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<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/">Acquia</a> – the digital experience platform built with open source <a href="https://www.drupal.org/" target="_blank">Drupal</a> at its core – continues to innovate around its award-winning digital asset management (DAM) capabilities.
Yesterday, it announced new enhancements have been added to its <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/acquia-dam">Acquia DAM</a> (formerly <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/">Widen</a>), empowering marketing and creative leaders to find and collaborate on digital assets faster.
The new capabilities – which revolve around search, sharing, and analytics – are slated to help marketing and creative teams maximize the value of their content investments across brands, regions, campaigns, and personas, even as budgets are squeezed. 
“Marketing and creative teams turn to DAM systems to rein in content chaos and gain insight into how their content performs, particularly across global brand portfolios,” said <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-and-the-art-of-the-possible-interview-with-chief-market-officer-jennifer-griffin-smith/">Jennifer Griffin Smith</a>, Chief Market Officer at Acquia. “The new Acquia DAM updates empower teams to create, find, and share assets faster, giving them better control over revenue-generating digital marketing campaigns and the ability to ensure better brand consistency.” 
<h2>Giving marketers and creatives more DAM power </h2>
As Acquia outlined in its press release, marketing and creative teams are responsible for building and maintaining increasingly larger and more complex catalogs of digital assets. They need to be able to find assets quickly so they can get campaigns and products to market faster, understand which content performs best so they can use it again (or create more content like it), and drive brand consistency.
The new updates to Acquia DAM help customers rise to these challenges with:
<ul>
<li>Enhanced search experience: A redesigned search experience presents teams with more relevant results and filtering capabilities, enabling them to find the assets they need faster so they can launch campaigns and products faster. Redesigned cards on the search page display file naming conventions, making asset identification simpler and clearer.</li>
<li>More options for sharing assets: Teams can now share results for common searches to support better cross-team collaboration, so colleagues can see asset options in real time, regardless of their location. Users can copy and paste a link to search results, which includes search terms, sort, pagination, and filters applied. Also, new asset share links give the recipient the choice to pick the size and format they need.</li>
<li>Keyword and tag improvements: Teams can leverage tags for improved keyword search, making assets simpler to find. Entry of keywords now uses a familiar tag UI, with clickable tags on each asset, directing users to a search results page with all assets sharing the same tag. Admins retain editing control over these tags. This feature can help teams more efficiently manage very large collections of content assets.</li>
<li>Increased analytical insights: Acquia DAM analytics enhancements give teams faster access to asset usage and performance insights via an improved backend data pipeline. New asset insight charts provide more options to filter and group asset data. Asset insights now has API endpoints to connect with other marketing data in a data warehouse or business intelligence tool. This directly supports marketers who want to understand how content is being used and how well it’s performing so they can focus on the best-performing assets.</li>
</ul>
<h2>A modular, composable platform</h2>
Acquia DAM is available standalone or within Acquia DXP, and supports composable strategies through integrations with other Acquia and third-party marketing products. It is foundational to the industry’s only open digital experience platform, which brings together content and data to create world-class customer experiences. 
You can learn more about <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/acquia-dam">Acquia DAM,</a> view the new <a href="https://www.acquia.com/blog/acquia-dam-search">Acquia DAM search experience</a>, and explore how customers are using Acquia DAM – including <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/case-studies/crayola">Crayola</a>, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/case-studies/livewire">LiveWire</a>, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/case-studies/novavax">Novavax</a>, and <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/case-studies/san-francisco-international-airport">San Francisco International Airport</a> 
<h2>About Acquia</h2>
Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that leverage their content and data assets to engage customers personally and at scale, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out. Learn more at <a href="https://www.acquia.com/">https://acquia.com</a>.

