celum Update IMAGINE With 2013.3 Release

One of our featured DAM vendors, celum, have released a new version of their DAM system, IMAGINE.  This release, 2013.3 includes the following updates:

• SE version (essentially a ‘lite’ edition of the enterprise product)
• New look and feel
• Social media content management for controlling distribution to social media properties like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc
• iPad client

And the ‘boss quote’ (as my fellow contributor calls them) looks like they’re making a comeback, certainly with some DAM vendors.  This is from celum CEO, Michael Kraeftner and is typically light on detail – as these quotes tend to be when the top brass get asked to offer a sound bite:

“We are very excited that for the first time smaller and medium sized companies or just smaller projects to centrally manage their digital assets and rich content have the opportunity to get access to our great products at very competitive rates, as perpetual or annual license plans. This will definitely create a stir in the DAM market and be a great benefit for existing and new celum clients” [Read More]

My sales tip to vendors: when you are talking about new products, either get someone who is actively involved with implementation to write these quotes, or ensure the senior manager has been properly briefed so they have something worthwhile to say.  The bigger the vendor, the more acute this issue seems to be.  Product releases are about what your current and prospective end users can expect to get – it’s one of the reasons we cover them on DAM News.  Don’t waste that opportunity and if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, defer the release until you have.

The celum release looks a bit thin on anything new (although to be fair, I have not seen the UI adjustments).  As we mentioned with the Widen updates earlier this month, a lot of this is vendors copying each other’s features and rendering any former USPs of one peer or another into merely tickable checkboxes for tenders and RFPs.

I believe this is another marketing oriented update where the timing has been made to coincide with the Henry Stewart DAM Europe event which is taking place this week.  Again, I might be wrong, but the press is so light on worthwhile news that it’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion.  They might counter-argue that we have not seen the new release – which is true.  But neither have any prospective users (nor the majority of existing ones) and press releases are supposed to tell the market what you are doing with your product.  They should be more than just marketing megaphones for creating more DAM noise pollution.

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