Today, everyone is a content publisher. This is due to lower content creation costs (consider the cost of creating HD videos now versus five years ago) and the increasing need to deliver engaging, rich-media-driven experiences. As organizations across verticals morph to become content publishers, best-of-breed digital asset management (DAM) solutions are garnering increasing amounts of interest. Why the fuss? These solutions can help manage the content creation process, manage finalized rich media content, and prepare content for delivery across channels.

As organizations begin placing a premium on DAM technology, they need the technology to do more than serve as a static, siloed content repository. Instead, solutions now must support two key business imperatives:

  • Digital experience delivery. DAM solutions must provide deeper functionality to prepare rich media content to be delivered globally and across channels. To do this, solutions must support vision and functionality to support greater automation in managing global/local versions of content, various renditions of content across channels, and integration with key systems of engagement (e.g. eCommerce, web content management, campaign management).
  • Marketing and business agility. DAM solutions must allow marketers and other business users to work with greater agility as well as operational efficiency and effectiveness. To do this, DAM solutions must support greater business process management, automation for key content management tasks (e.g. tagging, rights management, version control), and integration with a greater enterprise marketing technology ecosystem to fuel greater efficiency and effectiveness.

In order to assess how well DAM solutions are keeping up with these business imperatives, we spent the last five months identifying and evaluating the leading vendors in the space by scoring them across 38 criteria. Our criteria spanned areas like workflow and approval, metadata and taxonomy support, globalization/localization, video support, marketing capabilities, and foundational library services.

To see how the 10 vendors—ADAM Software, Adobe, Canto, celum, HP, MediaBeacon, North Plains On Brand, North Plains Telescope, OpenText, and Widen—stacked up, check out our Wave report. And remember that this research is just scratching the surface. We encourage clients to review the detailed product evaluations and adapt the 38 criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave’s Excel-based vendor comparison tool. I also encourage clients to leverage their Inquiry access to learn more about these vendors and which vendors are potentially a best-fit for their specific scenarios.