Acquia DAM Bolsters Search, Share, and Analytics Capabilities

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This week, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-taps-its-modular-open-source-legacy-to-drive-the-composable-future/">Acquia</a>, a leading digital experience platform, announced new features in its digital asset management software, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/acquia-dam" target="_blank">Acquia DAM</a> (Widen Collective). The main attraction: an artificial intelligence chatbot that can assist users in creative workflows.
Acquia's new AI Assistant is integrated into the comments functionality of its review and proofing tool, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/dam/workflows" target="_blank">Workflow</a>. The feature allows users to collaborate on a piece of content or gather new ideas from the chatbot by asking questions in a conversational manner. The chatbot responds in seconds, helping users create and edit content faster, and receive feedback across the Workflow tool.
In the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-digital-asset-management-dam-drives-creative-collaboration-ai" target="_blank">news release</a> announcing the new features, Acquia provided several use cases for the new chatbot. These include copy suggestions for improving the written style of a project; ideas for visual design, imagery, or video; recommendations based on audience segmentation around interest or behavior; or even analyzing a competitor's content to help ensure differentiation.
“Great content is at the heart of every exceptional digital experience,” said <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewgonnering/" target="_blank">Matthew Gonnering</a>, SVP and GM, Acquia DAM. “Adding generative AI to the creative review process is an idea accelerator for marketers and designers. The new capabilities we’re introducing make it easier for content teams and marketing organizations to take full advantage of the amazing images, videos, copy, and more that they already have, to ensure consistency, and to spur creativity. We’re pleased to deliver these innovations, which are just the latest in a steady stream that distinguish Acquia DAM as the system of choice for creatives, content pros, and marketers across industries.”
<h2>What else is included?</h2>
Along with its AI assistant, Acquia announced several additional features and integrations for its DAM product:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/canva-button-gives-cms-users-integrated-graphic-design-tools-for-visual-content/">Canva</a>: Connects Canva's graphic design tools to Acquia DAM, allowing users to leverage thousands of designs and images – or create their own.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira" target="_blank">Jira</a>: Automatically syncs content and metadata from Jira to Acquia DAM to improve team workflow.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/" target="_blank">Dropbox</a>: Integrates with cloud storage and sharing software to access content shared with colleagues or collaborators.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.marq.com/" target="_blank">Marq</a>: Enables organizations using brand asset management software to connect to Acquia DAM and keep all brand assets in one place.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reviews/salesforce-cms-review-evolving-a-crm-powerhouse-into-a-dxp-challenger/">Salesforce</a>: A new two-way sync with Salesforce saves customers time by allowing them to stay within Acquia DAM while uploading new content from Salesforce and automatically syncs assets and metadata from the DAM system to Salesforce to ensure consistency.</li>
</ul>
<h2>AI continues to evolve </h2>
With the emergence of large language models that power generative AI like ChatGPT, it's clear that search and conversational AI have become the norm.
Earlier this month, one of our critics chatted with Acquia's SVP of Product, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannaballew/" target="_blank">Deanna Ballew</a>, and Director of Product, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretschroeder94/" target="_blank">Maggie Schroeder</a>, and touched on the subject of AI. Both said the open source Drupal community had been working for months to create and improve AI functionality and design innovative solutions that are ahead of the curve. These new features in Acquia DAM clearly align with the company's goal of delivering high-utility applications that impact the user experience. 
<h2>About Acquia</h2>
Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that leverage their content and data assets to engage customers personally and at scale, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out. Learn more at <a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">https://acquia.com</a>.

Acquia DAM Introduces AI Chatbot, New Features to Enhance Creative Workflows

Acquia AI chatbot - robot floating over light with laptops on the left and right side.

This week, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/?s=acquia"> Acquia</a> – a leading open source digital experience platform – rolled out an enhanced version of its digital asset management (DAM) platform, offering customers new integrations and API connectivity to further boost their digital experiences.
