by Nigel Wordsworth

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