Old Article, Common Question: How does a company founded in 1948 get into digital asset management software?
It’s a confused look or baffled pause we get every time someone evaluating our digital asset management services asks “How long have you been around?” and we respond with an answer that starts or ends with “…60 years!”
In the mid 1990s, as a 40-some year old family-owned company creating and manipulating large volumes of massive image and page files with our prepress operations, Widen created a problem for our customers by not having a means to easily manage, access and distribute these “digital assets” from different locations across the country. Hence, Widen began the R&D department for what would later be known as Digital Asset Management software.
Widen never thought of providing software that would be left up to the customer’s IT department to install, maintain and support. We’ve always been delivering software as a service provider—placing an emphasis on the Service aspects. The Marketing and Creative people we worked with did not want that then, they don’t want that now, and more common nowadays—IT departments don’t want that either. C’mon IT, why would you want to be taken off supporting your core business applications to devote resources to Marketing with such a specialized and ever-changing demand?
Widen never thought of providing software that would be left up to the customer’s IT department to install, maintain and support. We’ve always been delivering software as a service provider—placing an emphasis on the Service aspects. The Marketing and Creative people we worked with did not want that then, they don’t want that now, and more common nowadays—IT departments don’t want that either. C’mon IT, why would you want to be taken off supporting your core business applications to devote resources to Marketing with such a specialized and ever-changing demand?
Read the WisBusiness.com article “Gonnering: Widen Enterprises thrives through tech transitions” from March 31, 2009 to learn more about the evolution of Widen’s service offering to marketing and creative groups. Or, check out Widen’s History to learn how it all began—starting in 1948 as Widen Engraving, Co. Check out the historical photos of Widen Engraving Co. at Facebook.com/Widen.
People talk all the time about the good old days, but if you were a photo editor, audio/video professional or graphic artist (or owned a company providing these services) in the 1960s those days were often quite tedious. What we call asset management, the storing and retrieval of photos or artwork, meant having entire rooms, sometimes even entire buildings, full of file cabinets, storage closets and 1,000-page inventory lists. It could take days to find something. 
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I’ll be the first to admit… Digital Asset Management is not that sexy. As a marketing guy, it’s hard to get excited about databases. However, the content stored in a DAM system is another story… Of all the content types, digital assets—particularly images and videos—got to be the sexiest! Consider the growth and popularity of online video... 
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