There are some days when I feel like a relationship therapist for people who are unhappy with old versions of their DAM systems. In particular, our subscribers often ring me up to opine at length about bad experiences with a legacy version of HP MediaBin or OpenText Media Manager.

When these customers inevitably arrive at the moment when they want to consider alternatives, it's often a challenge to even convince them that they should look at the latest versions of HP MB or OTMM vs. whatever alternatives make sense on their new short list.

I might line up dozens of ratings from our research that show how these tools perform across particular use cases, or how well each vendor is applying the latest search or transformation technologies. Sometimes, these ratings demonstrate that HP or OTMM is a stronger fit than 7 to 10 other vendors.

And yet, I still hear, "I don't care. I just want a new vendor. I don't want to work with them anymore." That frequently recurring sentiment is usually a reflection of the support relationships, not the actual technology performance.

Both HP MB and OTMM have evolved in recent years. However, compared their competition -- particularly the growing SaaS mid-market -- they've been comparably slow to innovate. OTMM only debuted an HTML5 interface last year after a long delay (most other vendors did so in 2011 or 2012). We give the edge to the new version of OTMM over HP MB for user experience; however, the foundations of both technologies still resemble what was released 12 to 15 years ago.

One advantage both of these systems have is that they are known for scalability.  Additionally, they boast the functionality to support a very diverse range of complex scenarios within both marketing and broadcasting. But that comes at a hefty price, and it is usually as part of a broader enterprise deal that incorporates other HP or OTEX technologies. As such, we don't see SMBs sticking with -- or even considering -- these tools.

In addition, the majority of deployments for these tools are on-premise, not in the cloud, so you'll want to understand your deployment strategy before considering one of these solutions.

In the latest release of our research, we've updated the evaluations of both of these big vendors' DAM tools. You can also use our Realtime Vendor Comparison Tool to see our detailed ratings as well.