We've been talking to a number of DAM vendors lately, and it's exciting to see so much new R&D and "capability buildout" going on at a time when activity in certain other spaces is (by comparison) rather slack, due to cost-cutting and other factors. As a member of OpenText's Artesia group said: "The DAM market, right now, is where WCM was five years ago" -- meaning, interest is keen, people are starting to "get" what DAM is about (and why it's needed), and vendor stories around DAM are starting to become quite interesting. What can you, the end user of these technologies, look forward to as a result? How should this influence your future plans around rich media?

One of the more noteworthy trends that's emerging that's wise for all to embrace is an understanding that rich-media types (Flash, AVI, MPEG, mp3 and others), because of their growing pervasiveness, need to be treated as "first-class" content types in the enterprise. This means they need first-class "content services" supporting them: version control, security, logging, workflow, collaboration services, lifecycle management, and so on. Traditionally, DAM systems have not done these ECM sorts of things well, and so-called ECM tools have been more document-oriented than media-oriented (hence the need for DAM in the first place). It's going to be a while before DM and DAM fuse together (if indeed they ever do).

This leads, of course, to discussions around systems integration, something DAM products have been notoriously poor at supporting, and enterprises often don't plan for adequately. That may be starting to change. The FeedRoom, which acquired ClearStory's ActiveMedia last fall and also sells a video aggregation and transformation/transcoding platform called FeedRoom Enterprise Video Platform, have decided to attack the problem by embracing CMIS as its primary integration API. The FeedRoom has already begun to write code that will very shortly be tested by beta customers. The fact that vendors are already writing code against a standard that technically isn't a standard yet (and won't be, until OASIS blesses it around the end of this year) doesn't surprise me -- we know of others who are writing code against CMIS already -- but what is surprising is that it's a DAM company (not an ECM company that happens to have a DAM product), and The FeedRoom is not one of the original sponsors of CMIS.

Content is getting richer and more interactive by the day. The state of the economy doesn't really play a role in this: content gets richer on its own whether you want it to or not. This is driving some important changes in the way people are thinking about content. Metadata matters more; storage (and the ability to remove content as soon as it's no longer needed) matters more. Interoperability between silos matters more. The puzzle pieces are morphing more quickly now. Agility matters.

All of this points to a bright future for DAM, near-term as well as medium-term, but it's going to take a while for these new benefits to trickle down to you, the end user or buyer of DAM technologies. We're seeing a lot of interesting developments, but many won't be available until later this year or early 2010. To keep up with it all, subscribe to our Digital and Media Asset Management Report. And if you have any news you'd like to share, by all means get in touch. You know where to find us.