DAM technology too often gets perceived as merely an image repository. This is a shallow view — like saying that a person sitting in a hot tub and kicking his legs constitutes swimming. Actual swimming includes a whole lot more than that, just as digital asset management consists of far more than just putting images in a central searchable repository.

But now with even SMBs adopting cloud-based DAMs containing hundreds of thousands of assets numbering in the dozens of terabytes, deployment strategy has become more important than the rather arbitrary term "enterprise"

Commercial stock photo provider Shutterstock decided to acquire WebDAM – a DAM vendor we cover extensively in our Digital & Media Asset Management research. For customers, the outcome of this acquisition could go in one of two directions.