Artesia's acquisition of Irwin Marcus' company, Marcus Technology, and a few employees at his midtown Manhattan office merited only a brief in the Washington Post last week, but the small deal illustrates a larger trend in the industry. Irwin Marcus' career has paralleled the rise of digital asset management (DAM), and his decision to sell his own business and go to work for someone else for the first time in 20 years reflects an important shift in the way these systems are sold and the role they play within large organizations. It also reminds us of the importance that individuals play in the success of technology.

A long, strange trip. Those of you who have been in this business longer than you care to admit may recall that Marcus broke into publishing in 1980 with the first microcomputer interface for a popular typesetting machine. Marcus' MC2 Solution connected the Tandy TRS-80 to the Linotronic VIP and 202, best-selling cold-type typesetters that had a paper tape interface. Through the use of shift registers and voltage translators, Marcus developed an interface that turned the paper-tape interface of the 202 into a parallel port for the "trash 80," as Tandy's microcomputer was affectionately known. With only 32K to work with (that's not a typo!), Marcus wrote code for the TRS-80 that enabled operators to create composed galleys. It was the beginning of the PC revolution in typesetting.

During the 1980s, Marcus utilized his skill in interfaces to help magazines hook up Bestinfo's composition system to the 202. The Marcus box was popular-we at Seybold used one to drive a 202 from a Bestinfo system in 1987 and 1988. When Bestinfo ditched the magazine market for catalogs, Marcus switched gears and teamed up with Archetype and its new product InterSep. InterSep was the first commercial PC and Mac-based media asset management system-an inexpensive Novell system based on a Btrieve database for keeping track of digital assets. Marcus' innovation was to create a cross-platform CD Jukebox solution called Istore that ran on the same Novell network. He installed the system for dozens of clients, including CMP Publications, Penthouse, Omni and Whirlpool. The complete solution gave clients media asset management tied to their production layout process-complete with OPI-creating an efficient production workflow for print products.

When Archetype created MediaBank on an Access database in the mid-1990s, Marcus again looked around for opportunities and found North Plains' Telescope. An up-and-coming SQL-based media asset manager, Telescope showed promise but lacked key features that clients such as Kimberly Clark and Publishers Clearinghouse wanted. Tops on that list was a Web interface. Marcus and his team developed the first Web front-end to Telescope (in 1996, no less) and also extended the product with more configurable metadata fields, additional database interfaces and a Quark Xtension with which you could drag and drop items from the database onto the page layout. Once again, Marcus installed dozens of systems at major publishing houses and retailers. As the popularity of Telescope (and its OEM brother, Luminous' Media Manager) grew, however, Marcus found he was no longer an exclusive VAR but just another dealer. Departmental image management was becoming more of a commodity. Within a few years, North Plains was developing its own Web interface based on the WebObjects that would be part of its Enterprise Edition.

At the same time, the success of asset management systems led to greater recognition of their utility within the customer base. Systems that Marcus had installed had paid such dividends to some of his clients that the clients decided to roll them out across other departments. When that happened, Marcus found himself in competition at his own accounts with vendors pitching their enterprise-level products to senior executives within the organization.

Graduating to the next level. The decision to move again, and this time to join another company rather than go it alone, came in part because asset management has changed from purely a point solution to one of base technology supporting multiple needs within a company. "We put these systems in at a time when no one wanted asset management. They all had champions within the department; IT often didn't back them up-no one knew what these systems were; no one believed that they would work," Marcus explained in a recent interview.

What a difference a few years can make. Digital asset management has graduated from being a workgroup-level specialty application to a key "enterprise" technology, which means that a corporate IT department, potentially the CIO, not a production manager, is the buyer. At that level, the one-on-one relationship that Marcus offered his customers is less impressive than the "we've got a whole team" message that vendors such as Artesia bring to the boardroom.

Time to reflect. By buying Marcus Technologies, Artesia has bought an entrée to Irwin Marcus's accounts, and with that an opportunity to migrate them from workgroup to enterprise installations. More importantly, Artesia has acquired someone with years of experience in turning commercial technology into systems that work in the field. Marcus's contribution to the industry has been piecing together technology components into complete solutions. As DAM moves up to the enterprise level, IT buyers will no doubt weigh a company's health, its stature and relationships in the marketplace, the architecture, and the size of its product's checklist of features. But let's not forget that it is the hard work of skilled individuals-technologists that understand the business application-that are most often the difference between failure and success. Asset management-like content management-has grown up and is now recognized as a technology that can be part of an enterprise-wide infrastructure. But it will be people like Irwin Marcus who figure out all the connections that have to be made for systems like TEAMS to pay dividends-by integrating them seamlessly with each department's workflow.

Mark Walter was a senior editor for The Seybold Report.

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As a Legend Moves On, A Market Grows Up

As a Legend Moves On,
A Market Grows Up