Meet DAM and Work Freely With Your Files – 6

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7. DAM Global Market Status

Products in this market were initially custom built solutions to meet the specific needs of individual firms. Now product suites have modular architectures so that customers can pick and choose the functionality they require instead of buying the entire product suite. Product architecture is also very open to allow full integration with other third party systems. Most architectures are now built on a web services platform to ease integration. Though most of the platforms currently use J2EE, many vendors are now working on a .NET strategy as well. Vendors that do not use either platform do have XML based APIs to facilitate interoperability and integration.

a. Competitive Ecosphere

Products in this market were initially custom built solutions to meet the specific needs of individual firms. Now product suites have modular architectures so that customers can pick and choose the functionality they require instead of buying the entire product suite. The number of competitors in the world DAM market continues to be dynamic as new vendors crop up while others drop out of the market each year. No vendor even has 5 percent of market share. There are over 70 vendors worldwide that provide DAM solutions in some form and many more who claim to provide DAM and have very basic indexing and search capabilities. In 2006 there were different tiers of competition within the vendor landscape for the DAM market.

These included:

• Large broadcast equipment manufacturers that sold DAM to the media and entertainment (M&E) market
• Large storage and software companies that sell DAM to enterprise and M&E markets
• Small and highly specialized DAM software companies that sell high-end DAM solutions as installed or hosted solutions
• Small DAM software companies that sell low-end DAM solutions mainly as workgroup solutions

The industry has started seeing a lot of investment and consolidation activity since 2002. Many DAM vendors found themselves in too much of a niche market. Customers felt that they needed more collaborative bids as their needs were better met by the implementation of a suite of products from various vendors. This led to strategic partnerships across the DAM value chain. With tight capital markets these partnerships have been turning towards consolidation. Vendors feel that they can be more competitive by having a more enhanced product suite through consolidation and also get funding more easily. Many outside parties are also seeing this industry as very lucrative and looking to invest into companies in this area. Vendors that do not use either platform do have XML based APIs to facilitate interoperability and integration.

b. Significant Vendors and Important Acquisitions

Significant vendors in the DAM market include (in no particular order): EMC, NorthPlains, Interwoven, OpenText, Corbis, Canto, Avid, Getty Images, Widen, ClearStory Systems, MediaBeacon, Harris, Extensis, Xinet, Paxonix, Blue Order, Vizrt and Apple to name a few in this heavily fragmented market.

Apart from companies within the DAM space consolidation is also occurring from allied industries. Key acquisitions since 2000 include Documentum’s acquisition of Bulldog and then EMC’s acquisition of Documentum; Savvis’s acquisition of Wam!Net; Interwoven’s acquisition of Mediabin; Stellent’s acquisition of Ancept followed by the sale of Ancept to North American Systems International; Avid’s acquisition of NXN; Corbis’s acquisition of eMotion; OpenText’s acquisition of Artesia; Autonomy’s acquisition of Virage; Apple’s acquisition of Proximity; Vizrt’s acquisition of Ardendo; Oracle’s acquisition of Context Media and INSCI’s acquisition of Webware to form ClearStory. In all these examples the acquiring company belongs to an allied market. This shows how, as the DAM market evolves, vendors from allied markets looking to enhance their product offering are going to try and achieve this through buying into the DAM market rather than reinventing the wheel on their own. Similar acquisition is also expected between DAM and another growing market – The Marketing Process Optimization Solutions (MPOS) market. Many MPOS vendors already partner with DAM vendors and/or have some light DAM functionality built into their solutions. The ability to integrate with third party systems and collaboration platforms has become very important. Vendors achieve this through either a Web Services architecture or through XML based APIs for integration.

The use of DAM as the central platform that enables workflow integration with other third party systems is a growing trend. Some DAM vendors are trying to position themselves as such a platform themselves by virtue of being built around a Web Services platform, while others are exploring partnerships with infrastructure providers to achieve that. Many third party solution vendors that provide components which integrate into a DAM system as a module are finding lucrative OEM partnerships deals as well, since DAM vendors are now more open to such OEM partner integrations rather than spend time and resources to develop the module themselves. These modules are usually around deep video indexing, transcoding and emerging application modules such as presentation management.[7]

The chart below shows the market positioning of key DAM vendors within the competitive landscape.

c. Core Competencies (Benefits of DAM)

Global Access

Global Access provides any user or program with a single logical view of an enterprise’s digital asset inventory through the most appropriate devices and with role-based views.

Business Problems Solved:
• Easily find/access important information
• Save the time needed to search or recreate assets
• Gain trusted access to existing content and their associated rights to generate new revenue
• Reliably identify rights related to assets
• Exchange assets and corporate knowledge with partners/stakeholders securely

Business Benefits Gained:
• Providing a best-of-class solution improves relationships and increases satisfaction
• There is an opportunity for new sources of revenue when there is a higher degree of self-help in the licensing of digital assets

Digital Asset Warehouse

A digital asset warehouse can be defined as the enterprise solution for storage, organization, search and retrieval of digital assets and their associated rights.

