Perhaps not as exciting, but more pertinent to you the enterprise customer, DRM also refers to the process of managing the rights and licensing information of digital assets within an organization. As content technology analysts, we frequently get asked about rights management by customers who are undertaking Digital Asset Management projects. Specifically, they want to know more about the depth of the DRM functionality available in DAM software products in the marketplace and whether/when they need specialist DRM solutions to meet their requirements.

Our just released advisory briefing "Managing Digital Asset Rights in the Enterprise" tries to bring greater clarity to this discussion.

In this advisory, among other topics, you'll find:

• Approaches available to you as a customer to support common DRM requirements
• A comparison of the Rights Management functionality of DAM vs. DRM products
• Considerations to decide when you need a DRM solution alongside your DAM
• An illustrative list of DRM products to jumpstart your vendor research

(As an aside: I referred to the DRM debates in the beginning. To make their point, some clever folks in Sweden got their government to recognize a new religion called "Kopimism",  whose central tenet is the right to share files. Let us just say that at Real Story Group, our central tenet has always been agnosticism. Vendor agnosticism, that is...)

Our DAM research stream subscribers can download the advisory briefing here.

At NAB, Dalet announced its release plan for Galaxy, which will be the updated version of its core MAM platform, and outlined the features to expect when the package eventually ships. Before you get excited, though, note the timeline: select customers are expected to get a dekko of Galaxy in a couple of quarters and it will be a year down the road before full availability of the product.

Nevertheless, it raises the issue of BPM in the media segment.  In many other industries, BPM tools have already gone through the hype and hoopla routine, and by now enterprises have a fair idea of BPM capabilities and limitations. But in the media and broadcast industry, the BPM star has been on the ascendant only fairly recently, and vendors want to marry MAM and BPM. It won’t end up being a silver bullet but the logic is sound and there is merit to the approach.

No surprise then that one of the key features expected in Dalet’s Galaxy is a BPM engine that allows for greater automation of both IT tasks and user activities. Customers will also be able to configure many workflows themselves, supposedly without having to write code. New UI skins, better to-do lists for users, enhanced rich media editor, integration with additional craft editors (Avid NLE, Adobe Premiere), and support for Google gadgets are also part of the promised package.

On the multi-platform delivery front (which is a high priority item for broadcasters) - Dalet announced that its current MAM product (Enterprise Edition) is integrated with the Video Content Management System (VCMS) from the Australian company called Switch media. VCMS can in turn be integrated with other enterprise systems (DRM, Web CMS) and Content Delivery Networks to distribute content to multiple platforms like web and mobile. In general, a MAM system is also an integration hub -- so think through which integration points make better sense in your scenario.

In addition to sprucing up the product line, the company claims that it is streamlining its support processes, systems, and organization. MAM customers consider support a lifeline for their operations and SOS calls are not uncommon, so you'll want to monitor this very carefully.

A couple are worth monitoring since they could solve current broadcast pain points -- when they become available for stable deployment eventually.

Avid Interplay Sphere is a distributed content production system - meaning journalists can create, edit, and finish media assets from remote locations.  When other Avid tools begin to support the Sphere technology, you could have remote access to news room resources.

Avid's Multi Platform Delivery (MPD) technology was also previewed. All research shows that users are ditching the TV in droves and consuming content on alternate devices. This is really a make-or-break thing for broadcasters: if viewers disappear, so will advertisers too, breaking the back of broadcasters. So, naturally there is a lot of interest in following the users where they are going and serving content to them on these new devices/destinations. 

The current multi-platform delivery model in the media segment today is an after-thought and not elegant. So, Avid proposes an overarching "write once, publish many" model for video that in theory hides the complexity underneath from content creators.  It anticipates a process where journalists just use a single interface for TV, web, mobile, and social media.  In practice, there are some very tricky operational, technical and content challenges here.

Anyway, even though it's a long road from “demo to deployment,” these previews provides a rough glimpse of what you as a customer can expect to see come online in the marketplace, and perhaps use it in your own project planning.

Coming back to the present...

What’s also interesting to note is how vendors now position MAM to customers. Previously, MAM was positioned as “super software” that can completely transform the processes, systems, and operations of a media company. When it comes to  MAM, Avid now follows a more circumspect approach that focuses first on solving a particular pain point or optimizing a specific sub-process using the technology, and then perhaps expanding the scope of MAM deployment gradually. 

Probably a good thing for vendors to set more realistic expectations. If you're into anagrams, let's just say that "Avid Interplay MAM" can be rearranged to read "Am Avid, try me plain."

• Globecast-Netia: French vendor Netia has been part of Globecast for the past 3.5 years. Globecast provides production services to broadcasters and is a subsidiary of France Teleocom. Netia CMS consists of a workflow manager and MAM modules.


• Harris: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Demos of how the Invenio MAM services are being used across its portfolio of related products. Its current focus is on resource optimization using MAM.


• Primefocus: Primefocus brings the global delivery model to broadcasters and media companies, with presence in US, UK and India. Provides services CLEAR Platform, which also contains MAM functionality.


• Reelway: German company, founded by ex-executive from Blue Order (a MAM vendor acquired by Avid). Has an on-premise MAM (ReelRock) and a cloud version (ReelCloud).


• Snell: Broadcast Infrastructure vendor Snell announced a new MAM solution called Momentum. It’s too early to comment on the product but the launch of a new product in this space signifies the second coming for MAM solutions in general.


