The DAM Difference

General-purpose relational databases have long been able to store and retrieve unstructured information as "blobs", or binary large objects. Yet there's a difference between simply storing and retrieving digital riches, and doing something useful with them. Companies want to be able to attach descriptive information, or meta-data, to their images, audio and video to make them easier to find. They want to keep track of versions and set up workflows, control access and manage digital rights. They also want to be able to convert or "transcode" their media into different formats, depending on its use.

Five years ago, Coca-Cola couldn't find any suitable commercially available software to digitise and organise images from its archives. So Coke's IS department built an image repository that had a strong search capability and made it available on the company's intranet, with reasonable success, says Phil Mooney, director of Coke's archives department in Atlanta. But two years ago, Coke began looking at setting up parallel systems for archiving textual information (press releases, executive memos, articles written about the company) and moving images (TV commercials, company-sponsored films, videos of executive presentations). "We were creating these silos of information," Mooney says. "We said, We've got to find a digital asset management system that will be a one-stop shopping place."

Coke found what it needed from another global giant, IBM, in a product called Content Manager (formerly called Digital Library). Mooney says he was drawn to IBM by more than just system features and scalability. "We were convinced that IBM was going to be here in five years, whereas a lot of those other folks, we just didn't know about," he notes.

New DAM vendors will no doubt enter the market, says IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher), even as consolidation continues. IDC forecasts that spending on software for "rich media asset management" will grow from $US117 million in 2000 to $US1.8 billion in 2005. Adding to the confusion: vendors that offer Web content management, enterprise content management, document management and brand resource management are adding features that overlap with those offered by DAM vendors.

But for now, a dearth of off-the-shelf systems remains, and DAM prices are all over the map. Canto, for example, sells a single-user version of Cumulus, its DAM product, aimed at individual photographers and graphic designers, for under $US100, but it also offers enterprise packages that start at $US35,000 for 20 licences. Artesia says most of its deployments start at $US100,000. Meanwhile, IBM DAM projects call for software and services that typically range from $US250,000 to $US5 million. "It's a highly fractured market," says Joshua Duhl, a contributing analyst at IDC.