Acquia's Acquisition of Widen

Acquia empowers thousands of the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers and IT operations teams to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions and help businesses stand out.

Widen is a marketing technology company specializing in digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM). The company’s cloud-based DAM and PIM software simplifies how digital assets, product specs and marketing copy are delivered to market. Award-winning Widen solutions help marketing teams across 700 organizations create, review, manage, distribute and analyze their content across its entire lifecycle.

Acquia DAM is the Widen Collective! It’s the same powerful DAM platform, with new branding. Acquia DAM (Widen) is now also able to integrate with all tools across Acquia’s digital experience platform (DXP) — as well as hundreds of other systems. But you’ll still be able to use and purchase it as a standalone platform, too. Additionally, you can count on receiving the high-quality software and support you’ve come to expect from Widen, only now with a new look and more resources for DAM information.

Acquia announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Widen, a provider of digital asset management and product information management software. With Widen, Acquia extends its leadership in managing web applications. Customers will benefit from being able to add rich content—such as images, videos, PDFs—to any digital customer experience.

It’s important to our customers that they have a fully integrated DAM as part of their DXP solution. We evaluated all potential options and considered Widen to be the best fit. The company is growing quickly and has extremely satisfied customers, and the technology can be fully integrated with our DXP.

The Widen platform is unique in its ability to combine digital asset management and product information management. This means that brands can centrally manage and leverage digital assets with product information across the digital experience. It simplifies how brand, marketing and product content is organized, accessed and delivered to market, empowering teams to find what they need, when they need it. Widen keeps track of versions and automatically publishes updated content across all channels. Plus, metadata, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) power more efficient content workflows. The result: brands leveraging their digital content and product information to build stronger, more consistent, more trusting and longer-lasting relationships with customers.

Acquia customers can purchase the Widen DAM and PIM solutions from Acquia, together or to complement Drupal Cloud, Marketing Cloud or Acquia Open DXP. With access to an integrated platform under one roof, Acquia customers will be able to manage all brand content, data and experiences shaping the customer journey. Customers on the current Acquia DAM product may elect to remain on that platform or migrate to the new solution.

Yes, Widen offers a Drupal Digital Asset Management Module. It lets users do things like search for assets in Widen products and publish them directly within their Drupal application, use embed codes to automatically update new versions of assets in Drupal and use dynamic resizing. Benefits to users include saving time switching between two applications and spending less time uploading and downloading rich media assets. Acquia will devote resources to enhancing this integration.

Widen has more than 700 customers, including prominent brands such as Autodesk, Boston Ballet, Brooks, Carnival Cruise Line, Crayola, Energizer, Hootsuite, New Balance, Progressive and the University of Georgia.

Acquia will increase investment in Widen R&D to accelerate innovation in the product line. Acquia also will invest in development of the Widen Drupal module, which enables customers to use assets managed by Widen solutions in Drupal 8 and 9 applications. Current Widen customers will retain access to the Widen products and receive support as usual. They also gain the benefit of access to a full range of DXP products that will be seamlessly integrated with their DAM.

Acquia will invest in Widen R&D to speed product innovation. At the same time, Acquia will make the products available through its partner ecosystem. Widen partners may continue to work with the Widen partner ecosystem.

Acquia has nearly 1,400 employees worldwide. Widen has 135 employees, most of whom are in Madison, Wisconsin and London, UK.