EPi Server Adds inRiver PIM Modules – More WCM And DAM Turf Wars In Prospect?
Open Source .NET Web Content Management specialists, EPi Server have partnered with inRiver to add a Product Information Management (PIM) module to their popular WCM platform:
“Product management can be a real headache for online marketers and merchandizers with complex product assortments that are sold through multiple channels in multiple markets” said Bob Egner, vice president of product management at EPiServer. “With different members of the marketing team often duplicating product content and media assets for use in marketing campaigns or in-store channels, organisations want to improve consistency and gain control of their processes. This new PIM offering will provide our customers with control over the product content and the processes of managing it.” [Read More]
Although PIM isn’t Digital Asset Management, it is certainly a close cousin and some purer play DAM vendors such as Adam offer PIM modules that integrate with their solutions to enable them to enter this market. As we have noted previously, WCM and DAM are increasingly beginning to cross into each other’s territory and a turf war of sorts is in prospect for corporate budgets (especially where the end users are marketing departments). I would have to say, I think WCM is probably either winning this war, or will gain the upper hand, simply because it has a far higher number of end users and the use case is broader and easier to scale up than DAM. I don’t think that is the end of DAM, but I doubt whether DAM systems as end user interfaces will exist as independent products for long – most either transforming into plug-ins for WCM/ECM or switching into the back-end media processing side of the market.
As argued elsewhere here before, there are some that cite this as the trend towards ‘CXM’ (Customer Experience Management). I still find the term toe-curlingly painful to contemplate – and not just from a linguistic perspective, however, I would have to acknowledge that these things don’t entirely happen in a strategic vacuum and I guess if that’s what you need to call it to get C-level execs to pay attention to content technologies these days, then so be it.
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