“Content is at the core of any exceptional digital experience,” said <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakeathey/" target="_blank">Jake Athey</a>, VP of Sales and Marketing for Acquia DAM and PIM. “Acquia DAM enables organizations of all sizes to maximize the value of their content by connecting to other software solutions, including a DXP, via built-in integrations or API. Our newest integrations with widely used tools as Shopify, Asana, and Monday.com make content more secure, extensible, accessible, and trackable across a brand’s digital properties.”
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/platform/digital-asset-management" target="_blank">Acquia DAM</a> works within the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/platform/acquia-dxp" target="_blank">Acquia DXP</a> (powered by the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-introduces-composable-enterprise-features-in-latest-version-of-dxp/">Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud</a> ecosystem) to push out content across many different channels. With many of today's marketers utilizing images, audio files, and video files for the majority of their content creation, housing those large file assets in the DAM makes searching and accessing them much easier, especially for marketing teams that might be located in different offices.
<h2>What to expect from Acquia DAM</h2>
With the new enhancements, Acquia DAM is now able to integrate with the following:
<ul>
<li>Airtable: Enables customers to use DAM assets to build collaborative applications in Airtable.</li>
<li>Asana: Adds finished assets to the DAM once projects are completed.</li>
<li>Google Sheets: Allows customers to connect their DAM with Google Sheets to capture and use metadata about content, such as when an asset was published and by whom.</li>
<li>HubSpot: New or updated assets in Acquia DAM can be copied into HubSpot. Customers may also choose to set security in HubSpot for all assets or groups of assets managed by the DAM.</li>
<li>Monday.com: Adds finished assets to Acquia DAM once projects are completed.</li>
<li>Optimizely: Connects the DAM to Optimizely content management systems (CMS).</li>
<li>Shopify: Syncs content assets and metadata from Acquia DAM, as well as all product details from Acquia’s product information management (PIM) system to Shopify to support e-commerce deployments.</li>
<li>Slack: Permits users to access Acquia DAM files from their Slack messaging platform.</li>
<li>Smartsheet: Connects Smartsheet and Acquia to automatically sync new or updated assets and metadata from Smartsheet to the DAM.</li>
<li>Templafy: Allows access to brand-approved assets from Acquia DAM within the Templafy document generation platform.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Built on the legacy Widen DAM</h2>
In September 2021, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/">Acquia announced</a> it would acquire Widen, a DAM vendor. Widen had strong brand recognition among enterprise-level organizations and a well-established following, making it a great addition to Acquia's expanding digital experience platform.
After rebranding to Acquia DAM, Acquia has continued to make improvements and provide additional API connectivity for its DAM system.
<h2>Other enhancements to Acquia DXP</h2>
In late December 2022, <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221222005228/en/Acquia-Launches-Enhancements-to-Market-Leading-Customer-Data-Platform" target="_blank">Acquia also released enhancements</a> to its customer data platform, including a unified data layer, an integration with Acquia DAM, and direct SQL access. In that news release, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimidelson/" target="_blank">Jim Idelson</a> – vice president of product for Acquia CDP – promised additional integrations, which are now coming to fruition.
“A key tenet of any composable digital experience strategy is ability to work with data across systems,” said Idelson. “We look for every opportunity to expand integrations between Acquia CDP and other martech systems, and to make it easy for organizations to make full use of their data while respecting the privacy and preferences of their own customers. In 2023, you’ll see additional enhancements from Acquia designed to support customer self-service and broader integrations.”
Acquia’s updates in the last several years have brought its DXP into <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/report/gartner-dxp-magic-quadrant" target="_blank">the Leader category</a> of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, along with the likes of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-experience-cloud-adds-new-headless-cms-capabilities-updates-to-commerce-integration/">Adobe</a>, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a>, and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sitecore-announces-updates-to-product-suite-enhances-composable-features-and-innovation-from-acquisitions/">Sitecore</a>.  
<h2>About Acquia</h2>
Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that leverage their content and data assets to engage customers personally and at scale, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out. Learn more at <a href="https://acquia.com" target="_blank">https://acquia.com</a>.

