Cumulus Product Line History
Cumulus
1.0 shipped to the Apple Macintosh creative community back
in 1992. (Canto had established itself in the Macintosh community
two years prior with the release of the company’s Cirrus
scanning software.) Within a year of it's release, Apple Computer
awarded Cumulus a $50,000 prize for “Most Innovative
Product of 1992.”
Cumulus 1.0 was a single-user product,
but Canto engineers envisioned a day when creative digital
production would be more a collaborative effort. A network-capable
version was put into development. It would set the stage not
only for continued growth in the Cumulus product line, but
for the creation of an entire industry that revolved around
the management of digital assets. |
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| Longtime Cumulus customer Raley's Supermarkets
(Sacramento, California) sent us this scan of a Cumulus 1.1 floppy diskette
they still had on file, proving once and for all: Cumulus users can find anything! |
Within two years, Cumulus would be
upgraded to version 2.5, released in five different languages,
and receive the MacUser Magazine Eddy award for “Best
Publishing & Graphics Utility” for 1993.
Platform "Fever"
With an
increasing number of prestigious awards under its belt, and
gracious coverage from the media, the Cumulus user base expanded
exponentially. And as the number of users increased, so increased
the diversity of those users' needs. No longer was Cumulus
just a tool for creative professionals—companies as
a whole were recognizing the benefits of digital asset management.
But, while most creative professionals
of the day were Macintosh fans, most businesses were not.
Companies saw computer platforms as an either/or proposition.
It was difficult enough for users to move assets between computers
running the same operating system. Moving files across platforms
was a challenge that intrigued few businesses.
Faced with this dilemma, Canto engineers
started thinking different, so to speak: Should the computing
platform really matter?
After some intense re-engineering (and
some concessions made by Canto's Macintosh-loving engineering
team) Cumulus 4 was released to an amazed and polarized computing
community. What was most remarkable about Cumulus 4 was not
that it was a network-ready workhorse—users knew a network
version was coming. What was most remarkable about Cumulus
4 was that it was release for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX
platforms. While simple peer-to-peer networking challenged
many Cumulus competitors for years, Canto engineers had not
only released Cumulus 4.0 in a workgroup-ready network version,
it did so while removing—once and for all—the
concept of “platform” as it pertains to digital
asset management.
Were creative pros using Macintosh?
Were accountants using Windows? Were the world's most reliable
servers running UNIX?
Yes, yes and yes, but it no longer
mattered. Assets stored on one platform were now available
to users on all supported platforms.
What’s more, it no longer
mattered where people worked. TCP/IP-based networking was
now a part of Cumulus. Production workgroups could now span
the office, the country, or even the planet. The global collaboration
Canto engineers envisioned back in 1992 was now a reality
for users of Cumulus. (Or at least for those will to buy one
of those newfangled "network interfaces" for their
computers.)
Open Architecture, Open Future
In 1999,
Cumulus would see its next technological milestone: Knowing
that closed systems would not fit well in the platform-agnostic,
open-architecture future of computing, Canto revamped Cumulus
to enable easy connectivity to other systems. In doing so,
they also ensured future Cumulus product enhancements would
never be limited by aging program architectures. The release,
Cumulus 5, would offer users over 100 new features and be
available—for the first time—in an enterprise-ready
edition.
Within two years, there would be over
9,000 client/server installations of Cumulus worldwide.
Collaboration was clearly where this
market was headed and Canto continued to drive the Cumulus
product line in that direction. The program’s new open
architecture enabled the development of “hooks”
that were never before possible between Cumulus and other
systems. Cumulus was now a team player with legacy systems,
and offered users of those systems dramatic productivity benefits.
(Anyone who has used a SQL command line to search for a photograph
can imagine the excitement of those users the first time they
experienced the streamlined Cumulus user interface.)
http://Cumulus.Goes.online
But the
Cumulus 5 open architecture enabled far more than direct links
with older systems—it offered direct links to newer
systems, like professional digital cameras, personal audio
players and, most significantly, the World Wide Web. Users
were able to search and retrieve assets using any standard
Web browser anywhere an Internet connection was available.
Entire collections of assets could be published to the Web
with push-button ease.
Canto took Web publishing one step
further in 2002 with the release of Web Publisher Pro, which
enabled Cumulus users to develop and publish dynamic Web-based
asset collections complete with an integrated order and fulfillment
system. A year later, Canto would up the Internet-access bar
once more with the release of Internet Client Pro, which enabled
users to manage and edit Cumulus catalogs from any Internet-connected
Web browser worldwide.
The Joy of Six
By the
end of 2003, Cumulus 6 was announced. With improved ease-of-use
came additional advanced technologies such as Canto’s
Embedded Java™ Plugin (EJaP) technology, which enabled
system integrators to build custom Cumulus-connected applications
once and run them on any supported Java platform. This not
only cut development costs in half, it further encouraged
Canto’s platform independence.
In the first quarter of 2005, Canto
released Cumulus 6.5, bringing LDAP support to the product
line, adding a new user authentication API, and greatly simplifying
administrative tasks. Cumulus 6.5 would mark the final release
of the Cumulus Single User Edition.
In July of that same year, Internet
Client Pro 3.0 and Web Publisher Pro 3.0 were released in
conjunction with Cumulus 6.6. Added were many of the search
and management features previously available only with the
operating system-native Cumulus Client software. User-favorite
features such as Asset Actions (asset-processing functions)
were now available via the Web. RSA security for password
authentication was added, and users were able to embed URL
asset reference links into email that would enable recipients
to click and be taken directly to the asset.
Seventh Heaven
In the
Summer of 2006, Canto released the Cumulus 7 product line.
Massive updates were made to the user interface, the database
back end and the Web Clients. Cumulus could now track relationships
between assets, enabling users to find what they need in new,
intuitive ways never before available. In addition, the 7.0
release saw the update of the Web Clients to support modern
Web technologies that enable Canto's engineers to make future
improvement to the Web Clients that will increasingly blur
the lines between the features of Web and OS-native use.
Soon thereafter, Canto announced the
division of the Cumulus underbelly from its Native and Web-based
user interfaces. Dubbed Cumulus Core, Canto's metadata processing
engine would now be treated as an independent technology,
complete with its own development schedule. Canto and third
parties can now easily build custom applications based on
Cumulus Core that will further cement the company's position
as the world leader in digital asset management technologies.
16 Years Later
Today, with 13,000+ Cumulus Servers and 1,000,000+ user licenses sold, Canto remains
the Digital Asset Management market’s leader. And Cumulus?
More than ever, the world's favorite digital asset management
system.
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