• Tedial: The Spanish vendor Tedial comes at this space with with a Business Process Management orientation. Their MAM Product is called Tarsys with clients chiefly in Spain and Mexico.


• TransMedia Dynamics (TMD): The UK vendor TMD has three variants of its Mediaflex MAM solution - for workgroups, mid-sized businesses and large broadcasters. Is also putting the solution to use in Archives and Collections Management scenarios.


• VizRT: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Global presence with headquarters in Norway. Viz Media Engine (VME) is the flagship MAM product. Integration of VME with the latest version of video editor Adobe Premiere is new.

Note that many Digital Asset Management vendors (e.g. OpenText) offer video content management functionality but are not included in the above list.

Any hidden gems not here that we should be aware of? Do let me know.

MAM vendors come in all shapes and sizes, but mostly come by way of Europe

• Some are small and will struggle to field a football team of their own; many more are the size of a small platoon; the headcount of the larger vendors resembles the the average Facebook friend count (190).


• Some vendors span the entire broadcast chain while many others focus on specific activities only.


• Some remain rooted to their home countries while others travel well.

In coming months, we'll publish detailed evaluations of many of these products. For now, here's the sampler menu, arranged alphabetically.

• Arvato: Formerly known as S4M (solutions for media) and now rebranding itself as Arvato, which is its parent holding company. The big kahuna in its home base Germany but also has a US reseller.


• Aveco: Around since 1992, this Czech vendor is one of the early vendors in the MAM space. Their Astra family of products has clients both at home and in South America.


• Avid: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Avid Interplay MAM is now part of the larger Avid Interplay Production offering. We already took a look under the hood and a detailed evaluation is available to our DAM research subscribers.


• CatDV: This is a light-weight solution from UK software company Squarebox. One of the smaller vendors in the space and addresses a sub-set of the broader MAM functionality.


• Cinegy: German company Cinegy has broadcast R&D roots and its MAM offerings are Cinegy Archive and Cinegy Desktop. The company actively participates in standards bodies like AWMA (AWMA).


• Dalet: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. French vintage but global footprint. Announced Galaxy (according to the company roadmap, available to all customers only next year). Has a well put together solution for the radio side as well. Detailed evaluation of the current core offering Dalet Enterprise Edition is available to our DAM research subscribers.


• Empress: Small US vendor who also offers digitization services. Software product eMAM Enterprise is an asset management system for media companies.


• Etere: Italian vendor with a smattering of clients in other parts of the world, including Asia. Perhaps has the one of the broadest MAM frameworks -  called Media Enterprise Resource Planning (MERP), it is a bouquet consisting of resource planning, MAM and workflows.


• Evertz-Pharos: UK based Pharos was acquired by Canadian company Evertz a couple of years ago. The Pharos product Mediator is their MAM offering.

To be continued in Part 2...

The "creating cross-platform content" session at the NAB Show highlighted the challenges of truly integrated ad production. For example, TV is a linear medium while web/mobile/tablets are interactive. As advertisers increasingly create content simultaneously for multiple media, there are new and different scenarios that  Digital & Media Asset Management products have to support.

Take for instance, Honda's Good Reasons campaign from September 2011. In a series of TV spots and online videos, actor Patrick Warburton promotes the reasons to buy a Honda and directs viewers to online shopping tools. What's interesting to note is the setting: all the action is happening inside the website frame, with different page elements being pointed to or moved around. Producing this calls for exact synchronization between online elements and the offline shoot. From a DAM perspective, this requires maintaining the associations and linkages between different video / audio parts and image assets so as to be able to package them together.

Another example that highlights the complexities of integrated production is the Coca Cola "Move to the Beat" campaign for the upcoming London Olympics. Music Producer Mark Ronson travelled to 5 countries in different continents to record the sounds of sports while aspiring Olympians practice. These beats, instead of the regular music beats, are used to create the "Anywhere in the world" theme song. Here are more details.

A project like this involves multiple different partners and contractors spread across different countries, complex project management and co-ordination, content security and access controls, asset tracking, as well as different types of workflow both in the production phase as well as when the campaign is running.

As they say in the ad world, "Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings." I'm afraid it will be a rough landing for integrated campaigns with many of the DAM products in the market. Currently, many of them are built to support simple, linear workflows across a single medium. You’ll likely have to employ multiple systems and stitch them together yourself to support integrated scenarios that span across channels / platforms.

But in integrated advertising scenarios I can see the seeds being sown for the next generation DAM systems that customers require.

As you have already heard a gazillion times, converting capital expenditure into operating expense is a key value proposition of cloud computing. Yes, but customers need to understand that cloud vendors have different payment models which can eat into any such potential benefits. For example, a cloud vendor may offer deep discounts if you pay upfront. But does not paying upfront (for a long duration of say 2 years) equate to a kind of capex? Also, almost all cloud vendors ask you to pay the monthly bill in advance, while enterprise customers typically pay in arrears for non-cloud purchases (e.g., 45-60 days after service provisioning / invoicing) -- so there is an interest cost to paying in advance.

These may seem like very small leaks in the savings bucket, but lopping off a few percentage points from a large base of spend means tidy savings.

Media companies are starting to pay particular attention here.  You may not think of it usually, but computing costs comprise a very big portion of movie budgets, particularly when the film involves out-of-this-world animation and special effects. A big line item in the estimated budget of $280 million for Avatar is the IT costs. You can imagine the compute power that goes into movies these days when the Kiwi company Weta's data center is counted among the Top 200 super computers in the world. Weta also created the special effects for King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new recipe for hit movies may well be “star power plus server power.”