Acquia Announces New Integrations as Part of Its Enhanced Digital Asset Management System

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If you just heard a loud noise echo across the digital marketplace, it might have been a sonic boom. But don't let your ears fool your eyes: this was a visual explosion, and it has us intrigued.
A few days ago, Milan-based start-up <a href="https://boom.co/" target="_blank">BOOM</a> acquired Berlin-based visual production start-up <a href="https://www.lemonone.com/" target="_blank">LemonOne</a> for an undisclosed sum. Now, that might not ordinarily catch your eye (or your ear), but what got our attention was the growth of a relatively new sub-category: visual asset management (VAM).
Not to be confused with the abundant plethora of TLAs (three-lettered acronyms), VAMs are evolving the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/">digital asset management (DAM)</a> charter by focusing more deliberately on the role of imagery within an ecosystem. Along with housing files like photography, VAMs go further by offering tools that enhance the management of creative files, brand elements, video components, and more. 
VAMs seem to have a number of different applications, but there's a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/visual-asset-management-what-why-you-need-kevin-bouffard-c-e-t-/" target="_blank">great overview</a> by Kevin Bouffard of 3SixtyEdge about a use case for construction. In it, a VAM provides a more immersive experience for integrating different image assets into a 360-degree tour of a building or property. Very cool stuff. 
As you might guess, VAMs are a perfect content management repository for agencies and marketing departments that are developing integrated visual solutions. As such, BOOM's acquisition of LemonOne further expands its content capacity to help creative teams build visual campaigns, organize imagery, collaborate on ideas, and publish visual content anywhere online.
<h2>BOOM makes waves by managing the full visual lifecycle</h2>
Founded by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacopobenedettiai/" target="_blank">Jacopo Benedetti</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicomattiadolci/" target="_blank">Federico Mattia Dolci</a>, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/giacomo-grattirola-1b8a58100/" target="_blank">Giacomo Grattirola</a>, BOOM has specialized in visual asset management. The company has raised over $18M in seed, Series A, and Venture funding in the last three years and has grown rapidly since its launch in 2018 – now serving clients in over 80 countries.
The acquisition of LemonOne strengthens BOOM’s presence in Europe, accelerating the delivery of its mission to create a scalable environment that empowers digital companies to effectively manage their full visual content lifecycle – from initial production to final distribution – from anywhere in the world in line with e-commerce growth and increased demand for visual content.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/06/boom-workspace-screen.png" alt="Boom Workspace Screen" />BOOM Workspace Screen
“This is a major leap forward in BOOM’s strategy to serve the whole of Europe and beyond through our ground-breaking digital platform," said Federico Mattia Dolci, CEO of BOOM. "We have been growing our team across Europe and the Americas, and we are now delighted to join forces with the team from LemonOne. They bring fresh energy, passion as well as a wealth of vertical expertise. We look forward to doing great things together!”
<h2>Squeezing the juice from LemonOne</h2>
Founded in 2017, <a href="https://www.lemonone.com/" target="_blank">LemonOne</a> has grown to serve online marketplaces, real estate agencies, and food delivery companies with on-demand, tailor-made visual content for their digital presence.
LemonOne’s clients will join BOOM’s network of customers – which includes major names such as Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Houzz – on the BOOM Worksite, a centralized platform that enables digital enterprises to organize, share, and collaborate on visual assets with internal and third parties.
LemonOne’s team will join BOOM’s workforce to boost service capacity for its growing customer base and enable the company to focus on its technology and product arms as it develops its new SaaS platform, Worksite. Meanwhile, LemonOne’s photographers will join BOOM’s community of visual content creators, enabling BOOM to serve a broader range of customers across mainland Europe.
“BOOM is breaking the ground to develop a revolutionary category leader in the space of visual asset management while LemonOne built a European market leader for digital photo production," said Maximilian Schwahn, Co-Founder at LemonOne. "By joining forces and being able to offer every company a one-stop-shop solution for booking, collaborating, and publishing visuals, we are able to reach our founding vision even faster. Therefore, we are super happy to partner up with BOOM and benefit from each other’s strength to make 1+1=3 for all our customers as well as our community.”
If you’re interested in checking out BOOM, you can <a href="https://boom.co/get-started/" target="_blank">get a free demo here</a>.
<h2>About Boom</h2>
<a href="https://boom.co/" target="_blank">BOOM</a> is a Saas company that powers smart solutions for visual asset collaboration, management, and production. Through a centralized end-to-end platform, BOOM allows creative and marketing companies to create, organize, collaborate on, and publish content anywhere online, making their workflow fast and frictionless from start to finish. BOOM’s client portfolio includes international players such as D&amp;G, Deliveroo, Glovo, and Westwing, all of whom have enjoyed BOOM’s visual production resources as well as the platform’s service as a single source of truth for all their visual assets.
<h2>About LemonOne</h2>
Lemon One provides businesses such as major online marketplaces, real estate agencies, and food delivery companies with on-demand photos within hours through algorithms that match them with a broad network of photographers. With Lemon One, businesses get tailor-made, high-quality visual content for their online presence, without extra effort.

