Digital Asset Management: The Product Landscape -- CMS Watch

Digital Asset Management: The Product Landscape -- CMS Watch:
"Digital Asset Management: The Product Landscape
by Chris Lynn
23-Aug-2002

Digital Asset Management ('DAM') has been around for a decade or more, but it is only in the last couple of years that mainstream I.T. analysts and reporters have paid much attention to it. In the meantime, some very powerful asset management technologies have emerged, but DAM is likely to play only a supporting role in larger corporate 'enterprise content management' (ECM) frameworks.

The Emergence of DAM

The term Digital Asset Management arose from the printing and publishing industry, and its variant, Media Asset Management (MAM) from the broadcast industry. CNN uses a system from IBM and Sony to manage their news archive, and large printers such as R.R.Donnelley have multiple DAM systems for storing and retrieving their clients? print ads, magazine pages, and catalogs. Even small ($5m annual revenues) pre-press shops will often have a hundred thousand dollars? worth of DAM software running on a server with a terabyte or more of RAID storage. This is no small investment, but one that is justified by the productivity gains that can accrue from the system, by the increased switching costs to help lock a client in, and ? as clients are given web-based access to their assets ? by the potential for incremental revenues.

But DAM remained a niche market until relatively recently, when several factors coincided to drive it toward the mainstream:

* The availability to low-cost storage to hold rich-media files online
* High-speed connectivity, both on the LAN and across the Internet, making the digital transfer of such files feasible
* The general 'democratization' caused by technology, so that work that was previously contracted out to a specialist can be done by the generalist user (of course, this has driven Web Content Management ? WCM ? as well).
* The desire of corporate marketing groups to become more efficient
* The beginnings of a confluence among document management, content management, knowledge management and DAM (of which more later)"