The most common question I get from our Digital & Media Asset Management research subscribers these days is, "Should I stick with OpenText?" In fact, three of our subscribers asked me this in the past week. Mega-ECM vendor OpenText are the current owners of "Media Manager" -- the product formerly known as Artesia, now dressed up in new, Flash-fronted clothes.

My answer varies, of course, based on the customer. Because Artesia is the granddaddy of DAM, early adopters of DAM technology tended to deploy it, and are usually running a legacy version. Version 7 has now been out for a while, but customers have traditionally been very hesitant to upgrade, and still are. Oftentimes they've bought our research to consider alternatives.

OpenText customers I know have hesitations with regards to customer service (really, lack thereof), speed, and the non-iPad-compatible Flash-based interface. Because the iPad has been so widely adopted by creatives and brand managers, ability to use a DAM on the iPad has become a key criteria for DAM buyers.

Though OpenText countered this problem with an iPad-specific application for asset review and approval, next to the HTML5-based offerings from MediaBeacon and shortly, North Plains (which allows the DAM to work on any sort of tablet), it comes off as sub-par. The choice of Flash interface, though, doesn't just affect iPad users.

Consider this example when I was working with one large global corporation to select a DAM.  OpenText was on the list of finalists, yet presented a big hurdle, since slow-to-upgrade, locked-down corporate machines had to have (at the time) the most recent browser and Flash version to run Media Manager. The prospective customer actually inquired about buying version 6, instead, but in the long run ended up going with a different vendor. Needless to say, we can't help but think that OpenText made a huge mistake taking the Flash route.

But perhaps OpenText's biggest problem in holding on to licensees is that their legacy customers don't get any love. When I first started covering Artesia back in 2007, it was a struggle to find a single customer who thought the support they got was anything more than mediocre. Engineers loved the technology, describing it as "awesomely scalable" and "a very useful enterprise platform," but businesspeople and techies alike said, "but if you need something, they ignore you." Even the most effective technology in the world just doesn't make up for that.

The icing on the cake was when, in 2008, OpenText announced a new customer care program that in reality seems to have amounted to very little. New customers get more attention, but long-term ones still fall by the wayside. Recently, while having coffee with a longtime OpenText Artesia user in New York City, she told me she was in fact asked to be a part of a customer care review program a couple of years ago. What came of it? "It was never mentioned to me again. I'm lucky if I hear from them about anything besides a bill."

OTMM is a powerful — but complicated — DAM system that requires a substantial investment of time, money, and resources to realize its full potential. Some customers are willing to commit to that; others no longer are. Today there are so many DAM options, it's not a foregone conclusion to stick with the one you have -- especially if you're not getting the attention you deserve as a customer.