Visual Content Management Platform BOOM Acquires Visual Production Company LemonOne

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Acquia has every DAM reason to be running a victory lap right now – and its DAM has something to do with it.
Recently, the Drupal-powered DXP announced that its <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/dam" target="_blank">Widen Digital Asset Management (DAM)</a> solution was named a "Leader" in <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/reports/forrester-wave-digital-asset-management" target="_blank">The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q1 2022 Report</a>. The analyst firm's research evaluated the 14 most significant DAM vendors against 27 criteria grouped into three categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence.
While this news comes fresh off the Forrester presses, it's augmented by the recent publishing of the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/report/gartner-dxp-magic-quadrant?utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=ppc_google_bof_mc_2022&amp;utm_content=7013a000002hl4dAAA&amp;utm_term=ppc_google_bof_mc_2022&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQiA95aRBhCsARIsAC2xvfwt8tHfpiJWirnXF0U4tNCgxIL4EoPamKncFewhJltgH7JITnH0kTUaAtQ7EALw_wcB" target="_blank">2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP)</a>, where Acquia continues to tighten the race for leadership with <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-acquires-video-collaboration-platform-frame-io/">Adobe</a> and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a>. 
<h2>Broadening DXP with DAM</h2>
Last year, Acquia <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/" target="_blank">acquired Widen</a> in an effort to bring its best-of-breed DAM and PIM capabilities to its expanding ecosystem. As a platform, Widen has been focused on large organizations where marketing teams required a more comprehensive <a href="https://www.widen.com/blog/digital-asset-management" target="_blank">digital asset</a> strategy for managing rich media, product information, and marketing content into a single workflow – and all accessible via an intuitive user interface. 
With content being at the heart of digital experiences, acquiring Widen was a well-calculated move for Acquia. According to the Forrester report, Widen continues to lead the way with clear strengths around search and marketing features, rounding out Acquia's digital experience platform model and filling the critical gaps of workflow and asset management capabilities.
<h2>Scoring high marks across all Forrester criteria</h2>
Widen earned the highest possible scores across Forrester's nine DAM criteria, including AI metadata extraction, search, digital rights management, version control, content performance analytics, usability and user interface, creative toolset integration, planned enhancements, and commercial model.
The report also stated that Widen offers a "clear commercial model and transparent pricing," as well as "superior capabilities with its creative toolset integration" and "solid digital rights management capabilities including integrations into third-party DRM applications." It also concluded that Widen's roadmap of planned enhancements, which are influenced by customer feedback multiple times a year, is a key advantage. 
"We believe that Forrester's findings prove the strength of Widen's DAM technology when combined with the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP)," said Jake Athey, VP of Marketing at Widen. "The addition of Widen to Acquia DXP brings our customers enhanced capabilities around rich media and product information content, providing even more opportunities to build world-class digital experiences."
You can access a complimentary copy of the report here: <a href="https://www.acquia.com/resources/reports/forrester-wave-digital-asset-management" target="_blank">The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q1, 2022</a>.
<h2>About Acquia</h2>
Acquia empowers the world's most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions and help businesses stand out. Learn more at <a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">https://acquia.com</a>.

