Over the past few years RSG has seen an emerging divide between Digital Asset Management vendors who can handle complex business and marketing scenarios and those oriented towards simpler use cases.

In our logo landscape, we showcase technical trends we’re seeing on a complexity spectrum.

Here’s a simple breakdown of the four tiers on this spectrum:

Complex - built to integrate into larger stacks, with strong object-orientation and flexible information modelsHowever these vendors are also — for better or worse — increasingly building out services beyond DAM: PIM, Campaign Management, MRM, Web2Print, Copy Management, Creative Workflow, Collaboration, Brand Portals, and so on.  Do you really want all that?

Legacy Complex - these remain in place in many enterprises, and have decent brand reputation. However, these older vendors have tended to prove less innovative, and can bring risky technical debt.

Now here's the divide...

Mid-Range - these vendors will typically supply all the canonical DAM services, but do not offer the depth of features or integration flexibility that you'll find at the tier above. At the same time, with the exception of Adobe they will offer lower costs structures when deployed against the specific use cases that they were built to serve.

Simpler - these vendors are mostly focused on providing basic asset repository services. You'll find many similarities among them, but they are trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on lower cost, simpler user experiences, and specialized industry solutions.

Find out which vendors are best suited for your enterprise by using the RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator as part of your DAM research subscription.

Get a free DAM vendor evaluation to reveal more of our latest findings and analysis.

Check out these other DAM resources:

Use Scenarios to Get to the RIght DAM Shortlist

DAM Trends to Watch in 2019

The Right Way to Select DAM Technology (recorded webinar)