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Kas Thomas

DAM's growing pains

15-May-2008

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Implementation, Information Architecture, Marketplace at Large, XML

Digital Asset Management may not constitute a huge slice of the ECM pie, but it's a fast-growing slice. That was the consensus of several experts who spoke at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management show in New York earlier this week. The generally accepted estimate is that the DAM market worldwide presently accounts for a yearly spend of between a third of a billion and half a billion dollars; and overall spending is increasing at the rate of twenty-something percent per year. If true (and one never knows...) that's a pretty healthy clip.

With any expanding technology there are bound to be "growing pains," and this is certainly true of DAM. In talking to vendor CEOs and CTOs, their customers, consultants, developers, fellow analysts, and other cognoscenti at the Henry Stewart conference, I heard certain concerns raised over and over again. I'll summarize the major ones quickly:

Silo proliferation: Many large enterprises have gotten to the point where multiple media repositories are being supported internally for multiple uses by multiple groups. Consolidating assets across a balkanized DAM landscape is often difficult for a variety of reasons. The challenge is to unify the media cloud with some sort of federation technology.

Media sharing across geographies: An organization headquartered in London has artists in Paris, editors in Montreal, and videographers in New York. How do the various offices collaborate on the processing of shared resources (including very large video files), without unacceptable latencies or bandwidth exhaustion?

Metadata handling: Which files, under what circumstances, should have XMP metadata embedded in them as opposed to being passed separately in a sidecar payload? How do you apply access control to metadata at the attribute or element level? How can you secure metadata against tampering (and detect tampering when it occurs)? How can you encrypt metadata so that unauthorized individuals who gain access to an asset can't see the metadata? If an asset with embedded metadata gets passed back and forth between DAMs, how do you keep one system from overwriting the metadata created by the other? (Ingestion rules may cause collisions.) These are just some of the metadata-related issues that "enterprise DAM" customers are struggling with.

Integration with enterprise systems: The typical DAM product was not designed with interoperability in mind and represents "yet another proprietary silo" in an IT environment. To address this, most vendors have added Web Service APIs to their DAM products. But as Jason Bright (founder and CEO of MediaBeacon) points out, all this does is open up a few peepholes into what's basically still a crazy-quilt of vendor-specific API methods. It doesn't really solve the problem.

Systems take too long to implement: Enterprise DAM projects are complex, expensive, and risky, typically involving a "cast of thousands" (many stakeholders), with a high potential for paralysis by analysis. Customers as well as vendors are desperate to improve the "time-to-value" proposition. This may account, in part, for the recent trend toward SaaS-based DAM. (North Plains Systems announced its entry into the SaaS fold at the Henry Stewart show this week.) Nevertheless, SaaS isn't for everyone, and DAM "in the large" requires serious research and advance planning, regardless of supplier model.

Of course, I should point out that you can shorten your research time considerably with the aid of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, our 275-page guide to the DAM market, containing no-nonsense evaluations of DAM and MAM products from 18 established vendors. (You can see a free online sample here.)

The challenges around Digital Asset Management are daunting and grow by the day. But the same can be said of the attendant opportunities.