Many factors account for the ubiquitous role that video plays in the contemporary enterprise. Whether it’s a movie studio’s cinematic masterpiece, a broadcaster’s news clip, an animation studio’s cartoon, a university’s lecture, or video content in support of an agency-created brand strategy, video has become quite commonplace. From a consumer standpoint, the power of broadband, the capabilities of hand-held devices, and the recognition of the power of video all contribute to the explosion of video assets. Enterprise production and distribution of time-based media (video in particular) calls for specialized technology to support the process.

We're increasingly asked about CDNs and OVPs by our customers who are in the process of selecting a DAM or a MAM system, so in this Advisory Paper, we provide essential definitions and vendor categories, as well as present key factors to consider when selecting Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Online Video Platforms (OVPs).

As always, please feel free to send me your questions.

Avid is primarily known as a provider of audio and video production technology (Media Composer, Pro Tools, etc.). In early 2010 Avid acquired a German company called Blue Order for its media asset management software, called Media Archive. As 2011 drew to a close, Avid announced the release of Interplay MAM 4.0, the first major release since the acquisition. We've lifted up the hood and taken a detailed look inside. 

MerlinOne, meanwhile, sits at a completely different place in the market. A tiny company with roots in the newspaper and print publishing market, MerlinOne remains one of the few DAM vendors wedded to a thick client, while the rest of the industry moves on has moved on to web-based interfaces. We found the system capabilities somewhat limited compared to other DAM vendors we cover -- albeit targeted to the company's core customer base -- and we outline why in detail in our report.

You can download a free sample of the vendor evaluation report here.

WAVE, Avid and North Plains are three vendors who are debuting a few some functionality they fervently hope will be "game-changers":

• WAVE will roll out a new, very attractively priced version of its flagship MediaBank product (to be called Gold, in late Q1 2012). The new version -- which has an updated UI and moves away from their traditional rich-client focus towards an expanding web client capability -- may bring WAVE into a more competitive position in the mid-market of the DAM spectrum, at a lower price compared to other vendors at the same tier who specialize in Brand Management.
• Just a few weeks ago, Avid debuted the re-branded Interplay Media Asset Manager, which the company is positioning as a kind of default solution for video producers who want a MAM deeply integrated with their video editing suite. It remains to be seen, however, just how deftly Avid will marry the multiple technologies they possess for the media production, management, and deployment process.
• Hot on the heels of their new TeleScope version 9, North Plains has debuted one of the more feature-rich iPad-specific DAM applications. Other vendors are sure to follow suit, or make sure their cross-platform HTML5 browser clients are up to snuff to compete.

These are just a few of the highlights from our 2012 DAM Market Overview. We go through each of the 20+ vendors we cover and assess their current positioning and potential risk they represent to you, the buyer and implementer of these technologies. As always, be sure to let us know if you have any questions.

This latest Market Overview is available to all DAM research subscribers, or may be purchased separately for $875.

MediaBeacon's DAM tool is among the industry's more flexible and standards-based, and though largely focused on brand management scenarios, the company made extensive efforts  to add video management features over the last 18 months.

In 2011, MediaBeacon was without question the DAM vendor I received the most inquires about, but those questions changed markedly over the course of the year. Earlier in the year, it was about features of their software; later in the year and in the first few weeks of 2012, the tone shifted: "Can MediaBeacon keep up with the growth?"

The company gained many new banner-name clients in 2011. However with the exception of Cognizant, their partner channel remains thin given the size of the companies with whom they're closing business. Historically, as we discuss extensively in our Digital & Media Asset Management Report, MediaBeacon's happiest customers were those who worked with Jason Bright directly. As anyone who's taken a basic business course knows, such a model is not sustainable. 

Some Real Story Group advisory customers came to me utterly passionate about adopting MediaBeacon's software, but were unhappy with the level of responsiveness from the vendor. The same was true of potential SI partners, who wondered how much MediaBeacon really wanted to expand their partner channels. Meanwhile, MediaBeacon slowly grew their services team, but not at the same pace as competitors like North Plains or VYRE.

So, is MediaBeacon keeping up with its growth? At the moment, not adquately. Recently, two of my customers who knew MediaBeacon's technology was a good fit signed with other vendors because they were disappointed in how the pre-sales process went. They figured that that as an actual customer, it wouldn't get any better. Another customer who wants to work with MediaBeacon wonders about finding a team of implementers who really know the tool -- and haven't been happy with the answers from the vendor.

As someone behind the scenes on such product selections, it's been interesting to witness the shift. Still, MediaBeacon sits at a cozy spot in the DAM market spectrum: it can reasonably address small business or agency brand management scenarios, but by the same token, it has the chops to support large enterprise DAM implementations. Yet, impressive technology alone does not turn small industry darlings into software powerhouses. Service and the ability to scale a company, along with that technology, is what opens up that possibility. It remains to be seen how well MediaBeacon will deliver on such big expectations in 2012.   

I know however that I am in the minority -- in previous jobs I have argued with fellow managers about the educational qualifications of the people we hired. ("I don't care if she's a certified PMP, has a PhD, and 5 other professional certificates. Has she ever actually managed a large, successful project? Can she inspire a team? Is she an effective communicator?") Education only gets you so far: what matters in my book is real experience and results. (Note, I have 3 PhDs in my immediate family, so I may now be uninvited to the holiday events.)

Recently I had an advisory session about web content quality control with a large, global Real Story Group research customer who adopted a new web content management system a year ago. They wanted to establish a culture of quality among their web content managers, and champion those who not only understood the system designed to manage dozens of global websites, but also possessed a certain level of experience and inherent attitude towards quality.

I suggested adopting a six-sigma-like / karate-oriented "belt" system that, after a base level of system training, was focused on levels of experience-based knowledge and, equally important, positive attitude and focus on content quality. 

Here's a short summary of a longer deliverable:

WCMS yellow belt:

• Has taken 3 days initial WCMS training, is willing to ask for advice, proactive curiosity about WCM and how it works

WCMS blue belt:

• Minimum of 3 months using the system, showing inherent interest in the "health" of the system, proactive constructive attitude about content quality
• Understands the ramifications of content type changes, tagging, and other content editing tasks
• Takes responsibility at at a local level and derives improvement ideas for both the site(s) and the WCMS from experience

WCMS black belt:

• At least 6 months using the system, daily exposure to the WCMS, experienced as an admin
• Omniscience of the "big picture" of how the WCMS effects sites, knows and understands why it's important to do things correctly, encourages others to maintain quality 
• Leads, delegates, and maintains content quality at a global level

One key question came up during the planning: "should we hire or promote someone into the black belt role?" Promote, promote, promote. Again, since this is about real-world experience in a particular environment and a particular company, it's like learning a language. Even if you learn to speak Spanish in Madrid, that doesn't cut it in Mexico City or the Andes. Black belts vary from dojo to dojo; the same should be true for WCMS black belts.

As such, there were many more criteria specific to the organization that defined these different levels, which I won't share here. Creating an operational framework that rewards system users based on their real-world experience, dedication to web content quality, and proactive attitudes towards system and content improvement is one way to make WCM a core part of how your team is evaluated. This approach can be adopted regardless of what platform you use, and also adapted for other types of technology.

As always, let us know if you need help.

-- Two new in-depth product reviews: Adobe's Scene7 and Dutchsoftware's Elvis DAM

-- A new overview of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Online Video Platforms (OVPs) for online video distribution scenarios

-- Expanded evaluation charts, which include more granular ratings on vendors' ability to perform image transformations, video transcoding, asset management via tablet devices, and technical capabilities such as extensibility, integration, and application development

-- Updated reviews on new releases from North Plains, Widen, and Extensis

-- Preview of Avid's Interplay Media Asset Management & Production Suite's move to HTML5

-- An updated look at the limits of SharePoint in DAM scenarios, and what add-on technologies are appropriate to make media management more viable with SharePoint

-- More in-depth use case scenario analysis for time-based media, and why the lines between production asset management and media asset management are blurring

-- Updated DAM & MAM trends for 2011 and into 2012

Due to increasing demand from our subscribers -- whose interest and investment in DAM & MAM technology is on a dramatic upswing -- we're continuing to make additions to this research on a regular basis. You can subscribe here, or feel free to send our team any questions you might have.

Here’s a picture of the Farmer’s Market in nearby Woodstock, VT, where I do most of my grocery shopping:

Directly behind that building to the left is the office of the Vermont Standard newspaper. Forty years of print archives went under water, and are completely destroyed.

Now, unlike my colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe, I don’t specialize in archiving – but customers often ask me if it’s worth the effort. This picture answers that question.

As Irene crawled up the coast, we Vermonters were ready for high winds and power outages, but never expected our rivers to crest beyond historic levels. Just about every story of data, information, or historic loss starts with the phrase “we never expected.” I never expected to experience an earthquake when I was in Virginia last week, either. But there it was, shaking a room full of brand managers near Richmond (close to the epicenter), as we discussed digital asset management over afternoon coffee.

