Go Forth and Integrate: Partnering with CI-HUB

There was a time when we purchased software to solve problems. Download. Install. Problem solved. Software was the instant elixir. Tech entrepreneurs became tech emperors, and our digital lives were smooth and beautiful (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit).

That is until the sheer volume of software solutions became a problem in itself: so many new systems to learn, new computers to purchase (because they could no longer handle all those processor-hungry apps). Each app existing in splendid isolation from one another. A chaotic realm of tantalizing possibilities. A blizzard of problem-solving apps at our fingertips, each claiming to be more intuitive than the next.

The Importance of Centralised Digital Asset Management

Today, we (the user) find ourselves lost in the dizzying galaxy of 'apps'. It can be exciting, bewildering even. And, yes, it can end up becoming pretty inefficient too.

When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), the dominant concept has always been to centralise; to solve the widespread problem of uncontrolled fragmentation whereby users squirrel away valuable digital assets on local hard drives. A good DAM is about placing your assets in a single secure place (most probably on a cloud server) so access becomes universal, yet controlled.

The mantra you'll hear chanted by many DAM specialists the world over is that your digital asset management platform should become 'a single source of truth'. You might imagine your DAM as the still center of a digital mandala with all the spokes of the wheel converging on your DAM - the data hub at the heart of your digital universe.

While this is true - yes, your DAM really should be a single source of truth for your archives and data - achieving this reality isn't so simple. Trust us, we've thought about it. In fact, we're thinking about it all the time.

Put very simply, in today's world one of the biggest challenges is how to connect one's DAM to a long list of apps, many of which have become indispensable tools, and which are themselves continuously changing, continuously being upgraded and so on. Basically, it's a moving target.

Our Partnership with CI-HUB: Bringing Integration to Life

At LightRocket, our developers went about identifying some candidate apps, read their documentation, and started preparing the necessary APIs, only to discover, obviously, that keeping everything up to date for just one integration was going to be lots of work, let alone for multiple integrations. Doing this ourselves, we realized, wasn't practical.

Enter CI-HUB, a clever Berlin-based company that saw opportunity in chaos. Their solution? Specialise in providing a service that connects DAM systems to a plethora of high-profile (meaning the most widely used) apps. I know, genius ideas are often infuriatingly simple!

At LightRocket, where 'integration' has been identified as one of the core pillars of our service, we see CI-HUB as an “integration white knight”. We're a small, highly specialised company that is passionate (and possibly even a little geeky) about digital asset management. We recognise, like so many of our competitors, that in today's world integration is essential. We also recognise that the distraction and many technical hurdles that plunging into a myriad of complex integrations represents.

It's still early days on our integration journey with CI-HUB, but we're excited to start the process of finally connecting the LightRocket DAM to a wide range of apps including Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365 (yes, that means integrations with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint). There's even Figma, Sketch Word, WordPress and much, much more.

We'll be sharing news about our integration journey with CI-HUB as it becomes available. For now, however, we're just excited to be partnering with CI-HUB and to have at last found an efficient way to bring the power of integration to our clients.