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Kas Thomas

Adobe: an elephant in the DAM room?

4-May-2009

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology,

Usually, as an analyst, I'm on the receiving side of briefings, but yesterday I gave one to a CMS Watch subscriber wanting to know more about Digital Asset Management (DAM). The customer asked an excellent question, something I myself have been wondering for some time: Where is Adobe Systems in the DAM pantheon? Where is Adobe's DAM offering?

Short answer, I don't know. Adobe has most of the necessary pieces, but hasn't assembled them into a coherent whole. Some of the pieces include:

• Experience with Java application servers. Adobe owns, controls, continues to sell, and continues to develop (for internal use) the JRun app server, and some of Adobe's products are supported on JBoss and other application servers as well.
• Some very interesting workflow and rights-management bits in the LiveCycle suite.
• Adobe Version Cue, which provides a versioning and collaboration server for workgroup scenarios. A server product that runs atop JRun, Version Cue uses an embedded instance of MySQL and has SOAP interfaces.
• Adobe Bridge, a lightbox file-preview and file-management application with metadata editing and other tools built-in, is bundled into the Adobe Creative Suite products. (Notably, Bridge is a SOAP client that can talk to Adobe Version Cue servers.)

And of course, the CS products themselves are used extensively by the same creative professionals whose needs are addressed by conventional DAM products of the Artesia, MediaBin, or North Plains variety.

The one piece that's missing from all this is a standards-based enterprise repository. Somewhat interesting in that regard is the September 2008 deal in which Adobe partnered with Alfresco to power the Acrobat.com site. (That site has since proven to be quite successful and is on the verge of surpassing LiveMeeting.com and OfficeLive.com for adoption.) Could Alfresco be the linchpin of a future Adobe DAM initiative?

Adobe's product integration story is still somewhat haphazard (on a marketing level; not a functional level) and one gets the sense that no one at Adobe sees the potential in bringing together a fully featured DAM solution -- a complete DAM package -- to compete in the open market with the likes of Autonomy's MediaBin, say, or Canto Cumulus.

When and if this elephant-in-the-room ever decides to make its presence felt, the ground could fairly shake. It will be interesting, I think, to see how much longer the pachyderm from San Jose will be content to stand on the sidelines.