May 13, 2008

Blogging Henry Stewart - Enterprise DAM Vendor Shoot Out

Day 2 - Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York City

A very lively if not heated session with digital asset management vendor CTOs sparring and debating many subjects took place towards the close of day two at Henry Stewart. The Enterprise DAM Vendor Shoot Out must have been highly anticipated as the session was packed and was standing room only.

The session was moderated by our own Joseph Bachana (President/CEO @ DPCI) and included panelists from five different vendors: Jason Bright of BrighTech Inc. (MediaBeacon), Damian Saccocio of Artesia Digital Media Group, Dirk Noppe of ADAM Software, Dan Macaluso of WAVE Corp. (MediaBank), and Steve Sauder of North Plains Systems Corp. (TeleScope).

Questions for the session were centered around themes published in Joe's recent article for CMS Watch, as well as a few additional ones, with each vendor given time to respond in regards to his company's strategy or approach.

I took some brief notes during the session that I have tried to distill down here in this blog.

Integration with other systems (i.e. WCM, CRM, DRM)

• Artesia: Web services and API must be used
• ADAM: Web services and API
• MediaBank: Web services, API and SDK
• MediaBeacon: XMP enabled integration, can integrate with any system that can read/write XMP
• TeleScope: Web services, API, MIMiX XML format for metadata, working on integration with JSR170 spec

Leveraging XMP

• Artesia: Ingests XMP and can be mapped to Artesia fields
• ADAM: Ingests XMP, but currently cannot write XMP back out into assets
• MediaBank: Can read-in and write-out XMP, with support for multiple namespaces
• MediaBeacon: Fully XMP based solution, XMP is not imported, exported or mapped. XMP is the metadata model. XMP can be introduced into non-XMP aware assets, e.g. MS Office documents. Ability to encrypt XMP metadata.
• TeleScope: Read-in, write-out XMP with XMP mapping i-piece (plugin). Ability to support multiple XMP schema mappings.

Integration with Web to Print Packages (Variable Data Solutions)

• Artesia: Has integrated with a number of the Web to print packages through Artesia professional services as custom dev projects.
• ADAM: Product SKU for integration with InDesign Server
• MediaBank: Currently has integration with PageFlex, has own solution for VDP, looking at integration in near future with XMPie.
• MediaBeacon: Has created integration with a number of VDP tools along with InDesign Server. Felt that this market was currently very small and could be an area of huge growth.
• TeleScope: Product SKUs for integration with MEI Wave2, PageFlex, and InDesign Server

Management of XML Content Types

• Artesia: Damian really didn't go into much detail about their approach
• ADAM: Dirk didn't go into specifics about their approach
• MediaBank: Has looked at integration with Nstein's TextML/TME. Newest version of client software communicates via XML protocols.
• MediaBeacon: Support for many different schemas. Taxonomies are presented through XSLT.
• TeleScope: XML plugin to allow mappings of different XML elements from various schema's to TeleScope metadata fields. No TME integrations yet. XSLT can be called on to export XML content out to multiple formats.

Distribution and Services Model

• Artesia: Works through services division and through partner integrators. Artesia is focusing on extending its partner programs. A note that Artesia largely does its own professional services on new projects but companies like DPCI do get called in to assist companies with value-add enhancements.
• ADAM: Does not do any professional services, all through partners. ADAM is 100% focused on enhancing the ADAM product. They have a strong partner channel in Europe, but this will be a challenge for them to develop partnerships in the U.S. market in an already-saturated community. They'll probably need to find outlier integrators that will represent them.
• MediaBank: Relies on partners in Europe and Asia markets, generally will perform all services on U.S. projects. WAVE almost completely likes to control its own professional services in the U.S. market, which will make it difficult for them to scale since they are a small, independent company.
• MediaBeacon: Offers professional services and works through partners. All partners pair up with MediaBeacon for oversight and customer relationships. MediaBeacon is very loyal to its consulting partners and does not add new partners within a geography. This is a strong approach that is serving them well, however it may cause scale issues in the short run. DPCI has also been involved in value-add services around MediaBeacon and finds them easy to work with.
• TeleScope: Mix of professional services and partner implementations. North Plains' biggest downfall is its 'partner' model. Since they want to be a software publishing company but their revenues are roughly 50% services, this holds North Plains back from scaling. Further, customers report numerous service issues over the last decade, and those do not seem to be going away. DPCI has performed services around TeleScope during that time, and the product is a good one. We'd love to see North Plains get out of the services game because they do not do it particularly well.

Differences between workgroup and enterprise product versions (or, how is your system enterprise-ready?)

• Artesia: Flexible application architecture, many customer examples on stability and expansion
• ADAM: Workgroup editions have restrictions in number of users. No restrictions in enterprise
• MediaBank: Differences in database options, and number of fields
• MediaBeacon: Clustered application servers, with integration of event cues
• TeleScope: Federated server approach. Can house metadata in a centralized server and assets locally in different geographic locations

SaaS (software as a service) Models

• Artesia: All models in practice (hosted, leased, hosted with partner etc.).
• ADAM: SaaS model integrated through partners. Does not offer any internal SaaS
• MediaBank: Vendor hosted options, partner hosted options
• MediaBeacon: Primarily leasing systems for a hosted solution on-site at the customer's location
• TeleScope: Hosted through parters, new offering to host with NPS called TeleScope OnDemand

OpenSource, Threat/Opportunity?

• Artesia: Doesn't see OpenSource DAM solutions as a threat.
• ADAM: Feels that the support model isn't there, and will need to be in place before it can truly take off.
• MediaBank: Feels their solution is already value-priced that anyone looking to go the open source route should be looking at them.
• MediaBeacon: Jason says that he embraces the Open Source DAM community. Would consider donating MediaBeacon's XMP libraries.
• TeleScope: Feels like the their target market is the higher end publishers that wouldn't really be considering an open source DAM. Encourages many different open source project, and has made some TeleScope modules open source in the past.

Posted at 08:00 pm by Ivan Mironchuk

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