Acquia's Widen Named a "Leader" in Forrester Wave Report for Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience

Talk about welcome news.
Earlier in December, <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/" target="_blank">Optimizely</a> – a leading digital experience platform (DXP) – announced a definitive agreement to purchase <a href="https://welcomesoftware.com/" target="_blank">Welcome</a>, a content marketing (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM), and digital asset management (DAM) platform.
Yes, that's a lot of three-lettered acronyms for one sentence...
While the DXP juggernaut is no stranger to acquisitions (they were, in fact, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/episerver-rebrands-as-optimizely-following-acquisition/">purchased by Episerver in 2020</a> but rebranded under the Optimizely name), this one provides a glimpse of the company's ambition to win the minds and hearts of internal marketers.
According to Welcome's press release, the combination will empower marketing teams at brands across the globe to drive real business value through better customer experiences.
“We believe a world-class customer experience starts with an outstanding marketer experience,” said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Optimizely. “By combining Welcome’s campaign planning, content production, and asset management capabilities with Optimizely’s existing breadth of digital experience solutions, we empower marketers to rapidly launch campaigns and control the optimization of every digital touchpoint which results in growth for the business.”
As the deal is set to close before the New Year, it's clear that Optimizely is making a 2022 resolution to focus more on the discrete needs of marketers, who are chiefly responsible for driving customer experience. With the rise of digital tools and hybrid work environments, marketers are becoming the "engines" of business growth by shaping consumer engagement. At the same time, they are being forced to adapt and respond to a fluid digital landscape, where a fragmented stack is arresting their ability to deliver personalized, relevant content and experiences at scale.
Bottom line: Optimizely aims to improve the marketer experience by adding Welcome's CMP, MRM, and DAM capabilities to their expanding ecosystem.
<h2>Combining marketing, content management, digital commerce, and personalization</h2>
As a four-time <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210325005585/en/Welcome-a-NewsCred-Brand-Named-a-Leader-Now-4-Years-Running-in-the-2021-Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Content-Marketing-Platforms" target="_blank">Leader on the Gartner Magic Quadrant</a>, Welcome has carved a strong niche in the small but growing cadre of Content Marketing Platforms (CMP).
As Gartner noted in their most recent report, "Welcome’s vision as a marketing orchestration software, combining the capabilities of a CMP, MWM, DAM, offers promise." This positioning certainly made the platform a more attractive target for Optimizely.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/12/gartner_mq_cmp-971x1024.png" alt="Gartner Magic Quadrant, 2021 for CMP" />
By combining Welcome's capabilities with Optimizely's suite of content management and digital commerce solutions, marketers will now have enhanced tools for a wide range of applications – all in a unified platform. This includes the "Holy Grail" of experimentation, personalization, and recommendations that have often remained elusive for marketing professionals and teams.
Under the Optimizely banner, marketers will be able to leverage Welcome's features on an evolutionary scale, allowing them to accelerate the end-to-end marketing lifecycle from concept to execution. This will allow users and teams to plan, create, and collaborate on campaigns and publish across multiple channels to reach the right audiences. They will also have unprecedented control and transparency to manage content delivery without relying on the support of IT or development.
The combined set of capabilities should be a force multiplier for Optimizely, enabling marketers to grow revenue by scaling best-in-class data-driven tools such as A/B testing and content recommendations, augmented by Welcome's content marketing processes. Marketers will also be able to easily share results across their organization, providing greater insight into the impact of their marketing investment.
“We could not be more excited to be joining the Optimizely family,” said Shafqat Islam, CEO and co-founder of Welcome. “We’ve made it our mission to transform the way marketers work, by delivering a purpose-built solution to orchestrate all of marketing. Now, together with Optimizely, we believe we are unifying two category-leading solutions to see that mission through.”
<h2>A string of strategic acquisitions</h2>
As the DXP category becomes more crowded, enterprise vendors are clawing their way to the top of the mountain. In Gartner's <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3995917/magic-quadrant-for-digital-experience-platforms" target="_blank">2021 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms</a>, Optimizely found itself chasing the heels of both <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-upgrades-open-dxp-capabilities-to-expand-composable-enterprise-features/">Acquia</a> and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-acquires-video-collaboration-platform-frame-io/">Adobe</a> in pursuit of the crown.
To enhance their DXP completeness of vision and gain competitive ground, all three platforms have been scooping up strategic technologies – including Optimizely's 2021 <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-acquires-customer-data-platform-zaius/">purchase of Zauis</a>, a leading customer data platform (CDP).
Adding this all-important data layer gave Optimizely a needed edge, but the purchase of Welcome is key. Not only does it signal a renewed focus on the role of the marketer, but it repositions the power of the platform on the marketer's experience. Providing an integrated, end-to-end lifecycle solution for managing content, assets, and resources – and amplifying it with the commerce and optimization features of a proven DXP – could be a real gamechanger for Optimizely. We'll be watching as the next steps unfold.
<h2>About Optimizely</h2>
Optimizely is a leading digital experience platform (DXP), equipping teams with the tools and insights they need to create and optimize in new and novel ways. Now, companies can operate with data-driven confidence to create hyper-personalized experiences. Building sophisticated solutions has never been simpler. Optimizely’s 900+ partners and 1100+ employees in offices around the globe are proud to help more than 9,000 brands, including Toyota, Santander, eBay, KLM and Mazda, enrich their customer lifetime value, increase revenue and grow their brands.
<h2>About Welcome</h2>
Welcome transforms how marketers run marketing. It is the leading marketing orchestration platform used by the world’s most successful brands to strategically align teams, take the friction out of execution, and demonstrate meaningful results. Only Welcome offers a platform purpose-built for the complexities of modern marketing that can scale to support the largest teams in the world. It is a new layer of the marketing technology stack where marketers can work better together, connect other martech tools, and measure performance. Welcome unleashes the potential of marketing.

