NorthPlains Announce New Version Of Telescope: Custom Content & Video Targeted As Key Areas

One of our featured DAM vendors, North Plains, have released an update to their flagship Telescope Digital Asset Management system.  Now on version 9, the new edition includes the following main upgrades:

• New HTML5 interface
• Drag and drop files from Telescope to other applications
• User friendly visual workflow engine
• Multi-lingual extensions to support left-to-right or right-to-left presentation
• View metadata in two languages simultaneously

The full press release is available on the North Plains site.  One of the key points that stood out was this:

“A recent report by the Custom Content Council showed that 84 percent of its Chief Marketing Officer respondents see custom content as the future of marketing. The findings in this report, combined with the pervasive proliferation of video, is creating a real-time challenge for marketing teams – managing and delivering the growing volume of rich media in order to take advantage of the unique opportunity to  deliver a rich, customized experience to customers. As creative work is often done with partners, the way to effectively manage this content is with a solution that links a company to its creative and distribution partners in a digital asset ecosystem.” [Read More]

This highlights a key battleground not just between DAM system vendors, but DAM solutions vs other classes of solution.  A question is whether video and custom content will be managed by user’s DAM systems or if the DAM becomes a silo for media only, with the custom or video parts being handled elsewhere.  If the latter, then one would expect that now all major players have a Cloud offering (following Apple’s announcement), they will rapidly assimilate many of the core search/store functions of DAM anyway.  Certainly the Apple iCloud PR talks a lot about managing personal media and one could extrapolate this to a corporate equivalent without needing to do too much thinking.

Given the convergence of solutions and the downward pressures on costs as a result of the wider economic picture, this would indicate a trend towards platform consolidation is likely as customers will not wish to invest in fewer platforms with each needing to offer a highly compelling value proposition.  North Plains certainly seem to be making a strong play towards being one of them, but how long they or their investors can (or want to) remain independent is a another matter.

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