Nuxeo 5.6 Released

One of our featured open source Digital Asset Management vendors, Nuxeo have released version 5.6 of their platform.  The new features include:

• Adaptive workflow
• Visual workflow design
• Definable action buttons
• Multi-tenant features
• Content difference highlighting
• Document templating (creation of custom documents)

This topic seems to be a common theme among DAM and ECM vendors recently with many of them seeking to provide their end users with features to customise content.  Earlier today we posted the WebDAM release where they introduced various features to allow end users to modify images and call up presentations.

I do think that both these vendors are good examples of how the DAM industry will sub-divide itself between the front and back-end offerings.  The former is SaaS only and you can’t download it, the latter is open source (LGPL) and as Apricot it is embedded as the “Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository”.  You can get SaaS offerings from Nuxeo, but the cost of getting them to do the legwork and support for you might be regarded as a little steep by those on a tight budget (certainly if compared with other DAM products).

It’s unlikely that Nuxeo are realistically going to be able to keep turning out front-end modules to help you tweak and change everything from images to video and PowerPoint, they probably want their ‘user community’ to do that part for them so they don’t need to allocate capital for it themselves.  This is why they don’t have a problem ‘giving away’ the core product – it’s a form of marketing that lowers their development costs and increases their market penetration.

I know nothing about how WebDAM organise their Cloud hosting provision, but similar vendors I have experience of generally use one of the major Cloud hosting providers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure, RackSpace etc.  More than a few have needed to nail their colours to the mast of one in order to provide them with some kind of integrated automation and to simplify their management.  Several I’m aware of even use open source ECM platforms or are planning to transition to them to avoid the hassle of maintaining their own.  To differentiate themselves, these providers want to pack out their product with numerous features to increase the perceived value to end users.  Certainly, as discussed earlier this week, Amazon’s support for CORS will help them to do that (and also increase the number of competitors they have to contend with too).

It’s intriguing, but also concerning, how the DAM software market seems to be playing out like the stock photo market where the bigger guys take over and leave their smaller peers to fight with each other over the scraps that remain.  If I were an investor in a DAM vendor, unless it can be proven a margin can be made within an ever decreasing ‘profit window’, I might be back-pedalling a little over any requests from the management to commit large sums to implementation and development expenditure – there is at least an evens chance you might not get your money back.