Southpaw Technologies Update TACTIC Open Source DAM

One of our featured DAM Vendors, Southpaw Technologies have announced an updated edition of their open source DAM solution, TACTIC.  The new features include:

• Support for noSQL database: MongoDB
• Perforce integration: Perforce is is a software configuration management system
• Drag and drop upload from file system
• Automated messaging based on triggers from the TACTIC event model
• Improved performance

This is the quote from Southpaw CEO, Gary Mundell:

“These latest upgrades to TACTIC are all part of a larger initiative to ensure that TACTIC can be implemented more easily across very different data and file system environments, and to ensure that we continue to provide the tools that speed digital workflows for all work environments.” [Read More]

Many of these updates seem to be more technical and will have appeal to those who want to use it as the basis for a wide-ranging large scale DAM solution designed to cope with large volumes of assets.  Based on this and previous TACTIC releases, Southpaw’s focus is on the production DAM market such as film studios or FMCG (including the creative agencies that service them).

Many of the open source vendors appear to be carving a niche in markets where extensive customisation is required.  This makes sense since many users will want easy access to the source code to modify the products to suit a particular need, but some of those same users are even other technology vendors now.  I know of at least one Open Source DAM vendor who are currently supplying component technologies for another DAM vendor.  Commercial non-disclosure agreements do not allow me to say who it is, but I expect to see more of this cross-vendor activity where the open source firms act as R&D departments or specialist developers for fee-paying commercial DAM vendor customers who would prefer to avoid the development cost of building certain features entirely in-house.

This would appear to support Ralph Windsor’s DAM Value Chain theory that ultimately, vendors will have no choice but to specialise and collaborate on a selective basis to ensure they can still answer all of their client’s needs.

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