Box And WebDAM Solutions Announce “Technology Integration”
As a general rule we don’t often post articles about vendor partnerships as they’re usually very boring and of little interest to anyone apart from the parties involved (even that might be stretching it a bit in a number of cases, I suspect). This announcement from one of our featured DAM vendors, WebDAM solutions is a little more interesting, however, because their partner is Box.net:
“The integration of Box and WebDAM offers the best of both worlds to each user community: greater flexibility, more powerful marketing workflows, robust marketing media sharing, and marketing media control. Users can now work with one-click file sharing between Box and WebDAM, all in their preferred user environment for a seamless experience – no searching through local folders or switching between applications.” In particular, Box users can now easily open, edit, share, and save collateral from WebDAM or send files to WebDAM for control over marketing assets, rights management, conduct batch conversions, quick browsing, search, and automated sharing of marketing collateral (brand assets, images, graphics, videos, sales collateral, presentations, and more). The integration also provides a path for WebDAM’s marketing users to send content for real-time collaboration with Box users despite different systems, applications, and departments. [Read More]
We’ve talked before about how Box.net have the potential to take on a number of DAM vendors at the lower end of the market. Also, their own core product has acquired more DAM capabilities over the last few years. Last week we discussed how Amazon’s strategy of providing ‘building block’ application services could facilitate increased competition in the DAM SaaS market segment and whether they viewed this as a more cost-effective strategy than developing their own alternative.
It seems that Box.net have a similar take. At present, it’s easier to get an existing vendor partner to offer more obscure services and features for which the business case is not fully proven. One does need to wonder how long that will remain the scenario though and if this is a ‘wait and see’ tactic by Box before they use their superior financial clout to just extend their own core system, they certainly would not be the first tech vendor to compete with their partners and/or customers.
I note that it’s a “technology integration” rather than a partnership per sé. Whether or not it has come with exclusivity clauses for either is not discussed (I would doubt it, certainly in the case of Box). I would expect to see other DAM vendors follow suit and announce similar “technology integrations” also as many DAM vendors compete by just copying what their industry peers seems to be doing. How long they might all regard the arrangement as mutually beneficial remains to be seen, however, especially if Box becomes a useful platform for customers who want to migrate from one Box.net integrated DAM SaaS vendor to another (using the Box infrastructure and API protocols as a convenient conduit to smooth the transition).
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