Business Problems Solved
• Can reliably manage large volumes of heterogeneous digital assets
• Centralized logical infrastructure prevents
• Knowledge flight (IP)
• Lost assets
• Recreating existing assets
• Loss of brand consistency across divisions and distribution channels
• Lack of efficiency in locating assets and their associated rights
• Efficiently Track and Protect Rights
• Generates and protects revenue
• Facilitates digitization initiatives rescuing deteriorating physical assets

Business Benefits Gained
• Creating the digital future requires effective control of your digital assets.
• Better control of digital assets and improved reliability of asset integrity delivers better margins.
• Globalization and market fragmentation have pushed traditional content management systems to their limits
• As other technologies associated with delivery, customer relationship management and web content management have matured; the weak link is now the ability to strategically manage, control and deploy assets.
• Managing advertising campaigns and images to enable reuse, coordinate branding across multiple advertising and PR firms, leveraging communication channels while avoiding expensive and wasteful content recreation.

Rich Media Production and Distribution

Rich Media Production and Distribution is the process of creating and producing media (streaming and non-streaming) and delivering various combinations of these assets across lines of business, to trading partners and out to customers.

Business Solutions
• Offers an infrastructure and a set of processes that will scale to support the impending growth in digital assets
• The processes around creating, using and reusing rich media can be simplified and automated
• Digital channels are used effectively
• Creative collaboration is streamlined and distributed

Business Benefits Gained
• Accessing and managing existing assets is as important as creating new ones
• Digital content growth will justify business process improvements to better leverage new media
• The digital divide will become increasingly important at the enterprise level and organizations that cannot integrate their operations and collaborate with their trading partners via digital channels will be increasingly perceived as lesser partners.

d. Opportunities and Forecast

Digital content has grown in popularity and is expected to do so over the forecast period. Traditionally companies in the media and entertainment market have been the main users of these solutions as they have had the maximum amount of content that needs to be digitized and managed. Though media and entertainment continues to be a major source of demand for digital asset management (DAM) systems, there has been a shift in focus towards other markets for DAM system implementation, especially as a tool to facilitate marketing and corporate communications. This shift in demand has primarily come about because of the extensive and increasing use of media documents (audio, video, images, and animation) in other segments. Companies in the corporate horizontal market not only maintain much of their brand equity as rich files but also have accumulated and are continuously creating a large amount of rich content in corporate communications and training. This has created an ever-increasing demand to manage this content.

Enterprise Markets – where DAM is primarily used as marketing and corporate communications tool. This also includes the marketing and corporate side applications for media and entertainment companies. DAM systems provide archive and management for digital assets used in the business process of these organizations. The content or digital asset itself is not the product being sold in these markets. DAM makes a good case for enterprise wide deployment in these markets.

Media and Entertainment (M&E) Markets – where DAM is primarily used as a tool to archive and manage content through the creation, re-purposing and delivery phase of the digital asset and for these markets the content is the actual product being sold. DAM systems typically see work-group level deployments in these markets.
The percentage split in revenue contribution is expected to be initially in favor of the enterprise market with the M&E market overtaking the enterprise market by 2011. This is because of the explosion of digital media in the M&E segment which has made content creators, content owners and content aggregators start looking at asset management solutions seriously.

Apart from healthcare, telecommunications and the mobile wireless markets, increasing DAM applications in fields such as legal, engineering, manufacturing, retail, financial services and architecture are expected to help fuel growth. These verticals should continuously increase the demand for DAM solutions over the forecast period.
The market has an immense amount of growth potential, which is largely driven by the explosion in the use and creation of digital media and the associated value proposition of increased efficiency, cycle time acceleration, reduction in the cost of lost or misplaced work, repurposing of assets and resources among others. Another big driver for the market is the rapid acceptance of DAM as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). More organizations are now open to outsourcing their content management needs and have hosted applications help them free up some of their IT burden.
The biggest challenge faced by this market is the deep fragmentation that exists. This has created a lot of market confusion as many vendors, despite their claims, do not have a true DAM solution but because of such claims customers get confused about what is a true DAM solution. This at times leads to bad customer experiences and reluctance towards further technology investment for DAM.

The industry will continue to grow towards maturity and revenues will continue to increase, though from 2011 growth will be at decreasing rates as the market matures. The DAM market is expected to cross the billion dollar mark in 2011. As DAM implementation increases over the forecast period and current restraints decrease in impact, overall market revenues should grow to well over a billion by the end of the forecast period.

e. Key Future Competitive Factors

There is vast potential for digital asset management (DAM) solutions in the future. As the digital age is transforming day-to-day life, increasingly digital media applications are being found in every vertical market segment creating a huge amount of content and in so doing also creating the need and demand to manage these digital assets. Despite the persistence of some amount of economic sluggishness and tighter capital markets, this market has proven its viability in today’s business environment. This has led companies like EMC, Apple, Oracle, IBM, HP, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems among others to also take active interest in this market either through acquisition or by creating facilitating technology platforms. Successful companies in this market will be the ones that can leverage their technologies with strategic partnerships with others in the DAM space and with vendors in complimentary markets in an effort to consolidate their core competencies to gain market share by targeting multiple verticals instead of using a niche strategy.

Key competitive factors in this market include:

• The ability to integrate with third party systems using a Web services architecture
• Providing DAM through a SaaS model for customers looking at deploying DAM functionality without burdening internal IT
• Modularity to provide customers with the flexibility to choose from the most relevant modules for their business processes
• Enhanced metadata models for more refined indexing and search capabilities, especially for video
• Highly scalable solutions to help customer future proof for increased usage
• Conditional access and DRM (Digital Rights Management) integration to provide enhanced security
• An increased number of file types/formats that can be handled by the system help customers deploy a point solution for all their asset management needs

[7](An Introduction to the World Digital Asset Management Market)