Optimizely's Acquisition of Welcome Signals Expanded Focus on Marketers

With little time to reflect on <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sitecore-acquires-ai-powered-search-platform-reflektion/" target="_blank">Sitecore's recent acquisition of Reflektion</a>, another enterprise DXP has helped itself to strategic snack – providing more evidence that the market's appetite for expansion is still voracious. 
Just a few days ago, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/faq/acquia-acquires-widen" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading digital experience platform, announced its purchase of <a href="https://www.widen.com/" target="_blank">Widen</a> – a cloud-native digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) provider. 
While the past 18 months have seen a relentless cycle of consolidation across the industry, it now seems that <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/key-takeaways-from-gartners-2021-magic-quadrant-for-digital-experience-platforms/" target="_blank">Gartner's crop of DXP leaders</a> are playing pole position around critical gaps in their DXP stack. What started with optimization and customer data is now evolving into a heated race for robustness on every level – and for Acquia, digital asset management has been missing from the mix.
Here's more on what the acquisition could mean for the Drupal-based DXP platform.
<h2>Widen bring best-of-breed DAM and PIM capabilities to Acquia</h2>
Widen's value proposition is fairly simple: it unites <a href="https://www.widen.com/blog/digital-asset-management" target="_blank">digital assets</a> such as rich media, product information, and marketing content into a single workflow and provides an intuitive interface that democratizes access to a brand's resources. 
In layman's terms, it makes finding and using assets like video, graphics, and copy much easier for marketing professionals (or anyone for that matter).
Whether you're a content strategist, UX designer, marketer, or web developer, delivering a great user experience is always the mission – and good content is essential to that goal. Widen has focused on the asset side of the Content Operations flow, enabling users to enhance their experience with access to the right components. 
Acquiring the capabilities of a DAM and a PIM are "strategic gold" for Acquia. To create personalized customer engagement at scale, brands are creating immense volumes of digital content. Traditionally, DAMs have helped simplify a marketer's access to this content while managing versions and workflows to ensure consistency. But within the context of a DXP, a modern DAM must also provide robust technical capabilities and extensibility. Additionally, a PIM solution should enable product data enrichment with marketing copy and digital assets to easily create branded product content. 
Together, these capabilities help organizations create and refine distinctive digital experiences based on evolving customer preferences – which is exactly what Acquia aims to do. It's also worth noting that the worldwide market for <a href="https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5311981/digital-asset-management-market-global-industry" target="_blank">DAM is projected to grow to $8.5B by 2025</a>, a 15% CAGR. <a href="https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5304126/product-information-management-global-market" target="_blank">PIM is set to increase from $8.8B last year to $18B in 2027</a>, an 11% CAGR. This underscores the value of the investment. 
"Acquia has long been an established leader in managing textual website content," said Dries Buytaert, Co-founder, and CTO of Acquia. "Now, with Widen, we will be able to offer world-class capabilities around rich media and product information content. Widen is consistently ranked a leader by industry analysts for vision, execution, and market presence. We have numerous joint customers today and believe Widen software will deliver value to Acquia Marketing Cloud and Drupal Cloud customers. We're excited to welcome the Widen team to the Acquia family and to collaborate with them on Acquia Open DXP."
<h2>Acquia Open DXP with Widen maximizes the value of digital content </h2>
When it comes to expanding the stack, the buying spree continues – and Acquia was already leading a similar trajectory as other DXPs, particularly in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) layer. Aquia <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-digital-commerce-unifies-data-content-commerce-and-digital-merchandising/" target="_blank">acquired AgilOne</a> two years ago, while in the last six months, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sitecore-acquires-boxever-and-four51/" target="_blank">Sitecore acquired Boxever</a> and Optimizely <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-acquires-customer-data-platform-zaius/" target="_blank">acquired Zaius</a>. 
While some other platforms have already addressed DAM capabilities as part of their DXP offering, Widen presents a more advanced solution that will enable Acquia with key advantages. Now, marketers will be able to create, review, manage, distribute and analyze content across the entire lifecycle and support complex marketing workflows and enterprise DXP requirements.
"With Widen, we continue to differentiate Acquia Open DXP by adding enterprise-grade, cloud-native DAM, and PIM capabilities," said Mike Sullivan, President, and CEO of Acquia. "We will immediately invest in accelerated development of the Widen solution and leverage our global capabilities and partner network to bring it to marketing organizations that use Acquia Open DXP to manage, transform and deliver digital assets at scale."
Widen also goes beyond managing creative assets to include storing unstructured data such as legal documents, insurance claims, and contact lists. The marketing-friendly Widen PIM solution delivers product data from creators to customers – centralizing it for syndication across websites, catalogs and e-commerce channels. 
Widen also brings a portfolio of more than 700 customers to the Acquia ecosystem, including notable brands like Carnival Cruises, Crayola, Energizer, Kohler, LG, McCormick, New Balance, Progressive, and more. This is yet another differentiator for Acquia as they look to compete with other leading enterprise platforms. 
"Content is the heart of any digital experience," said Matthew Gonnering, CEO of Widen. "It influences action across marketing channels; email, social media, content management systems, marketing campaigns, e-commerce, product information management, and more. By combining with Acquia, a company that shares Widen's belief that radical innovation starts with commitment to customers and the community, we will continue to rapidly innovate our solutions to support the first and only open digital experience platform."
Widen will be available as part of Acquia Open DXP or as a standalone offering. To read more, visit the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/blog/acquia-continues-rapid-growth-plans-acquire-widen" target="_blank">Acquia</a> or <a href="https://www.widen.com/blog/an-open-message-from-widen-ceo-matthew-gonnering" target="_blank">Widen</a> blogs.
The transaction is expected to close in late September 2021.
<h2>About Acquia</h2>
<a href="https://www.acquia.com">Acquia</a> empowers the world's most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open-source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions and help businesses stand out.
<h2>About Widen</h2>
Established in 1948, <a href="https://www.widen.com/">Widen</a> builds high-performing software that empowers organizations to create impactful, measurable and consistent brand experiences. Its platform spans brand management, marketing resource management, and product information management solutions and has enabled over one million marketers, content creators, and technologists at over 660 global brands to better connect with audiences. Customers include Dyson, New Balance, Energizer, Laura Mercier, Nars, Zeiss, Salvation Army, Citizen Watch, the Atlanta Falcons, Carnival Cruise Line, and many more. Headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, and with a European office in London, UK, Widen has the highest customer loyalty in the digital asset management (DAM) industry.