Strategic Blue, a UK start-up whose founders have a finance background, is trying to bring smarts from the world of trading to optimize cloud purchases. The company is a cloud broker and dealer. It keeps track of the financial terms of different cloud providers and tries to offer you better terms and conditions by serving as a demand aggregator and may alleviate some of the issues discussed above. Note that you deal with the cloud provider directly for support and SLAs. 

While the rest of the media industry is still trying to figure out the cloud, the finance folks at movie studios are evincing a lot of interest in such models, loosely based on the portfolio theory of modern finance. As they say, but now in a good way: In Hollywood, the really creative people are the accountants, perhaps?

Even if you're not in show business, keep an eye out for opportunities to optimize cloud procurement. If you decide to use an intermediary, be sure to fully understand any commercial / technical trade-offs and the implications on flexibility. And in the end, don't forget to negotiate.

To date, the native gamification functionality in Jive (even in the latest version 5.0) was very limited, with basic functionality you would expect in such tools going missing.

The Bunchball add-on is meant to plug such gaps, ideally increasing adoption and engagement of the social network. Users can be awarded points for different actions (e.g., comment on documents, write a blog, answer questions) they perform in the Jive-Bunchball powered social networks, with points getting tallied in different ways (leader boards, status levels).  In theory this is supposed to spur collaboration.

In our evaluation of Jive software in the Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research stream, we note that Jive is known to OEM third party modules in its platform at a fast pace and swap them out at an even faster pace. Jive is sticking to the script. Much before the current announcement and as early as October 2011, a similar app "Nitro for Jive" had been available. Details and documentation are still scarce, but the new, new module seems to be the next version of the older app.

The jury may still be out on gamification and its merits, but enterprises looking to experiment should note that this is an optional module that costs extra license fees and most likely some custom development to work it into your applications.

It's also worth mentioning that similar Bunchball modules to gamify your social network are available for IBM Connections and Salesforce Chatter as well.

At the NAB show, futurist Marina Gorbis talked about the seismic shifts taking place in the world of content creation and used examples of installation art pieces to illustrate trends like algorithmic content and non-human content creation.

Exhibit 1 is what I call "real-time fashion". In 1998, artist Nancy Paterson created a stock market skirt . Economists say there is a relationship between the stock market and fashion fluctuations. If the market is doing well, the skirt length reduces and if the markets are floundering, the length increases. The installation art consists of the mannequin Judy, a computer, several display monitors, and a mechanical system of motors, cables and pulleys. Some Perl scripts analyzed online stock quotes, and the skirt length adjusted accordingly.

"Painting the town LED" is Exhibit 2. In Erik Krikortz's art project Emotional Cities, the aggregated responses to "How are you feeling today" are used to light up a city's skyscrapers and serve to illumine the city's zeitgeist. You'll recognize the more prosaic version of this as "sentiment analysis" which is increasingly being added to marketers' tool kit.

Not mentioned by Gorbis but Exhibit 3 is "Writing on the wall". The Think Exhibition at New York's Lincoln Center to commemorate IBM's centenary consisted of a 123 feet long data visualization wall, which displayed dynamic patterns based on data feeds from the city's traffic, pollution, and sunshine indicators. The art on display was not a Da Vinci, but perhaps a Fibonacci.

Conventional notions of what constitutes art get challenged in these explorations. Similarly in an age of convergence, boundaries blur and traditional categorizations like platforms and channels can crumble.

Metadata so far has been operating in a linear, unidimensional fashion and has been helping make only basic connections and discovery for us. Are our information models, sense-making apparatus, and systems (and yes, even our own evaluations) ready for this brave beautiful world of multi-dimensional interconnectedness? What do we need to get ready?

Welcome your comments below...

The first part of the analysis summarizes seven key trends in this marketplace. Check out the press release describing those trends.

The second part of the analysis provides a 4D view of 22 vendors.

Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream. There is a constant ferment of activity in the E2.0 space, and we try to capture the rate of change of both vendors and their products. This should give you a good sense for the relative riskiness of your technology choices and help you match the options that are right for your enterprise risk appetite and eliminate any nasty surprises for you down the road.

Let us know what you think.

Now, you may remember that Atos is the largest enterprise to have publicly declared war on evil email (Imagine Atos top gun Thierry Breton, charging a la Popeye in The French Connection and thundering, “Get off the email and get on the Wall”). Atos wants to transition to email alternatives for all internal communications in three years.

As an aside, while debates continue about the wisdom of this zero-tolerance-for-email policy, I think it is pure marketing genius. Atos may have been Europe’s second largest IT Systems Integrator (behind Capgemini) and the IT partner for the Olympic games, but trailed its peers in brand awareness outside its core European markets. The no-email initiative has become a conversation starter;Atos gets free publicity and gains mindshare.

Back to blueKiwi. In last month’s update to our Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluation research, we said “blueKiwi’s offering lies between the social platform Socialtext wishes to offer, and the ever-enticing notion of a modern replacement for email.” Done with explaining the acquisition rationale.

I am usually circumspect about M&A outcomes and certainly not a cheerleader for every deal that happens. Also, one can expect culture mismatches and different DNAs in integrator-vendor deals, but perhaps there is some merit to this particular marriage. It is a sign of Atos putting its money where its mouth is, if nothing else.  We can expect that Atos will put blueKiwi to work internally (seems the current Atos E2.0 arsenal consists of Office Communicator and a wiki).

In addition, blueKiwi could boost Atos' Smart Organization offerings (which are a mix of ECM + Collaboration software implementations with some consulting services on top). Don't be surprised though, if enterprises end up paying more (the overheads, consulting services) for any such offerings. So it's not quite au revoir. We can expect blueKiwi to have a semi-autonomous existence for a little while if only to honor existing customer commitments.

Existing customers should not have to head to the exit door right away but are well advised to have their plan B ready.

Of course, there will be a greater sense of urgency and a bigger question mark for SIs who either use blueKiwi (e.g. Capgemini, Atos biggest competitor) or have built offerings around blueKiwi (e.g. Logica who has an offering called Logica Integration built with the help of blueKiwi). Dassault Systems, blueKiwi's first client and early investor is said to have sold its stake and has launched its own social networking product now. You can expect some changes in the social software pecking order in Europe in the coming years.

Social software usage and adoption is innately tied to organizational culture and ethos. blueKiwi used to say that one of their successes has been to get even the reticent French to start using social networks. Two French proverbs perhaps provide a glimpse of the psyche

• "I have often regretted having spoken, but never for having not." - Philippe de Commynes
• "We were given speech to hide our thoughts." - Talleyrand

Though blueKiwi’s reach was strongest in native France and neighboring Germany, it was still the leading European vendor for social software. The likes of Jive software, which are hoping to expand globally, will now sense an opportunity but it won't be easy sailing as they have to crack the culture coda.

As broadcasters undertake these conversations, it is worth keeping in mind the lessons emerging from the other industries like banking, financial services, and telecom.

• Cloud requires new skills and newer approaches. Enterprises are quickly realizing that success in the cloud requires different focus areas and new skills. For instance, it puts new emphasis on application management. While cloud resources may be consumed on-demand, it is also necessary to turn the tap off when not needed - something that calls for a greater resource management and optimization techniques than before. The highly publicized outages of Amazon cloud services last year served as a wake up call for putting in place different Disaster Recovery strategies.


• Attractiveness of cloud economics is not a foregone conclusion. Aside from the technical considerations and analyzing how well the requirements can be met by the available cloud services, it is also worth taking a closer look at the cost-calculus. Pricing models prevalent in the cloud (e.g. per-user / month) look attractive for small to medium businesses, but for large enterprises, the per-user model is not necessarily cheaper. In my previous consulting work in the not too recent past for large global enterprises, when the capacity requirements are high, I have seen the scale tip in favor of building out their data centers over cloud providers. 


• Don't be surprised....but cloud models not fully mature yet. From a technical standpoint, in addition to the performance and security requirements, we examined the readiness of the cloud file sharing services (file sharing is a key requirement in broadcast) -- and the current state of the market is not very encouraging.


• Understand implications of higher OpEx for your business. The argument of capital avoidance in favor of operational expenses is also worth examining in light of your own situation. Depending on investment cycles, some companies prefer an upfront outlay instead of recurring expenses.

• Have realistic expectations to avoid disappointment. As a way for broadcasters to test the waters and ease into it, Al Kovalick identifies candidates for the cloud in the broadcast chain.  But setting the right expectations around what can be achieved initially is also very important. As many enterprises that have switched to Gmail have found, in the larger scheme of things the savings may represent just a drop in the ocean.

In sum, cloud or no-cloud, just deploying web tools and browser based applications can go a long way in improving the current state of collaboration for cross-functional teams distributed across geographies and spanning organizational boundaries.

In early 2010, Walmart acquired "VUDU," a high-definition video-on-demand technology company, and made it part of Walmart Entertainment. Using VUDU’s technology, Walmart is launching (on April 16th) a service for customers to access their personal DVD collection on multiple devices for a fee of $2 per DVD.

Here is how the process works: you take your DVDs to a Walmart store to get linked to your account. After that you can watch them on multiple devices (computers, game consoles, internet TVs, mobile phones). You’ll need an internet connection for video downloading or streaming. For $ 5 per DVD, you can get access to high definition versions as well. You’ll need a special player for viewing on iPads and iPhones. The DVD you take to the store is marked with a special ink (it still plays) to prevent it from being used twice. 

The technology for storing (in the cloud) and keeping track of user rights to content is based on the Ultraviolet product, which supports multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Walmart has tied up with five major studios whose titles will be available. Disney is not one of them, AS it supports a competing product called KeyChest for DRM. 

You can think of this as outsourcing to Walmart your content migration to the cloud. I did not mention content archiving because this is not Walmart’s first foray into online video. An earlier attempt in 2007 partnership with HP fizzled fairly quickly.

It remains to be seen how well this D2D service fares in a competitive environment against Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others - that will determine the long term future of continued access to online content as well. 

So, what are some of the interesting things in this D2D initiative from a content management perspective?

• Multi-channel delivery is the big trend in the video world. Media Asset Management solutions can play a big role in this as the keepers / aggregators of metadata, but it is not a current focus area for them. 
• Content is king but acquiring rights is a big hurdle. (e.g., Star Wars movies are not available.)
• Online technology alone won’t suffice -- business processes need to encompass online and offline worlds (e.g. DVD verification, rights agreements)
• The world is not flat and geography is paramount (D2D is presently available only in the US -- global rights issues are another Pandora’s box)

In other words, a predominantly micro-blogging oriented software without other collaboration oriented features / applications risks becoming a social ghetto. Yammer often becomes such a social silo today: employees can take notice of different conversations happening in the enterprise, but to act upon them and to get any meaningful work done, they have to shift to different applications / systems.  In short, easy to talk, harder to act.

