Southpaw Upgrade Tactic To Version 4.0

One of our featured DAM vendors, Southpaw, who are better known by the name of their flagship system, TACTIC, have released version 4.0 of their open source DAM solution.  The new features include:

• Updated Data Connection Technology
• New Plugin Architecture
• HTML5 Themes

This quote from CEO, Gary Mundell, contains a rare item of refreshingly straightforward real-world facts about DAM which suggest he might have some proper experience at the sharp end of a typical DAM implementation:

“If there is one thing we’ve learned, it’s that every company has its own internal digital workflows to handle various tasks, none of which can be supported by a one-size-fits-all solution,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “Yet, we’ve also learned that each company has the same problem – they all have tons of digital files, and they need more efficient ways of moving those files through their system without having to replace their massive infrastructures. With TACTIC 4.0, we’ve given companies completely customizable software for solving their growing data challenges” [Read More]

Despite my co-contributors less than favourable write-up of ADAM’s press and marketing earlier today, there is a degree of similarity between these two offerings which illustrates some further evidence of ongoing trends in DAM.  Southpaw are clearly aimed more at large-scale production facilities, Film/TV looks like a big market for them in particular.  By contrast, ADAM are pursuing a more marketing oriented segment of DAM where the end users need to manage collateral across multiple channels and through the whole production supply chain.  The common factor is the ability to re-model their technologies and re-configure the solution in a highly flexible manner to suit a given specific purpose, but without the need to resort to custom building a bespoke app from scratch as you might have needed to do in the past.  This article from vendor, NetXposure, discusses how some DAM products are becoming platforms (a theme we have discussed many times in the past on DAM News)

“DAM is becoming a platform.  Much in the same way that databases moved from obscurity to core business components, we’re seeing a similar shift with Digital Asset Management. In early software development, applications were developed using a myriad of custom data models, often in very ad hoc ways. Each new application had its own data framework. And why not? What else would you use?” [Read More]

This is pointing towards some vendors beginning to offer DAM as a kind of media delivery infrastructure service broker.  Many still seem unwilling to go the full distance and interoperate with similar products that might be regarded as the competition, but it’s hardly surprising that this currently a difficult internal sell (to say the least).  It might well take an external interest from outside the confines of the DAM market to realise the opportunity to start linking these disparate sources together in a more industrialised fashion, but demand and momentum suggest it will eventually happen.

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