With demand growing for digital asset management, Interwoven Inc. is making a strong move to capitalize on that trend by acquiring MediaBin in a deal announced Monday.

By buying MediaBin, one of the best known independent digital asset-management vendors, Interwoven looks to broaden its ability to help customers manage rich-media files in addition to the traditional Web content and document files for which they've already established workflows. Financial details of the deal haven't been revealed.

The move comes more than a year after one of Interwoven's primary competitors, Documentum, snatched up digital asset-management vendor Bulldog. Interwoven already partnered with MediaBin and WebWare so that Interwoven's TeamSite content-management software could be used to access digital media stored in a MediaBin or WebWare repository. But that wasn't enough. "Our customers have always been badgering us to do more in this area," says CEO Martin Brauns. "We wallpapered it with our partnerships."

Interwoven expects to complete a deeper integration of its MetaTagger software with MediaBin by the end of the year. Then, MetaTagger could automatically populate metadata so that digital media stored in the MediaBin repository could be incorporated more completely into the TeamSite workflow, Brauns says. Brauns didn't want to do that level of integration based on just a partnership with MediaBin, since customers would have had to get support from two companies. "Doing it without acquiring the technology scared me," Brauns says.

Twelve MediaBin customers also are Interwoven clients, including Harrah's Entertainment, which uses both to manage its marketing and Internet assets. Other notables among MediaBin's 50 customers include Ford, John Deere, Microsoft, Reebok, and Samsonite. MediaBin also owns 22 patents for its technology, and Brauns says Interwoven will look for new ways to generate revenue from those patents.

MediaBin customers, who have become accustomed to concurrent-user licenses, should expect some pricing changes. Brauns says Interwoven will probably bring MediaBin pricing in line with its approach of charging per named user.

The deal is expected to close by the end of June, pending the customary regulatory and shareholder approval.