Now, Yammer is taking baby steps towards enabling document-centric collaboration. It has acquired oneDrum, (a UK based company with less than 10 employees) for an application that lets multiple users edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files at the same time. According to a Techcrunch report, the oneDrum features will get added to Yammer in a few months time.  In theory the user experience for collaborative editing will go something like this: folders corresponding to your Yammer groups get created on your desktop and any edits you make to the files in the desktop will get synced to Yammer as well as your coworkers in those groups.

In this day of the cloud and GoogleDocs with their models of centrally hosted documents, a peer-to-peer fileshare model does feel a bit quaint. Certain questions about architecture, network capacity, security, and scalability also come to mind, but I'll hold them back until we see the product in action later this year.

Essentially, this acquisition signals Yammer's intent to break out of its silo and expand its footprint into the bigger world of enterprise collaboration, where documents, workflows, and business processes rule roost. That is already a crowded field with both

• Traditional collaboration vendors, who're busy applying fresh coats of social paint to their software
• Social platform / suite vendors, who also have a head start over Yammer in this respect

Only time will tell if Yammer can acquire new stripes and become a social software suite, but it won't be an easy transition.

Ms. Duncan suggested the exciting possibilities of their marriage: "Think of our child; with your brains and my body, what a wonder it would be."

Bernard Shaw replied, "Yes, but what if it had my body and your brains?"

As the tale of social vendor Socialcast illustrates, vendor M&A does not always deliver the best of both worlds either. To begin at the beginning...

The last few years have seen much jostling among social software vendors to become “twitter for the enterprise.” Early on, one of the contenders for this title was Socialcast, and its activity stream-oriented software found a fair bit of adoption among both small and large enterprises. The success of the company attracted a suitor in the form of VMware.

VMWare is of course the emperor of the virtualization world. VMware’s technology and products find favor with many enterprise IT departments, it has established relationships and deeper pockets (compared to the much smaller Socialcast), and itself was growing at a fast clip. Also, note that storage heavyweight EMC owns about 80% of VMware.  

So, in May 2011, when the acquisition of Socialcast by VMWare was announced, it was widely expected (and justifiably so) that Socialcast would be able to punch above its weight as it now had access to greater resources to support a real breakout.

However, after about a year, we wonder if that promise has been realized.

• The core product lumbers on with incremental (but not earth shattering) enhancements
• Progress on its social project management tool, "Strides," seems rather slow (originally conceived in 2010, announced in September 2011 but still in Beta)
• Tellingly, Socialcast does not find a mention in the product list on VMware website.

As the social software space matures and we see broader dispersion of product features and functionality, vendor intangibles become an increasingly important differentiator.  Our advice in all such situations may seem nothing more than common sense, but will stand you in good stead: get as much concrete detail as possible on product roadmaps, and do as much diligence on the vendor as you do on the technology.

To keep things straight, let me clarify the terminology a bit here. Broadly speaking, we refer to digital asset management (DAM) solutions when talking about general purpose software used mainly for image management and put to work in say, brand management and catalog management. Primary examples of ones we evaluate include ADAM Software and Widen. A media asset management (MAM) solution refers to software used to manage time-based audio/video assets (e.g. news clips, sports clips). Examples include Avid Interplay MAM, Dalet Enterprise Edition, Harris Invenio and VizRT Ardendo. Of course, DAM solutions have some video management functionality, and MAM solutions can handle images to some extent, but generally speaking each of them is meant for a specific scenario with deeper functionality for that purpose. 

Just as the single biggest reason for a DAM implementation is to find image assets when needed, the main motivator for a MAM implementation is also search. Every news producer is familiar with the situation: they're 100% sure they have a video clip somewhere but can't find it when they need it. A MAM can serve as an umbrella for the various broadcast systems and tools (believe me there are many of them) and tries to be the single source of truth during the entire lifecycle of a media asset from ingest to archival/purge. MAM solutions typically tend to be platforms - meaning they offer a multitude of features to get your media house in order, but that also means they'll need to be customized and/or extensively configured for your setting before you can start using them. 

We are increasing our focus on the fascinating but complex world of broadcast - Avid Interplay MAM was evaluated in the previous version of our DAM report. Now, version 4.2 of our DAM Report takes a close look at Dalet Enterprise Edition and shines a light on the experiences customers have had trying to implement Dalet. In the summary section, we provide a head to head comparison of Avid and Dalet along different tangible and intangible parameters. As far as we know, this is the first research published with such a structured and detailed comparison of these two complex systems - be sure to let us know what you think. 

We'll keep expanding our MAM coverage, if there are particular vendors in this space you are interested in knowing more about, let us know. 

Here’s a quick snapshot of what you’ll find in this update:  

• As before, Jive’s software continues to change rapidly from version to version. New modules are being added -- and older ones getting booted out -- fairly regularly as the company strives to maintain its marketplace momentum 
  
  
• Socialtext is championing “social as a layer,” but enterprise integration is never an easy undertaking


• blueKiwi is aggressively courting European enterprises while attempting to add more collaboration services into its networking-oriented platform


• MindTouch no longer focuses on plain-vanilla wikis and internal collaboration, but is going after the online product help and technical documentation use cases


• Mediawiki, open source and powering the biggest wiki of them all (Wikipedia), maintains its “tech-at-heart” profile

One more thing; HD resolution may be new in iPad 3, but our evaluation research has always provided the clearest picture and the richest detail for technology buyers. Version 4.1 continues this time-honored tradition...

