North Plains Acquire VYRE

North Plains, have announced today that they have acquired UK based vendor, VYRE:

“This acquisition continues our rigorous focus on enabling North Plains customers to better connect and engage with their target audience by unleashing the power of their visual media,” said James Christopher, President and CEO, North Plains. “We’re fortunate enough to work with some of the most innovative brands in the world, helping them to create brand value and drive business growth.” [Read More]

VYRE’s products have covered a number of different areas using their ‘Unify’ media server platform, but their major focus is on marketing oriented DAM implementations such as MRM and Brand Asset Management.  Their clients tend to be marketing departments or some of the larger agencies (Lowe being a notable example).  The VYRE transaction gives North Plains a professional services base in London as well as North America.  In addition to VYRE, North Plains took control of Xinet earlier this year and have also recently received further funding from Accel KKR last year.  This is one of many other transactions going on in DAM right now, including WoodWing’s purchase of Elvis.

This seems to point towards the consolidation trend we anticipated some time ago where the major players merge together to see off threats from smaller competitors and also use it as a customer acquisition tactic.  There is overlap between VYRE’s products and those of North Plains.  The former has undergone some significant development work in recent years also.  As is often the case with technology acquisitions, it might be more North Plains employees who might need to be fearful for their future employment as the acquiring company’s management use their new found clout to get things done in the target company and ‘mow the lawn’ in their own operation.  I can’t see how they will be able to justify three independent platforms and development teams long-term.

In September we discussed how some of the larger vendors were keen on buying or integrating with partner products to create their own monolithic suites that attempted to cover all the different bases so they could maintain their ‘one stop shop’ positioning and grab as much of their client’s business as possible.  As I discussed in that post, I do have to wonder how long these kind of behemoth products have really got though?  Presumably the cost of the resulting platform is going to need to be pretty steep to make all this worthwhile which will limit the range of potential customers to the very high end deals.  I can see the ground being incrementally taken from beneath their feet though by emerging cloud platforms and smaller more discrete systems that are more modular and easier to couple and de-couple.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out – but probably more so as an observer rather than a vendor participant.

Share this Article: