Digital Asset Management Market Update - Impressions from Henry Stewart DAM NY

My impressions of the DAM market after attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management (DAM) New York, June 1-2, 2009.

The DAM market appears to be alive, with vendors continuing to innovate and grow. Over the past couple of years, more vendors have added on-demand / hosted / SaaS DAM offerings -- either their own or via acquisition (e.g., Open Text's purchase of eMotion) and added support for the XMP metadata specification (not quite yet a "standard") and most recently new user interfaces. Every conference has a theme and this time it appeared to be "User Interface/Experience" as many of the vendors (MediaBeacon, North Plains, Autonomy/Virage - MediaBin, and Open Text/Artesia) were showing off their new user interfaces.

MediaBeacon demonstrated their new R3volution 3.0 Widget Platform and R3Search, Organic Enterprise Search. MediaBeacon was the most innovative going with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as a "standard" for their Widget Platform, which allows users to easily include any other GWT widget into the UI. This allows users to include all the GWT and Google social networking widgets (chat, IM, etc.), for easily constructing powerful user defined or company defined portals which neatly integrate DAM. They also added faceted search based on SOLR an open source extension of the Apache Lucene search engine. Users see groupings of tags for the images in front of them and then filter further by drag and drop of filters into the query palette. Users can easily filter assets by these drag and drop tags, without typing. MediaBeacon also added drag and drop of assets onto metadata "stamps" -- a grouping of metadata that can be reused and attached to assets -- or users can drag and drop stamps onto individual or groups of selected assets to apply predefined metadata to the assets. I've always felt that DAMs exposed metadata too much -- users should work with metadata without knowing that they're working with it. The trick is to incorporate it into the UI in clever ways. I like MediaBeacon's approach a lot because it hides the metadata manipulation behind simple drag and drop user interactions, and makes the user experience much more a visual user experience.

Note: this kind of drag and drop metadata application was first available in a limited form in Adobe's Photoshop Album software -- a standalone, personal desktop image management program. You could have an image represent a tag and then drag and drop that image onto other pictures to apply the tags (metadata). It made grouping pictures of friends, family, events, locations, etc. very easy to do and you didn't even think that you were adding metadata. That was the key. More of the DAM products need to do this -- make the application and manipulation of metadata a background operation, hidden under well designed user experiences.

MediaBin, now called Autonomy Virage MediaBin, (which is a mouthful, and frankly a real branding challenge -- more comments on this below) was demonstrating the new MediaBin Version 7 -- an integration of the Autonomy IDOL conceptual search technologies and Virage search and video technologies with the MediaBin DAM all expressed through a new UI. The combination provides a very rich search environment, probably one of the richest of the DAM products. It includes (not an exhaustive list):

• Full text search
• Faceted search
• Speech to text for video (from Virage) with search of the text and return of keyframe accurate references back into the video
• Speech highlighting as it is spoken (from Virage)
• Easy filtering of assets based on metadata
• and drag and drop application of metadata (similar to MediaBeacon)

The UI also displays a tag cloud for common metadata. The search capabilities are deeply integrated into the UI and user experience. Gone are the multiple windows that plagued previous MediaBin user interfaces. MediaBin also (finally) adds dynamic collections (that refresh each time a user accesses them providing users with the most up to date set of assets that match the criteria defining the dynamic collection), a capability that most DAMs have had for a while.

This was the first major release of MediaBin since the acquisition of Interwoven by Autonomy. It's clear that Autonomy is attempting to maintain all the brands somehow for a period of time. While understandable, it's incredibly confusing. Leading with Autonomy and trying to keep the Interwoven, Virage and MediaBin brands is certainly desirable for a time, but it's not clear where the MediaBin product lives, nor is it possible to easily find information about it. At the time of this writing, the Autonomy, Interwoven, Virage, and MediaBin web sites are not in sync. Trying to find information on the latest MediaBin DAM release can only be found at http://www.autonomy.com/VMB7 a link that was buried in the MediaBin 7 press release. Clicking on all the others, including the "Digital Asset Management" link on the Autonomy home page, take you to the outdated Interwoven/MediaBin information rather than the Virage MediaBin 7 page listed above. Incredibly confusing.... and something that needs to be addressed soon!

