DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 22) MS MANAGE & STRATEGY & To Market, To Market d a s the volume of digital media within an enterprise steadily increases, organizations are faced with the responsibility of managing their digital assets throughout the entire life cycle as well. Looking towards DAM initiatives, enterprises will need to have the market “know how” to shop for their DAM needs. Digital media — photos, audio files, video clips, Flash animations, games and banner ads, PDF documents and web pages — has become an increasingly significant part of our everyday experience. The management of this digital media throughout its lifetime, regardless of final output medium, is the general domain of digital asset management or DAM. Exploring this growing market sector, CMS Watch conducted a fivemonth research project, performing critical product evaluations of 18 DAM tools and looking at the overall DAM market. We observed that DAM technology has made significant strides in maturity, but it remains a highly fragmented and specialized industry, where many customers are forsaking “name” players in favor of niche or hosted solutions. In our evaluations, we have broken down the marketplace into three tiers, roughly from those that are more complex and appropriate for enterprise-scale implementations to those that are simpler and more appropriate for workgroup or departmental implementations (and, thus, are usually cheaper). Enterprise DAM Open Text: Artesia DAM; Interwoven: MediaBin; EMC: Documentum Digital Asset Manager; ClearStory Systems: ActiveMedia; North Plains TeleScope; and IBM: FileNet/Ancept Media Server are considered the “major players” in the arena of digital and media asset management. Three of them (Open Text’s Artesia, EMC’s Documentum DAM and Interwoven’s MediaBin) are tools that came of age on their own, as products of independent companies before bigger ECM players gobbled them up. Note that MediaBin and Artesia, in particular, largely continue to operate as entities quite separate from their corporate parents, while EMC’s Digital Asset Manager little resembles the original product, Bulldog. ClearStory and North Plains remain the two major pure-play DAM vendors, whereas IBM’s partnership with Ancept Media Server, while not a single-company solution, presents an interesting paired offering for media asset management (MAM) in particular. What all these vendors have in common is that they’re quite malleable platforms — ones that you should consider if digital or media asset management are core to your business. They’re also rather expensive ($100k on the low end and half a million on the high end, just for licensing) and designed to integrate with larger ECM or enterprise architectures. However, that doesn’t happen easily: adopting and maintaining any of these tools takes a great deal of work. Assessing the marketplace of digital asset management By Theresa Regli 22 document june.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
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