I admit feeling complete rage upon seeing comments on social media sites to the effect that historic bridges washing away “doesn’t really matter.” Some might say the same about a newspaper’s archives, or even a major corporation’s records. This is short-sighted and ignorant thinking. Don’t be afraid to say the same to your boss (in a more diplomatic fashion) if he tells you a proper archiving plan isn’t worth the investment. Archiving goes beyond records management, compliance, or other everyday business matters -- it is also about preserving culture and history. One of our CIO customers refers to it as "collective cumulative knowledge," built up over time. And really, how many more natural disasters or other tragedies should it take before this becomes a no-brainer?

In Vermont, several of our historic bridges will have to be rebuilt. I don’t know if the state has the original plans for those bridges, enabling us to reconstruct them as originally built more than a hundred years ago. But if I were to build one of those bridges today, I’d make sure someone 100 years from now could reconstruct it in the exact same way, again.

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. 

Lisa, as well as many other speakers with a wealth of DAM experience, will also be joining us at the Chicago event. I'll be talking about the latest insights from our DAM research, including DAM performance on tablet devices, advances in DAM collaboration, and as always, the state of the market. 

For a deep-dive into DAM technology, be sure to attend my half-day tutorial "The Fundamentals of DAM" on Monday, September 12th.

Hope to see you in Chicago. 

We also updated the Trends for 2011, and in particular, delve into detail on the challenges of mobile asset management.

Our subscribers can access the research here. If there's other vendors or topics you'd like us to explore in our DAM research, don't hesitate to let me know. For those of you who missed this week's conference in New York, I hope to see you in London in two weeks, where I'll be reprising my presentations on what's new in DAM technology and how to pick the best DAM vendor for you.

Several DAM vendors, most prominently OpenText's Media Manager (formerly Artesia), offer Flash-based user interfaces. Others, such as MediaBeacon and celum (a vendor whose IMAGINE software will be evaluated in our next DAM research release), are very strictly HTML-based. North Plains, who will roll out version 9 of Telescope in a couple months, has a new HTM5-based interface, as well.

Since Flash applications don't work on the iPad, vendors like MediaBeacon use HTML5 as a selling point -- their application can work on the iPad, because it works in Safari. OpenText, meanwhile, has developed its own iPad-specific DAM app, which allows for asset review, video playback, and workflow approvals. 

So which is "better" -- the application that works on an iPad because it works in Safari, or the application that's designed for a specific device?

Neither is inherently better, despite vendors asserting otherwise. Though it's nice to be able to access a DAM application's full functionality via a tablet's web browser, that application isn't necessarily taking advantage of the form factor and the touch screen the way a custom tablet application might. Many web-based apps detect Safari and say, "this is a Mac, deliver the UI as if it's a Mac," without taking full advantage of touch screen gestures. It's still a mouse-oriented, drag-this-little-bar-to-the-right function to make assets bigger, as if the tablet was just about touching the screen in one place.  

So, even if an application works in your tablet browser, that doesn't mean the application is working any differently than it does on your bulky laptop (or desktop). This can be considered good or bad, depending on your perspective.

Despite the hype about tablet apps, there's no reason to choose or eliminate a vendor from your selection process just because they don't have a mobile-specific app. Be sure to look at what your real mobile use cases are: you may not need to edit video segments on your tablet -- even if a vendor tells you that you can.

I'll be exploring the topic of DAM and mobile further for our DAM research subscribers over the coming months, as well in my presentations at the upcoming Henry Stewart conferences. 

It's about time someone got put on trial for this.

According to testimony thus far, it seems the evidence is stacking up against DiMasi. Apparently "suffering" a loss of income from his law practice after he became Speaker, and carrying tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, DiMasi's associates entered into a "consulting contract" with the Burlington, MA-based business intelligence software company, and steered state contracts for close to $20 million their way. The prosecution claims that the bribes were disguised as a referral fee.  

The defense, of course, makes the case that evidence of thousands of dollars per month in payments by Cognos to DiMasi's associates, and in turn checks written to DiMasi by those same associates (and DiMasi's subsequent requests to destroy check registers) is not indicative of corruption or abuse of public office. But as we all know, the best lawyers can make even the most damning evidence seem inconsequential to an easily-persuaded jury.