For better or worse, the lineage of software gamification dates to the video game industry.  Video games are a serious business with global sales of $56 billion -- double the size of the music industry.  Closely related to social networking, gamification refers (roughly) to applying the techniques of video games to make software more engaging, work more interesting, and the world a funner place. Doing so will increase user participation -- so the theory goes -- and turn customers more loyal and make employees less disgruntled.

Some examples of gamification techniques include honor badges, achievement levels / laddering, loyalty points, leader boards, and challenges. These tap the intrinsic and extrinsic human motivations/behaviors to encourage contributions, while rewarding -- or at least recognizing -- participation.

If this reminds you enough of employee-of-the-month schemes, happy hours, airline loyalty programs, and the like to consider gamification old wine in new bottles, you’re right, at least to an extent. Companies have always been trying to influence customers and modify their behavior, and gamification itself heavily borrows from the field of psychology. What’s novel is consciously trying to embed these principles into work-routines, business processes, and software design.

As you’d expect, there are both external and internal use cases for gamification, targeted at your end-customers and your employees respectively.

Currently, most vendor solutions are focused on external use cases that try to increase brand loyalty. Examples include start-ups (almost all the gamification vendors are start-ups, pointing to the recency of the field) like Badgeville, BigDoor, Gigya, and Bunchball .

For internal use cases, (e.g., if you want to gamify your digital workplace), there are not many out-of-the-box solutions available. Bunchball has released apps that integrate with Jive and Salesforce software. Attini has a badges application for Sharepoint. Rypple, which had apps for gamifying internal HR applications, was acquired by Salesforce. None of the larger enterprisey vendors (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, et. al.) nor WCM vendors (Adobe, OpenText, etc.,) nor major social software suite vendors (Telligent, Jive, Socialtext, etc.) natively provide packaged gamification features.

However, if you want to experiment, you could start by adding game-like dynamics such as leader boards to your Intranet, with a bit of custom development.  Just make sure you haven't skipped some essential social networking and project support services first.  Your colleague Claire doesn't need game dynamics to help her find out what her predecessors have done on the Penske account she just inherited. She wants her intranet to either connect her with the right information so she can track down the right people, or connect her with right people so they can point her to the right information. Ideally both. 

Indeed, while cheerleaders (vendors and consultants) drum up the hype, gamification is not without its pitfalls. Without a clear “what’s-in-it-for-me” proposition, people will eventually see through institutional ploys. Also, gamification adherents frequently underestimate the difference between workplace and consumer environments.  In the workplace, for example, recognition typically trumps rewards, and the quality of participation will almost always trump quantity (something many vendors haven't grasped).

Your chances of success will be higher if you follow a well-reasoned approach that respects your users, be they customers or employees. Gamification can easily deliver instant gratification, but creating lasting satisfaction is no child’s play.

Having said that, Jive’s earnings release is interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re the first pure-play social technology vendor to go public
2. Jive management discussed their results and strategy for the first time since their IPO in December. 

Here, I won’t dwell on how they fared financially but will only focus on implications for you as a potential buyer of collaboration / social software.

Buoyed by the cash infusion from the IPO, Jive is significantly ramping up its sales and marketing resources, and their game plan is to land more big-ticket deals from the big fish (i.e., large enterprises). At least at this stage, Jive does not seem to think “small is beautiful,” so if you’re a mid-sized business or otherwise have a more modest social initiative, you should note this in drawing up your vendor shortlists. Ideally, you’d want a vendor for whom you are important or otherwise a good fit size-wise. Not to worry there: the collaboration / social software marketplace features many interesting vendors who gladly welcome the small or mid-sized customer.

Jive also announced partnerships with more large systems integrators. Among others, Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, HP, Logica, Infosys, Sapient, et. al. now can help implement Jive software for you. These represent formidable and sizable integrators, and if you’re a large enterprise, that’s likely a positive, since most probably your procurement team prefers established SIs. But as a general rule, the overheads of large systems integrators make sense only if the deal size rises above a particular threshold (usually millions rather than thousands). This further supports my contention that Jive is opting out of the sub-enterprise market. 

On a different note, Jive says that more enterprises are procuring social software using the RFP route. That's a very good thing.  But if you’re pursuing that route, don’t just rely on checklist feature matrices, but make sure that you ask vendors to demonstrate how their technology works for your scenarios as part of the evaluation process. We’d be happy to help whether you’re a small business or a large one.

Digital Asset Management is another big gap. Customers may praise SharePoint in various ways, but no one can allege that SharePoint has strong DAM functionality. (For more details, consult our DAM Report).

To make up for SharePoint's lack of muscular DAM features -- such as large file storage, transcoding, and transformation -- customers usually look at a separate DAM product. Increasingly common in Microsoft-centric enterprises is using SharePoint as a front-end to a full-fledged functional DAM back-end -- so that when you need transcoding or other non-SharePoint functions, it's there behind the scenes. DAM vendor ADAM has the longest-running SharePoint connector, and it's been widely used, albeit with largely mixed results.  

Another widely used offering is MediaRich for SharePoint, by software vendor Equilibrium. It's different from ADAM's connector approach in that MediaRich is not a freestanding product. It requires and rides on the services/functionality provided by SharePoint, such as user management, search, and workflow. It works with both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, providing the functionality around metadata, transformation of images, and transcoding of audio and video that SharePoint alone lacks. 

