The Digital-Asset DivideThe Digital-Asset Divide

Digital-asset management has become one of the hottest parts of the content-management market, and Interwoven Inc. grabbed its spot last week with the $10 million cash and stock acquisition of MediaBin Inc.

Northern California's biggest public broadcasting outlet, KQED, is an Interwoven customer that's just starting to look for a digital-asset management system to let staff access video and audio files via a Web-based interface. The acquisition of MediaBin has Tim Olson, KQED's interactive director, considering the benefits of more tightly integrated content management and digital-asset management provided by the same vendor. "We'd love to work with as few systems as possible," Olson says. "Getting them to talk to each other is always a challenge."

Olson wants to coordinate content for television, radio, and the Internet, plus printed program guides and educational materials. Longer term, the station wants to make all its content available to the public online, which would require routing digital assets through a Web-publishing system, just the sort of ability Interwoven expects to offer with MediaBin.

Once Interwoven completes a deeper integration of its MetaTagger software with MediaBin, expected by year's end, MetaTagger's automated tagging of content will let digital media stored in the MediaBin repository be incorporated more completely into the workflow of Interwoven's TeamSite content-management application, CEO Martin Brauns says.

The MediaBin deal comes more than a year after one of Interwoven's primary competitors, Documentum Inc., bought digital-asset management vendor Bulldog. Interwoven had partnered with MediaBin and WebWare Corp. so its TeamSite software could be used to access digital media stored in MediaBin or WebWare repositories. But that wasn't enough. "Our customers have always been badgering us to do more in this area," Brauns says. "We wallpapered it with our partnerships."