Widen Join ADAM and OpenText By Integrating With ConceptShare
One of our featured DAM vendors, Widen, have announced that they also have integrated their Media Collective SaaS DAM system with the ConceptShare creative review tools for annotating artwork:
“Users of the integration can send any asset to ConceptShare from Widen Media Collective’s asset details page. Once the asset is placed in a ConceptShare workspace, reviewers can use any number of annotation tools to mark up and make suggested edits to the asset. They can also initiate a review of the asset with a group of people. Once the review process is complete the asset’s status is updated to reflect that, Widen pulls it right back to Media Collective.” [Read More]
This announcement follows similar ones from ADAM and also OpenText back in May this year. It’s hard to say if this is a ‘me too’ decision – as DAM vendors tend to copy each other out of fear about getting left with a box on an RFP that they can’t tick, but ConceptShare seem to be pretty much cornering the market in artwork annotation and integration with DAM vendors. At DAM News, we are convinced this is the early stages of an ongoing inexorable trend as vendors find it increasingly more complex to offer everything that users want and either need to call in partners to provide the bits they can’t, or sub-divide their product ranges.
It’s possible that this last point could be another factor with the North Plains acquisitions this year also, but it’s hard to see how those demarcations will work out in practice. One could argue that a more aggressive strategy would have been to ignore competitor vendors and instead horizontally integrate by owning more of these components, such as ConceptShare and the array of different web based video editing tools that are now coming onto the market. With that kind of manoeuvre they would have been able to earn money from their competitors rather than spend it buying them up.
We don’t normally cover vendor partnerships on DAM News as they are as dull as the proverbial drying paint, but I wonder if they are about to get a whole lot more interesting in 2013?
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