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Midmarket Digital Asset Management Firms Disappearing
By: Nathan Eddy
2009-01-05
Article Rating:    / 4
There are 4 user comments on this Midmarket story.
Small and midsize businesses are faced with a dwindling selection of Digital Asset Management companies offering solutions aimed at the midmarket space.The Digital Asset Management and Media Asset Management marketplace
has split into a low end and high end, resulting in a dearth of
midmarket solutions, according to recent research conducted by CMS
Watch, a Boston-based independent analyst firm.
Mergers and acquisitions of smaller DAM firms by enterprise-level
corporations resulted in a shift in focus for many former SMB (small to
medium-size businesses) targeted companies. Various midsize companies
were swallowed up by large players who focused on the enterprise
market, says Kas Thomas, CMS Watch analyst and co-author of the report
The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2009.
The study found small team/workgroup-style DAM tools can be purchased
for $2,000-$5,000, while the enterprise-class DAM & MAM tools are
rarely purchasable for less than $150,000-$200,000. Thomas says that
for the midmarket business owner looking to grow, many DAM solutions
dont have the scalability SMB owners need. Small to midsize
businesses are often growing, from S to M, and when you do that,
you gain headcount, you gain hierarchy, you gain process, he says.
All of these things involve difficult problems that are just harder
for smaller DAM firms to address.
Scalability in DAM and MAM should be a critical issue for small
business owners, Thomas says. The claims midmarket-targeted vendors
make, along with the enterprise-level vendors who claim they offer a
scaled down solution, complicates the process of deciding on a vendor.
All the smaller vendors are going to say they scale, or just plain
tell you theyve got APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) you need
that arent already in the box, Thomas says. But the larger players
have a story, too; Well sell you a scaled down versionbut that
translates into is a huge cost. Once you get into it and find out your
integration pricing, or if you end up buying modules, pretty soon your
$30,000 solution is up to $150,000.
One thing small businesses should evaluate when deciding on a DAM
vendor is workflow requirements. If you have simple serial approval
processes, youre fine, he says. But if you need anything more than
that, like routing something through six people, or need special
escalation procedures, are just absent in most of these DAM systems.
Another area to assess critically is scalability. If your corpus size
doubles and your headcount doubles, or you need to add more servers, is
this system going to be able to handle it? he asks. This is a very
difficult problem and some of these systems just dont scale very well.
Overpricing is another issue confronting SMBs looking for a robust
solution, according to CMS Watchs principal DAM analyst, Theresa
Regli. "We often find that buyers end up spending 20-30 percent more
than theyre initially quoted, because of additional, separately priced
modules. As we detail in our research, additional modules can cost more
than the base software, and the cost quickly creeps upwards."
The situation is a serious problem for buyers who need more from their
DAM system than a simple digital archive, but don't have six-figure
budgets. There are some options out there for SMBs, however.
Berlin-based Canto, which also has a San Francisco office, offers a
solution called Cumulus that midmarket companies can turn to, Thomas
says.
Widen, based in Madison, Wisc., markets MediaCollective, an online DAM
system. Minneapolis, Minn.-based MediaBeacon offers what Thomas calls a
fairly elaborate Web-based DAM solution. Thats at the higher end of
the midmarket, he says. But it works just great in many SMB systems
right out of the box, and you really can build out with it.
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