Our Commitment to OpenAsset

We have a lot to celebrate with OpenAsset over the past 10 years, building a product with a great user base we love. With that in mind and to serve our clients best, we have decided to focus on our core strengths and have an announcement to make.

OpenAsset Media, our original product for managing images & videos, has been wildly successful in helping AEC companies. Today we are reaffirming our commitment to this product and will be taking it into exciting new directions.

While we hoped to achieve a similar level of success with our second product OpenAsset BIM, the writers cliche of the “hard 2nd novel” has proved to be true. We have decided to concentrate on what we do best; continue to help people manage images and videos through OpenAsset Media and ceasing support for OpenAsset BIM starting in 2016.

This decision will enable us to double down on the needs of the vast majority of our users, and continue to retain over 99% of our clients year on year.

A bit of Background

A little over 10 years ago we realized that AEC companies had a problem managing images, so we built OpenAsset. We work with over 500 clients across the globe to help them successfully manage, share and use images. We love our clients and we continue to get great feedback on the product.

Our success let us expand from London and we opened an office in New York, established reseller partnerships in Asia and Australia, as well as an integration partnership with Deltek. We are very excited about our accomplishments in the first 10 years, and feel we have hit our stride as the leading DAM platform for images within AEC.

About 4 years ago we started having conversations with firms about a new problem they were facing: managing BIM content, and specifically Revit families. It seemed like a natural fit: AEC firms + asset management. Check and check! These initial conversations and subsequent research led us to developing, selling and supporting a new product: OpenAsset BIM.

We've spoken to clients and partners and undergone a thorough review of OpenAsset BIM. We've surveyed key users, scrutinized feedback, and analysed usage metrics like the geeks we are. We know the needs of Revit users are different to marketing professionals, and we've concluded that reaching a perfect product fit, with truly happy users is not attainable.

We want to continue to excel which means recognizing our strengths and concentrating on them, even if it results in tough decisions.

Commitment to Support

We are committed to making this a smooth transition for our clients, and will support OpenAsset BIM and the Revit plugin through the end of each client’s current license subscription. In order to provide enough runway and help our clients plan their exit from OpenAsset BIM, clients can extend their subscription through to December 31st, 2015. We will also provide product updates to support new releases of Revit by Autodesk in 2015.

We’ll work with clients to help facilitate migrations of Revit families to alternative products. Starting on January 1, 2016 we will no longer support OpenAsset BIM or the Revit plugin.

Moving on and Accelerating Forward

We have big ambitions for our core OpenAsset Media product, which will once again be known as OpenAsset. We’ll focus our efforts on product improvements that will continue to build on the success of OpenAsset.

We’ll be building new apps for working with images and videos on mobile devices in the field, delivering OpenAsset in the Cloud and on-premise, offering new and exciting ways to create outstanding marketing materials and much much more.

Conclusion

While we have had to make a tough decision to retire OpenAsset BIM, we are extremely excited about the direction of OpenAsset and are doubling down on our commitment to providing our clients with the best DAM possible for images & videos.

If you have any questions about OpenAsset or our decision regarding BIM please do not hesitate to contact us.

Daniel Emmerson & Peter Walsham
Co-Founders and Joint CEOs