May 14, 2008
To Be or Not to Be - Open Source Digital Asset Management
One recurring question raised in many sessions at the Henry Stewart digital asset management symposium was, "What about open source DAM?"
Let me start by saying, that is a good question to ask. With the rapid rise in popularity of the open source platform for Web content management systems such as Drupal, couldn't we expect the same thing in the digital asset management space?
Many vendors, when asked this question, shrugged off open source digital asset management, thinking anyone serious about digital asset management would not be looking to go that route. Where is the support model? Where is the scalability?
Though support models and scalability are valid points, vendors need to be careful about getting too comfortable, as many large Web content management vendors felt the same way just a few years ago. We all know what the reality is today in the Web content management world, with major Websites from large organizations like Google, Yahoo, News Corporation, CNN, and many others deploying LAMP-based Web content management systems. That list is getting bigger all the time and is assuredly undercutting market share of the Web content management system vendors.
Digital asset management vendors can rest easy though, for a little while. The main reason why open source caught on so quickly in the Web space had to a lot to do with visibility. You download a content management system package, and in less than 5 minutes you are up and running with a new Website. Everyone and their mother has their own Website, spewing rants on various topics and sharing pictures of their dogs. How many people have a digital asset management system beyond iPhoto, or use products like Flickr, Picasa, or solutions like Shutterfly? Perhaps a day will come soon where people do not want to rely on an external solution to manage their historic content, whether that be images, photos, videos, or text.
When people's home computers start to die and they haven't had a personal digital asset management 'strategy' so they lose access to their file stores, will that drive investment within the open source community to jumpstart development around products like Fedora, ResourceSpace, or any new ones? Will those groundswells grow to workgroup solutions, then eventually get to the enterprise? Time will tell.
I would argue that it is not about the technology or the feasibility of creating a robust open source solution that is keeping open source digital asset management systems down, but rather the visibility of these projects.
Posted at 09:14 am by Ivan Mironchuk
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