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you really need or want your digital assets to be managed via SharePoint, or is it better to take a DAM-specific path and leave SharePoint to manage documents?

If you're already using SharePoint and are looking for DAM functionality, evaluate whether your requirements are best met by an add-on like Equilibrium or whether you'll need a separate DAM product. Much of this will be dictated by the user experience you want to deliver: if users are accustomed to using SharePoint for internal document management, it may make sense to manage those documents together with digital assets, if business workflow requires it. But SharePoint isn't used elsewhere in the enterprise, it should not be the first tool that should come to mind for standalone DAM. 

Let us know if we can advise your decision-making.

Not “Drill, baby drill”? More than 25 years ago, Ted Levitt said – “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” That rings true for even digital marketing or social marketing tools. An enterprise is not looking for social media or other software. Instead, they want to be able to better connect with their target audience and become the brand of choice for them.

Up the engagement quotient: As ad man David Ogilvy said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product”. Enterprises can tap digital / social marketing tools to better entertain and engage their customers and potential buyers. Nike Shout, an application where fan messages posted on Facebook or Twitter were displayed on stadium screens, is an example.

See the video on YouTube or read about it here.

“Develop the art of listening”: Social media tools provide an excellent opportunity to listen to the customer voice and feedback in ways not possible earlier. However, many enterprises still approach the digital medium as a one-way street for sales pitches and lose the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with customers. We should note here that there is increasing interest among enterprises for social media monitoring tools or “listening platforms” that promise to keep tabs on what’s being said about your brand. For example, see our earlier blog post on Jive’s social media monitor

“Analyze this?” Sentiment Analysis tools that scour social media conversations for positive and negative opinions about your brand are in vogue as well. These tools deploy language processing and data mining techniques to determine the prevailing attitudes towards your enterprise/brand. While this may (or may not) work well enough in a single language situation, we're not convinced yet that these can handle multi-lingual scenarios where different customers speak in different tongues. We, in the United States of India, are even known to employ two different languages like English and Hindi in the same sentence, or even write out a local language in the Roman (i.e. English) Alphabet. The tools may not be equal to the task of deciphering us.

“Fraudian Slip”: As they say, “half of ad dollars are wasted, the trouble is knowing which half.” In the age of pay-per-click advertising, we might as well say that a fifth to a quarter of online ad dollars are wasted due to click-fraud (based on estimates by Adometry, which tracks these things). It remains a cat-and-mouse game with the good guys and bad guys trying to outwit each other. Marketers need to stay alert and keep a close eye on their analytics for any suspicious behavior and patterns.

“TV is not the idiot box in India”: In India, where only less than 10% of the population regularly accesses the Internet, TV remains the influential medium and unmatched in its reach.  Flipkart (the “Amazon of India”) says that they were taken much more seriously once they started beaming commercials on TV. The larger message here is that depending on your situation, online may not necessarily be the cheapest or the most efficient channel.  

“Comment is Content”: Particularly for news and other community oriented sites, high-quality user comments are becoming as important as editorial content. We can second that based on our experience with clients who place great emphasis on the functionality like management of user generated content and community moderation in their social technology selection processes.

“Crisis Response Use Case” We’ve heard excellent examples of the general public and NGO volunteers rallying in the aftermath for the disasters in Haiti and Fukushima. They’ve created “people finder” apps and used social media tools to coordinate the relief efforts. There’s a lesson here for enterprises on having a plan for when things go wrong and be not caught flat footed. Have your public relations crisis plan ready before it happens.

“Greedy Brands” Earlier, companies just wanted a consumer to buy their products. But now they want them to not only buy their products, but be an advocate for them and also help with co-creating the products. From a software products perspective this has seen the emergence of co-creation and open innovation software tools. However, it is not yet clear why the consumers should participate and / or what’s in it for them.

“Did you know?” Finally, we promised trivia and tidbits as well. Here they are:

• Organized Crime is shifting from their traditional vices to cybercrimes -- equally lucrative but less physically risky.  
• The largest social media monitoring enterprise in the world? It could well be the Government of China, whose 40,000 officers analyze citizen postings on the Net  
• The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is only two years, according to Ogilvy; digital / social marketing projects need to deliver results fast, then

That last one must make CIOs -- whose average tenure is a bit more than four years -- feel pretty good by comparison...

- Apoorv Durga and Kashyap Kompella

Telligent Systems, a vendor of social software to enterprises, announced that it has acquired San Francisco based Leverage Software. Leverage also is focused on selling social networking software for enterprises but follows a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Different enteprises have different preferences for running their software applications -- behind the firewall, on-demand, or some combination of both. Employee-facing functionality would seem to favor on-premise, but not always.  On-demand versions of software typically boast more frequent updates.  While on-premise versions might get a major overhaul only once a year (or every three years...), hosted versions tend get updated much more frequently. This can be useful in rapidly evolving sectors such as the social software field.

Not surprisingly, then, social software vendors follow a variety of approaches. For example, Broadvision offers only a SaaS version, OpenText Social Communities is available only as an on-premise solution, while Jive and Microsoft offer both SaaS and on-premise versions.  And so on.

With this small acquisition of Leverage, Telligent can tell investors and the market that it now offers an on-demand solution. Telligent says that Leverage has an iPhone app for social functionality as well, so the mobile box gets checked. Finally, both Telligent and Leverage products are built off the Microsoft tech stack, which might bode well for future integration.  Analysts have taken note and are gushing over all the buzzwords.