Though DaMasi's culpability remains to be determined, the trial itself is interesting because it's the kind of kick-backs I often see -- and am offered --- by software vendors.

Recently, a software company offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for a conference, and followed it up with, "what else can we do to ensure you are thinking of us when you are putting together short lists for your customers?" 

What did that vendor accomplish by asking me that question? Ensuring I will talk about that email to anyone considering buying their software.

In the meantime, my next plane ticket to Europe will be funded by the Real Story Group.

Your questions about the DAM market have been pouring in; as a result over the next quarter we're adding coverage of the vendors you've asked about most. Subscribers will soon have RSG research on Avid’s Interplay MAM (the technology acquired via Germany-based Blue Order), Adobe's Scene7 (not a DAM in the traditional sense, but often a key component of many companies' brand management), celum's & Elvis' DAM offerings, and others — as well as the latest market trends. Irina Guseva and I are also looking deeper into the vendors that specialize in SaaS DAM, including MerlinOne and Widen.

I hope you'll join me, Irina and many DAM / MAM practitioners at the Henry Stewart DAM Conferences in New York or London next month. We'll be teaching a half-day tutorial on the Fundamentals of Digital Asset Management — a deep dive into the "how" of the technology — on June 7th in New York and June 23rd in London. You can get a $100 discount by using the code REAL at checkout.

In the meantime, please keep your questions on Digital & Media Asset Management coming our way. 

Two weeks later, I’m at the 5-year-old modern museum marvel of Paris, Le Musée du Quai Branly. I’m looking at a ceremonial mask from the Polynesian Islands of Vanuatu. As I read about the mask, music from the islands plays through a speaker above my head. Next to the mask, there’s an interactive touchscreen where I watch a video of the ceremony when the mask is worn, then an interview with someone who makes similar masks – with sub-titles in any of 5 languages (no dubbing – I get to hear his native dialect). There’s also a very clear map indicating where the islands are, what part of the island chain the mask is from, and an interactive timeline outlining the creation timeline of objects of this type.

Music. Moving pictures. Geo-location. Multi-lingual display. Historical context. I’d never even heard of this particular chain of islands, but after taking in this exhibit, I was ready to pack my bags for the South Pacific and jam with these cool guys in the video. Then on the screen, an unwelcome Windows error message: “A script is causing Macromedia Flash Player 8 to run slowly. Would you like to abort the script?” Fortunately I was able to abort the script and re-boot the application, and complete my experience of Vanuatu art.

Curation – a word not even recognized by my Microsoft Office spell checker – has taken on a whole new meaning in the age of multimedia. Real Story Group is fortunate to call many of the world’s largest museums our subscribers, and in the last year-to-18-months their inquiries about media management have skyrocketed – precisely because they want to deliver experiences like the one I had at the Musée du Quai Branly (minus the Flash error). It’s not that my experience at the Louvre was a negative one (on the contrary), but it was much less immersive, and didn’t have the richness of multi-sensory context that I’ve had in more modern museum settings.

Curators are eager to extend their trade to engage people beyond looking at an object and reading a paragraph or two about it. The first step, which debuted a couple of decades ago, was the audioguide -- which these days feels about as modern as an Apple SE.  But in most museums, the technology to manage modern multimedia curation simply isn’t there yet – often due to lack of funding, but also due to lack of sponsorship at the higher levels of museum management.

In some institutions, there’s a lack of awareness of the many elements required for multimedia curation: not just Media Asset Management technology, but rich geospatial and historical metadata, the breaking down of curative silos, and the integration of media with collections management. (A CMS in the museum world is not a Content Management System, but a Collections Management System, which manages the details and whereabouts of a museum’s tangible assets).

Multimedia curation is something every curator should be thinking about, whether you curate objects in a museum, or information within an enterprise. It’s an area where we closely evaluate vendor capabilities within our Digital & Media Asset Management Report.  Of course, the tools vendors sell represent only a small part of the overall solution.

In the meantime, I’m thinking about starting my own multimedia curation awards. After the Quai Branly, I’d award the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Basque Country (I dare not say Spain), and the The Winston Churchill Museum in London, UK (a multimedia-rich complement to the fascinating Cabinet War Rooms), my second and third prize for best multimedia curation. Do any of you have some more nominations? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

The event is free, so there's little reason to not drop by the session and say hi, especially if you have questions about DAM.  