Acquia Widens Its DXP Stack with Widen, Acquires DAM and PIM Capabilities

<a href="https://www.hyland.com/en">Hyland</a>, an enterprise content management (ECM) and process management provider, has <a href="https://news.hyland.com/hyland-enters-into-agreement-for-the-acquisition-of-nuxeo">signed an agreement</a> providing for exclusive negotiations to acquire <a href="https://www.nuxeo.com/">Nuxeo</a> – a content services and digital asset management (DAM) platform.
A leading ECM provider, Hyland is best known for its <a href="https://www.onbase.com/en">Onbase</a> and <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/perceptive">Perceptive</a> content management products, which securely centralize enterprise content and deliver relevant information to users across a wide variety of industries – including healthcare, finance, insurance, higher education, and manufacturing.
Nuxeo offers a cloud-native, open-source, low-code platform with content services and DAM capabilities, among others.
“We’ve innovated an entirely modern platform that provides both enterprise-class content services and digital asset management capabilities," said Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo. "And we look forward to bringing these capabilities to the Hyland portfolio as well as leveraging Hyland’s considerable global resources to deliver even greater success to our customers and partners."
<h3>A Leader on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/03/figure_1_magic_quadrant_for_content_services_platforms.png" alt="Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms" style="max-width:570px" /></figure>
Hyland has been a consistent force in the ECM and content services landscape, commanding the second-place position in the Leader Quadrant of <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/explore/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-content-services-platforms">Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms</a>.
While Hyland has been trailing right behind <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/12/08/over-200-million-users-rely-on-sharepoint-as-microsoft-is-again-recognized-as-a-leader-in-the-2020-gartner-content-services-platforms-magic-quadrant-report/#:~:text=Leading%20in%20the%20Gartner%20Content,Platforms%20Magic%20Quadrant%20for%202020.">Microsoft’s 365 platform</a> (fueled primarily by <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/sharepoint/collaboration">Sharepoint</a>), they were also being followed closely by <a href="https://www.alfresco.com/">Alfresco</a>, a fast-growing open-source content services platform that was gaining ground in the market but still viewed as a somewhat niche solution by large enterprises.
Following suit with many other CMS and DXP platforms in the last year, Hyland <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-acquires-alfresco-focuses-on-cloud-and-global-expansion-of-enterprise-cms/">acquired Alfresco</a> in 2020, eliminating their next closest competitor and changing the game in the leadership grid.
While buying a competitor is far from novel, Alfresco’s low-code tools – combined with its ability to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services from <a href="https://www.alfresco.com/ecm-software/aws">cloud providers like AWS</a> – were likely key factors in Hyland's decision, enabling them to accelerate their modernization efforts.
<h3>Adding Nuxeo's low-code AI service and DAM capabilities</h3>
With the Nuxeo acquisition, Hyland is consuming another competitor – this time from the Visionary quadrant of Gartner's MQ for Content Services Platforms.
Nuxeo brings some unique assets to Hyland that may translate into significant advantages against Microsoft and Sharepoint. First, it gains <a href="https://www.nuxeo.com/content-services-platform/ai/">Nuxeo Insight</a> – an AI offering that enables customers to use their own data and content to train custom ML models for a variety of business applications. This includes enriching content with metadata, classifying people, products and records, automating forms processing, and more.
The critical advantage with Nuxeo Insight is that it generates ML models that are trained with a customer’s own data – rendering them far more accurate and insightful than typical AI services offered through public clouds (like AWS).
Nuxeo is also known for its strong enterprise <a href="https://www.nuxeo.com/solutions/dam-digital-asset-management/">DAM capabilities</a>, which provide out-of-the-box solutions for enterprises. Additionally, its large-scale repository – which includes NoSQL and distributed file system options – provides storage and scalability support for organizations with a large number of documents.
In fact, last year, Nuxeo proved its scalability performance with an <a href="https://benchmarks.nuxeo.com/11-billion-benchmark-story/">11-billion-object benchmark test</a> on AWS.
<h3>What does the Nuxeo acquisition mean for Hyland?</h3>
Considering some of Hyland’s core industry verticals – specifically finance – Nuxeo may be well worth the investment. Along with its cloud-native, low-code solutions, Nuxeo's open source community and AI-driven capabilities address key gaps in Hyland's modernization strategy, and will likely be a source of continued product innovation.
The transaction is expected to close in April 2021. Until that time, both companies will continue to operate as two companies. Upon transaction close, Nuxeo's business will be integrated into Hyland.
<h3>About Nuxeo</h3>
<a href="https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&amp;l=en&amp;o=3043355-1&amp;h=141805745&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuxeo.com%2F%3Futm_source%3DPRNewswire%26utm_medium%3Dpress%2520release%26utm_campaign%3Dhitrust&amp;a=Nuxeo">Nuxeo</a>, the developer of the leading Content Services Platform, is reinventing <a href="https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&amp;l=en&amp;o=3043355-1&amp;h=1356444015&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuxeo.com%2Fproducts%2Fenterprise-content-management%2F%3Futm_source%3DPRNewswire%26utm_medium%3Dpress%2520release%26utm_campaign%3Dhitrust&amp;a=enterprise+content+management">enterprise content management</a> (ECM) and <a href="https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&amp;l=en&amp;o=3043355-1&amp;h=3747046695&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuxeo.com%2Fproducts%2Fdigital-asset-management%2F%3Futm_source%3DPRNewswire%26utm_medium%3Dpress%2520release%26utm_campaign%3Dhitrust&amp;a=digital+asset+management">digital asset management</a> (DAM). Nuxeo makes it easy to build smart content applications that enhance customer experiences, improve decision making, and accelerate products to market. Its cloud-native, low-code platform has been deployed by large enterprises worldwide. Customers like Electronic Arts, TBWA, ABN AMRO, and CVS have used Nuxeo's technology to transform the way they do business. Founded in 2000, the company is based in New York with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at <a href="https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&amp;l=en&amp;o=3043355-1&amp;h=1092214406&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nuxeo.com%2F%3Futm_source%3DPRNewswire%26utm_medium%3Dpress%2520release%26utm_campaign%3Dhitrust&amp;a=www.nuxeo.com">www.nuxeo.com</a>.
<h3>About Hyland</h3>
<a href="https://www.hyland.com/">Hyland</a> is an enterprise content management (ECM) software platform, combining integrated document management, business process management, and records management in a single application. Hyland software allows organizations to manage, control, and share digital content with employees, business partners, customers, and other constituencies. Learn more at <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en">www.hyland.com</a>

Hyland Enters Agreement to Acquire Nuxeo

Notre-DAM is an open-source Digital Asset Management platform targeted to the mid-market segment (digital libraries, micro-stock agencies, editorial teams, etc.).
The key features of Notre-DAM are:
<ul>
<li>multi-user, web-based application accessible from the most popular browsers</li>
<li>can manage images, video, audio and text</li>
<li>provides a customizable catalogue based on taxonomies and collections</li>
<li>full metadata support (EXIF, IPTC, XMP, Creative Commons, PLUS)</li>
<li>geo referencing and search, directly on a map</li>
<li>fully scalable, relies on a cluster of PCs for resource storage, processing, and delivery</li>
<li>provides a REST API for integration with other applications (e.g. CMSs)</li>
<li>distributed under the GPL v.3 licenseScreenshot: 
<img style="max-width:580px" title="notre-dam" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/notre-dam-580x306_zhohfp.png" /></li>
</ul>
More information (and an on-line demo) is available on the project's web site <a href="http://www.notre-dam.org">Notre-DAM.org</a>. A short <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMehvlhOPFY">video presentation is available too</a>.

Notre-DAM Beta released - an open source Digital Asset Management Platform

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