ADAM Subsidiary Van Gennep Update Publishing Now

One of our featured DAM vendors, ADAM have announced that their subsidiary acquisition, Van Gennep have updated their Publishing NOW! suite.

As is the convention with these things, the more inflated the vendor’s opinion of themselves, the less useful the press releases is – if you want to find out what is actually new or different about the product or vendor in question.  This one is packed out with needless verbiage and flannel, so one would expect ADAM and  Van Gennep to be pretty full of themselves right now.  Whether that is with good reason or not, only their customers (or maybe bankers) will know for sure.

After about 4-5 paragraphs of stuff about ‘bringing major disruption to the editorial management software industry’ (is that supposed to be good?)  the useful info is:

• New tools to separate planning streams for digital publishing.
• Video management integration built in.
• Platform API, that includes semantic indexing, search and retrieval

Yes, just three bullet points.  I’d need to say here that this update doesn’t sound that great to me.  It may be that there is a lot more functionality that they have chosen to skip over, or possibly the WoodWing acquisition of Elvis has spooked ADAM into getting some press out, even if it’s slim on real news.  Either way, DAM industry observers like myself are left to speculate on what they have left out, rather than what they put in.

Another plausible reason for the PR wallpaper is that marketing managers of software companies want to play down the geek-speak to ensure they retain the interest of C-level execs in larger companies.  That is understandable, but from my experience with board level personnel, many of them got there to begin with by having a laser-like ability to spot and shoot down boiler plate tech marketing clichés and then to demand to know in plainer terms what they will actually get for their money.  All software end users should do the same, irrespective of what pay-scale they are on.

For those with an interest, here is the obligatory quote from ADAM’s boss, Pieter Casneuf, that these things are also ‘supposed’ to contain.  This is similarly light on detail, which is a shame, considering Pieter has a long history in DAM and a lot of expertise about our subject (and a number of related disciplines too).  Perhaps it was a ghost writer who penned this one?

“The reason we do this,” said Pieter Casneuf, CEO at ADAM Software, “is because we’re passionate about making the processes involved in media management and distribution better in our ever-evolving information age – and editorial planning is a core element of those processes. Last year, we raised the bar by integrating DAM and editorial management software for the first time. We’ve seen our market competition struggle to bring similar offerings to the marketplace over the past 12 months even as we have further extended our market leadership with these exciting new offerings that keep us on the cutting edge of cross media publishing technologies.” [Read More]

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