North Plains was showing their recently released publishing platform for trade book publishers and their video manager. They had demonstrated TeleScope Publishing Platform (TPP) at both the London and NY book fairs where they published a book in 48 hours to multiple electronic formats, as well as a bound and delivered, print-on-demand, 6x9 edition. Not that anyone would actually publish a book that fast but what it proved is that it's possible for book publishers to significantly reduce the publishing time for multi-channel book publishing. It provides end-to-end capabilities including a lightweight commerce portal and marketing program tracking tool. TPP is an application that actually doesn't require the Telescope DAM. It is a real differentiator for the company -- it's a clearly defined application that has real business value to a very well defined audience. HarperCollins was the first to sign on. And it's rumored that there are a couple others in the pipeline. I suspect the publishing industry is watching how HarperCollins fares and will take notice of this offering.

I had a chance to take in some of the conference as well. While I'm sure that there were many interesting DAM user presentations, the two that caught my attention were Boeing's 787 Dreamliner eGallery and Showtime.

Boeing's presentation was titled "Changing the Rules of the Game: How Boeing is Leveraging DAM to Connect Customers with Suppliers Across the 787-Supply Chain via the Dreamliner eGallery". A clear descriptive title to be sure. However, Boeing's Dreamliner is a fascinating project in and of itself where the brand marketing is entirely about ecofriendly. It is a thorough application of the idea, but the Dreamliner program goes far beyond than that. It fundamentally changes how Boeing builds planes, interacts with their suppliers, and serves its customers -- allowing custom building of a plane, with interchangable parts (what a novel idea!), from different suppliers -- and providing a showroom (both physical and the virtual eGallery version) where buyers can examine and select all the components of the plane that they want. No more traveling from one seat supplier to another a thousand miles away, trying to remember how comfortable your bottom felt. You can do it all in one place. And similarly customers can preview and select all the components online via the eGallery. It's a purpose-built DAM application that stays within the Dreamliner ecofriendly brand: By allowing customers to view and select components (seats, coffee makers, TVs, etc.) via a web browser, it saves tons of paper (from not printing all the suppliers product literature), travel $ (including fuel) and makes selection a much more convenient and easy process. By requiring suppliers to provide images and metadata for their products for the both the egallery and physical showroom, Boeing becomes more like a typical retailer -- requiring its suppliers to provide the goods that it can put on its shelves and the pictures and descriptions it can put into its circulars. A fine use of a DAM. The Dreamliner program is also more economical for plane financiers who don't tie up as much money when airlines wish to shed or resell planes: Did you know that it currently takes a month to convert the engines from those your airline uses to the ones mine uses? Now it can be done in a day allowing them to offer better financing terms. Boeing has clearly thought through the whole set of stakeholders and is providing, in my opinion, a very compelling brand and offering. Very cool stuff!

Showtime demonstrated how they have become much more agile in responding to the advertising and marketing needs of their programs. Paul Nicholson, VP Print and Broadcast Production at Showtime Networks has done a masterful job of using a DAM and XMP metadata to automate and integrate a multiple systems into a cohesive enterprise-class system for managing and facilitating the produciton process for all of their print and on-line marketing materials. Using MediaBeacon and its deep support of XMP they've been able to increase the volume of material they develop and deliver (e.g., posters, bus covers, on-line ads, etc.) and have significantly reduced the amount of time it takes to produce each piece. It's a very impressive system for it's integration with existing systems, broad adoption throughout the creative services group, the flexibility, visibility (into the state/progress of things) and cost reduction it provides. I'd seen it presented before but it doesn't get old -- it still impresses me. It shows how DAM can provide real value to an organization.

One emerging area for DAM appears to be Open Source. On the one hand, this seems to be a natural occurance as there are open source versions of many other content technologies (e.g. web content management systems, search engines, content mangement systems, etc.) However, I've long thought that a good open source DAM would be far too specialized and couldn't be done well enough as an successful open source project. There's a lot of coordination required between the various components and functions of a DAM that I believe would make it difficult to do anything more than something with rudimentary or basic DAM capabilities through open source approaches. I still hold to that position. I was surprised to see Openedit exhibiting at the conference -- it was the first conference that I'd been to where an open source DAM vendor exhibited. Like with many open source projects, the revenue model is based on services. This may fit well for DAM as many implementations require customization. But Openedit's capabilities struck me as fairly basic. Thus anyone who would use it for a project of any significance would appear to require a lot of services, it could therefore easily turn out to be a better proposition to go with a non-open source vendor, not only for the comparable cost, but for the broader capabilities as well. This will be an interesting area of DAM to watch going forward.

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