For you the customer, the reality will not likely be so rosy. New features from acquired vendors appear in marketing brochures long before they appear on your screen. Telligent has acquired a revenue stream, but now must add a new product line to an already somewhat unweildy set of incumbent offerings.  Also, it's not easy to operate SaaS and traditional delivery models in tandem.  I'm not worried about the vendor here; I'm concerned about you the customer.  Don't trust the initial "roadmaps" that get marched out. 

The enterprise social software suites marketplace is relatively young and we can expect to see more M&A activity in the coming years as larger and mid-sized vendors try to cherry-pick oppotunities. We'll keep looking out for your interests...

The project in question has weathered some turbulence – execution delays, budget overruns and most critically, lack of end user enthusiasm for the delivered solution.  

At the surface level, they seemingly did everything right and all the boxes can be safely checked off. However, careful reflection reveals that they ended up where they ended up and not where they wanted because of the disconnect between Marketing and IT. In this instance, marketing drove the project with the assistance of a 3rd party integrator, and the internal IT team was not fully on-board till very late in the game. Important issues like global training, scaling up, ongoing support and service levels were left as an afterthought.

Suffice it to say a sound DAM (or for that matter, any IT) project requires all stakeholders to be aligned from the beginning or else you'll end up with bad karma, and a system that is not fully adopted.

In addition to our cornerstone evaluations of technology vendors, in our DAM Report you will also find sage counsel about the pitfalls that you'll encounter during your DAM project life cycle. While attaining DAM Nirvana is a difficult goal, we at RSG do our bit by at least pointing you in the right direction.

Had any enlightenment of your own recently? Tell us about your experience.

The Europe edition of the Creatasphere Digital Asset Management conference in the Hague brought together DAM customers, vendors, and consultants for a few days.  Bringing this event to Europe is fitting given that quite a few leading DAM vendors that we review in our evaluations are European.

For those of you who missed it, here are the Top 10 take-aways, culled from both formal presentations and informal chats.

1. DAM is gaining mindshare in the C-suite.  Historically considered to be a “niche within a niche,” DAM projects are slowly but surely coming onto the radar of the CXOs. In particular, CMOs and CIOs are paying more attention as DAM initiatives shed their silo orientation and get integrated with larger enterprise systems. The times they are a changin’, but departmental implementations still outnumber the enterprise wide implementations.
2. Big is not necessarily better: Large content management vendors seem to be reluctant players in the DAM arena, so much so that their DAM offerings come off as a kind of step child.  Big ECM vendors don’t seem to sell DAM on a stand-alone basis but always as part of a larger solution.  More often than not, when a large ECM vendor ingests a specialist DAM vendor, the DAM product languishes without regular releases, product enhancements, and well-defined roadmaps
3. It’s not raining clouds:  This is perhaps one of the few technology conferences where cloud-washing and hype were not present. Neither the vendor presentations nor the customer examples referred to the Cloud in a big way. If any, we heard that the cloud adoption for DAM solutions will be slower than other segments of the technology industry because of security, control, and secrecy concerns. 
4. Jury still out on Mobile DAM:  The role of mobile devices for content consumption is well understood and such support is currently available in most DAM products. However, when it comes to content creation cycle / workflow, it’s a divided house. We’ll have to wait and watch which of the DAM capabilities (e.g. only approval vs. full blown functionality) users demand and vendors will add to their products. 
5. DAM is still learning how to be social: There is a lot of client interest in using some “social” functionality in their projects but as of now, DAM products are not brimming with social features. We still have a way to go when it comes to “socializing” DAM products.
6. Emergence of CollabFlow:  Workflow is linear. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3... Creative work on digital assets may need to side-step this rigidity to let a hundred flowers bloom and thousands sparks fly, and enable multiple, unstructured contributions. You want to hang a piece of art on the wall, invite comments and touch-up based on feedback. Loosely speaking, “collaboration” enables this dynamic nature of creative work. Users want more of collaboration. In the final analysis, it’s not going to be an “either-or” between workflow and collaboration but both will co-exist as the situation warrants. 
7. Sorry, but the future is not supported: Museum curators and national archivists, tasked with preserving assets for posterity, rightly worry whether today’s formats will be supported in future.  On the other hand, digitization increases access to assets manifold and that in itself may be a compelling reason for DAM projects. As to preserving for the very long term, a multi-pronged approach that involves both digital and analog is a safe bet. The cost of preserving assets through time by continuously upgrading to newer formats is to be kept in mind as well. No easy answers here – only time will tell.
8. Meta-Meta Data:  Content may be king but Context will be emperor. We can almost think of “context” as supercharged metadata  on steroids – as users expect personalized digital experiences to be served fresh in real-time, DAM systems will have to work with multiple other applications and data residing in them to enable the relevant context.
9. Search is still singular:  Despite the notions of immediacy of content and personalized contexts, the single most important functionality demanded and used by customers remains search.  Users not being able to find the assets they need, when they need them, is generally the genesis of the business case for a DAM solution.  Search is a key subsystem that we review in our evaluations.
10. Cool but really useful?  You already know that you’ll use only a tiny fraction of the features available in any software. Do the next-gen search features being added to DAM products like search by shape, search by color, and search by concept fall into this category? Outside of some specialist use cases like crime detection forensics etc, are they really required when good ‘ol metadata can do the trick?  One definite use (for the vendors, of course) is the dazzle factor in the product selection process. 

Welcome your thoughts on other trends in DAM.