The answer is, as is so often the case, "it depends." Many WCM and ECM vendors claim to offer DAM functionality as part of their product, but generally, the feature set is limited to managing images for the web. Full-scale DAM offers a wider breadth of non-web-oriented functionality that you may or may not need, so understanding how assets will be ingested, processed, and distributed will determine if “DAM Lite” will meet your needs. 

Sometimes, like a lite beer or a low-calorie dessert, DAM lite just isn't enough to make you feel satisfied. We highlight situations where you'll need to look at a full-scale DAM tools, like those we evaluate in our Digital & Media Asset Management Report.

This advisory paper helps you assess you own situation, in terms of how you need to manage images, audio and video, so that you can determine if SharePoint or your WCM is adequate for the task.

Two vendors that are particularly onion-like in their layers of intrigue are North Plains and MediaBeacon, not only because they are prominent players in the DAM space but also because they are the two vendors our subscription customers ask me to compare and contrast to each other the most. 

During 2010 I was involved in several procurements where these two vendors were shortlisted, and several weakness and strengths were consistent with both:

• Neither of these vendors has a strong representation in Europe. Despite dribs and drabs of small implementations in the UK or resellers talking up the tools, our European customers always saw higher-cost proposals (than those of our North American customers) and thin resources on the ground when it came to these two vendors.
• Both vendors are evolving quickly, adding to their professional services teams and in some cases, outsmarting their own partners when it comes to the selling and implementation of DAM. Many buyers want to go right to the source of the product, rather than to a 3rd party - and these vendors are staffing up as a result.
• Both vendors have two internal visionaries - in Jason Bright (of MB) and Steve Sauder (of NP) - whose vision of the future of DAM and the technologies they built is of deep interest to both existing and prospective customers of the two companies. With MediaBeacon in particular I'm often asked, "What would happen if Jason Bright got hit by a bus?" It's not a simple answer - but suffice it to say that both these companies are still small enough that customers often expect the visionary's personal attention. Well, don't get used to it. 
• Neither MediaBeacon's nor North Plains' DAMs are simple systems. MediaBeacon's may be architecturally elegant and standards-based, and North Plains' may be more scalable -- but that does not come without complexity. They are both platforms moreso than out-of-the-box products, whose set-up and maintenance I'd compare more to cooking a ten-course French feast at a well-orchestrated Michelin 3-star restaurant, than whipping up a jell-o salad for the next community pot-luck.
• Both companies remain independent from the larger ECM market. While many DAM vendors of the old guard were gobbled up by the EMCs, Autonomys and OpenTexts of the world, both MediaBeacon and North Plains remain the rebellious and free renegades.

There are, however, marked differences between these two vendors that few tend to point out:

• North Plains has more VAM or Video Asset Management features than MediaBeacon, though the new features debuted in MB's latest release show they are eager to catch up.
• They have very different personalities. North Plains as a vendor is a rather serious, no-nonsense company; MediaBeacon, meanwhile, always feels like they're about to throw a party. One isn't inherently better than the other, but I have found this greatly influences which of our customers wants to work with them.
• North Plains has recently been focused on growth in the eBooks market, while MediaBeacon is expanding their reach further into broadcast media and brand management.

These are just a few of the things I point our to our customers when I'm asked to compare these two vendors. You'll find all the juicy details in our DAM research where I've updated these two vendor reviews with a lot more of the information I learned about them over the past year. I suspect 2011 will be an interesting year of evolution for both of them.

If you're part of the world of web content management and related technologies, you've no doubt read Irina's work in the past. She's been a prominent technology journalist and pundit for the past several years, writing and tweeting about web content management vendors, tools, and practices. She's also been a WCM practitioner, project manager, implementer, and end-user. She's a keen observer with a sly wit, and joins our team with a deep knowledge of marketing, radio, and other broadcast media.

I know Irina will add a great deal of insight to the Real Story Group body of research, and also provide excellent personal guidance to our customers. In addition to web content management, Irina will also be my compatriot in covering digital asset management.  

Welcome, Irina! 

That question has been asked every year for the past decade, and though in early 2008 we stated that DAM was "always the bridesmaid and never the bride," it seems at least it's on a serious date. Pure-play DAM vendors like North Plains are expanding services teams, ADAM landed a few big-name clients in 2010 and grew its team by 20%, MediaBeacon added a raft of new functionality to its software, while Autonomy and OpenText are attempting to keep their longtime MediaBin and Artesia customers via an upgrade to major new platforms. 

