On the heels of my colleague Alan's report of Open Text's purchase of Spicer, the next sign along the company's acquisition trail was posted yesterday with the acquisition of media asset management vendor eMotion.

eMotion's prior caretaker was Corbis, famous for their massive image library. eMotion, a hosted MAM service, was a natural compliment to Corbis' offering, allowing publishers, image and video production managers to host both their own assets, as well as pointers to ones licensed from Corbis, in one place.

There's several interesting things about this acquisition. First is that Open Text already owns a rather sizable DAM software offering, Artesia. This reminds me a bit of when Microsoft acquired FAST -- many asked why Redmond needed another search tool, when they already had several of their own. It comes back to scenarios and specific capabilities. Just as searching a public website vs. a SharePoint repository vs. your firewall-protected Oracle databases call for very different types of search technologies, so does managing digital imagery vs. time-based assets. Like Microsoft, Open Text wants to dominate more of those niches.

DAM and MAM used to be quite separate, and different vendors "grew up" focusing on one domain or the other. As we learned in our research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, there's few vendors that do well managing both images and video. Artesia's MAM capabilities are quite strong, compared to other vendors that grew up on the DAM side of the equation. Still, pure-play MAM companies like Blue Order, for now, continue to get the bigger share of the broadcast company MAM pie. Open Text's latest acquisition blurs the line between MAM and DAM even more, and shows they'd like to reach futher into both their core client base of marketers and advertising agencies as well as to the snazzy movie studios in Hollywood and beyond. Whether that can happen with two very separate technologies, Artesia and eMotion, will be interesting to see.

Also of note is that eMotion is a hosted or "On Demand" solution, whereas Artesia is strictly licensed softare. Several other DAM / MAM vendors have recently debuted hosted offerings as well. We've written in the past about the ambiguities of what a vendor is really offering when they say "On Demand", so proceed with caution. Open Text already markets a mish-mash of disjointed and loosely integrated ECM tools. This latest purchase is another reason for you, the buyer, to remain meticulous about understanding what each part of the pie really does.