Digital asset management systems address a growing range of needs as companies seek new ways to package images and documents.A panel of industry analysts shared insights at this week's Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York, describing how far the technology has come and where they expect it to go from here.
Mukul Krishna, senior industry analyst and program leader for digital media practice at Frost & Sullivan, said the market is defining itself as it grows.
"Anything you can digitize and attach some kind of monetary value to is an asset. Anything, be it a Word document, be it an e-mail. It all, in a sense, is asset management."
The wide-open market is attracting lots of competition.
"Everyone wants a piece of the cake," Krishna said. "You have Microsoft getting in… Adobe getting in. IBM is getting in. HP is trying to get in. You're looking at a space that is getting very, very crowded right now… People are still trying to define the niche."
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According to Geoffrey Bock, former senior vice president with the Seybold Group, "We are at that strategic inflection point, where we are absolutely drowning in digital imagery."
Bock cited a recent New York Times story estimating that 28 billion digital photos were taken just last year—some 6 billion more than the number of film photographs.
Other statistics also show explosive growth in the population of digital assets.
"Ofoto reported that their usage climbed by 90 percent in 2004," he said. "That's an eye-popping number that we haven't even seen since the days of the dot-com bubble, and I don't think digital photos are going away."
Bock said he expects to see the range of uses for digital assets expanding rapidly.
"A year or two from now I would predict that sales executives would expect to be giving daily or weekly inspirational talks to their sales force, which their sales force could download as they drive to their next sales call."
In addition, Bock said he also expects to see more specialization in the market in the near future. "So as I look at digital asset management, I want to segment it into three sets of technology: store, organize and 'do and use.'
"The storage stuff is pretty mature… [but] there's still magic to be had from putting our assets in a central repository, then providing access to that repository," Bock said.
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Bock said he believes that the task of organizing information about assets is much more pressing than the task of storing the assets.
"The metadata issue is for all of us to work out… It's the crucial thing that we have to get our hands around, get our minds around.
"And the problem is, it's not simply a two-dimensional thing or a three-dimensional thing; it's an n-dimensional aspect, and understanding how we categorize content, how we use content, how we find categories for the use of content, really goes to the heart of the matter."
Bob Markham, principal analyst with Forrester Research, said there is good news and bad news in the digital asset management market.
"As digital asset management is maturing, the user interfaces are getting better… [but] an ugly truth about digital asset management is that the repository is still separate [from the database]… You're still looking at a separate repository for your digital assets."
He recommends that people getting ready to invest in a digital asset management system ask prospective vendors if they plan to move to a universal repository in the near future.
Former Seybold exec Bock went on to emphasize the task of organization change in connection with a digital asset management initiative.
"Doing process change is really, really hard… making sure you're restructuring the use of the assets in a positive way is really difficult; it goes to the heart of the way a company is structured… It's going to take a lot of investment and a lot of focus going forward."
Bock also expressed some concern about the current pattern of consolidation among asset management vendors.
"What I worry about is that we're getting too much consolidation too soon around the areas where there needs to be a lot of innovation and a lot of change… that there will not be the necessary investment going into some of the really leading technologies around XML management, the production of XML databases, the use of X queries, etc. There really does need to be investment in order to reap the benefit."
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Another untouched issue, Bock said, involves how to describe assets in the ways that are likely to be most important to the final consumer.
"One of the things that digital asset management [systems] have to do is not only convey the analytic ability… but grasp the emotion of a particular asset.
"A good picture conveys an emotion as well as having a whole string of metadata associated with it, and good metadata people are good at tagging what some of that emotion is," Bock said.
But Bock said there is one rule that matters most: "It's the user interface, stupid."
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