The action and growth in the DAM world can in some part be credited to SMBs outside the media, advertising, and broadcast industries taking up an interest in this area. We have subscribers in the non-profit, medical, and government sectors who have started to ask how they can better manage their photographs and video, in particular, and are educating themselves in the discipline of DAM, as well as vendor weaknesses and strengths.

Meanwhile, longtime DAM system users from the M&E or ad agency world are looking at taking the next step - be it upgrading their DAM to a more modern, multi-faceted tool, or turning their system into something outward-facing to service customers or other 3rd parties. 

Our 2011 DAM market analysis takes a look at these trends, and delves into depth on how each of the 20+ vendors we cover plays a part.  Stay tuned - if you're not already managing multimedia or brand assets, you will be soon.

Take one recent DAM procurement I advised on:

Vendor A's pricing was based on the number of assets in the system - and the proposed pricing was for "up to 1 million assets." The number of users or servers the software was running on didn't effect pricing. This particular customer had planned to have about 2 million assets migrated into the system within 2 years, yet per-asset pricing over 1 million assets was not included.

Vendor B's pricing was based on the number of named users of the system, and a price was given for 50 users. The number of assets or servers didn't effect pricing.

Vendor C's pricing was based on a combination of "casual" and "power" user pricing. "Power" users, such as administrators, were more expensive ($800 per user) than casual contributors ($250 per user). They based their estimate on 20 power users and 80 casual users. An "unlimited" number of assets could be put into the system.

Vendor D's pricing was server-based, allowing for unlimited users and assets, with no benchmarks on the typical number of users that might log into to a single instance of the software.

Finally, Vendor E's pricing was based on a combination of 50 concurrent internal system users, unlimited users of the external portal application for 3rd parties to access assets, AND number of servers. 

Normalizing pricing and comparing apples to apples in such cases is a big challenge. I tend to do this in a spreadsheet, where I work to specify with our customers a 5-year plan for number of users, assets, and servers, and then normalize the pricing based on that. Adding services and support costs to that can bring you to a rough TCO, or total cost of ownership, over the near- and longer-term. What I often find after normalizing pricing is that the "cheapest" and "most expensive" vendors at first glance very rarely end up that way, when TCO over a five-year period is considered.

Web content management procurements can offer a similar myriad of pricing options, such as per domain, per user, per items, or per server. Staging and development instances of the software are sometimes, but not always, less expensive than the production instance. 

Search tools, by contrast, are sometimes priced by the size of the index, so the more content you make searchable - the more expensive it gets.

For every product we evaluate in our research, we outline details of how vendors typically price their software, and the range of a typical deal. This helps our customers narrow down to an appropriate short list based on their budget, which is often a key criteria for selection. 

But increasingly, vendors are offering multiple options, only adding to the confusion. In the last six months, I've seen one DAM vendor do a bid that was $800k for a large Fortune 100 corporation, and then bid $180k for a very similar package when pitching to a non-profit. I often say that buying enterprise software is akin to bartering for a handmade basket in a third-world market -- it's all negotiable, and $180k is better than $0.

But the point here is, don't just look at the price on the "investment" line of the proposal and think the story ends there. Uncovering the real story of vendor pricing takes diligence, investigation, and normalization against the competition.  

We'll also have a booth at the show, so please stop by and say hi.

A few highlights from the updates:

- An in-depth look at Google's new release of the Search Appliance

- A shift of Vivisimo and Coveo into the Platform category, where they share the stage with big players such as Microsoft, Autonomy, and Endeca. We explain how they've evolved over the last year in particular to warrant a spot on this stage. We couldn't disagree more with Autonomy's claim that search has become a "one-horse race"

- A closer look at IBM's new application of Lucene indexes

- We also look in-depth at the latest search technology updates from ISYS, Lucene / Solr, SAP, Open Text, and the array of search offerings from Microsoft

Subscribers can access all the updates here. To download a free sample (which features Microsoft), sign up here.

Like Henry Stewart's conference in New York, Henry Stewart's Los Angeles show will feature a wide range of case studies and panels about DAM technology and implementations. I've always appreciated Henry Stewart's focus on the end-user perspective, and this show is no exception.

I'll be moderating the track for those new to DAM, as well as presenting a full-conference session about the latest advances in DAM technology - and why you should be skeptical of them. Following the two-day conference, I'll also teach a half-day seminar on how to select and procure a DAM system, with an in-depth look at the DAM marketplace. 

I hope those of you on the west coast of the US and beyond will join me for what is sure to be an interesting event! Receive a $100 discount on the currently published price for registration if you use the code “REAL” when registering.