We are looking for C# developers.

We are looking for team members who do not take or give “we can’t” as an answer.

We are looking fo friends to share our dreams.

We are looking for ones who dare to fail to succeed. If you think you match those four EIFU criterias, please click here to proceed and read our technical knowledge requirements.

We are extremely proud to announce that KeyFruit is the new digital marketing communication solution provider of Turkey’s Food&Beverage Sector Pioneer, TAMEK.

KeyFruit will serve as “The digital marketing communication solution provider of TAMEK” starting from January 31, 2010. Tamek’s corporate web site (tamek.com.tr) and product category sites (tamekmeyvesuyu.com and tamekmutfakkeyfi.com) will be maintained and further developed by KeyFruit. Services such as; online marcom strategy development & application, e-mail marketing, SEM, online media buying consultancy, user experience design will be executed by KeyFruit’s Tamek Team.

We made more than “just a pretty site”.
We put the customer, first. We observed what they need to do on Kobiline.com so that it meets their needs, rather than what we perceived to be their needs.

Kobiline says that:”Our aim is to be the pioneer and leading e-business platform that serves small and medium enterprises in Turkey to increase their profitability through the opportunities in new economy.
Kobiline is considered as a social responsibility project by its Strategic Partners; Koç.net, Yapı Kredi Bankası and Projes thus many of the services are delivered through free membership in order to accelerate SME adoption to the tools of the new economy.”

We claim that “KeyFruit creates sites that are elegant, engaging and easy to use; has “Big Agency Skills” but small agency flexibility”.

Once we stepped into Kobiline.com’s Project Development, it was obviously clear that We had to take a user-centered design approach, which means we’ll have to make more money&transaction for Koç.net from Kobiline.com than if they go to an agency that adopts a more traditional approach. And also, within a highly competitive field such as “Domain & Hosting Services Sales”, we had to perfectly develop a search-engine-friendly-site information structure.

Here’s how we “think” we managed to do it;

We made more than “just a pretty site”.
We put the customer, first.
We observed what they need to do on Kobiline.com so that it meets their needs, rather than what we perceived to be their needs.

Information architecture was (is and always will be) our KPI for designing and developing efficient and useful structure for Kobiline.com’s user interface. We believe that by the means of our toolbox of innovative techniques, we came up with a bright solution to make Kobiline.com’s easy to navigate and information quick to find.
KeyFruit Services on Kobiline.com Web Site Project are;

• Information Architecture
• User Interface Design
• Interface Development
• Technical Build (Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5; SQL 2008 on Windows Server 2008)
• Content Management System (Interface Design + Development)
• SEO

KeyFruit’s whitepaper on DAM that we have shared with you through our corporate blog, SlideShare and Scribd has received recognition from overseas that made us feel humbled and honored.  Widen Enterprises, one of United States’ industry leading DAM solution providers, has requested to link our whitepaper as a resource on their micro-site, www.digitalassetmanagement.com which we have happily accepted. The joy of being recognized by such an organization made our belief in the saying “hard work pays off” stronger than ever and fueled our inspiration to work even harder to become a better company.

As Schiller once said; “Time flies on restless pinions…” and we agree. It hasn’t been until our last weekly meeting that we realized it has been 5 months to the day, since we have come together and founded KeyFruit.  Aside from the rush of the company set up that took almost two months, we can gladly claim that we have lived and worked a very fulfilling three months to put the cornerstones of KeyFruit in place.

Our vision in finding KeyFruit was to become a “Digital Communications Solution House” to provide web applications that help aid users with their daily business functions and create solutions for companies’ e-marketing needs all the while making our clients feel that we are as “in house and in touch” as any solution provider can get. We believe we have taken big steps in this direction as we have completed many projects, “quietly”, in the last few months. You will be able to view details of the aforementioned projects and related customer reviews in the “K-Labs Portfolio” section of our web site in the near future.

Our flagship project, InfoFlight, on the other hand, has provided us with a lot of nice and a few not-so-nice surprises during this time. Though our release date had been subject to a “minor” revision, we have always kept our motivation as high as possible and successfully reached the Alpha stage; just in time to receive an invitation to showcase it to a highly regarded, industry leading company. The initial reaction was a positive one thus allowing us to move on to phase two which, hopefully, will create a wider than expected exposure for InfoFlight. On a separate note, we are working extremely hard to release the public Beta version of the software in time for the holidays and our effort is much spent on polishing every single detail to provide you the best of what we can accomplish.

We have a very short period of time ahead of us until the beginning of 2010 to reach the goals we have set out for the first six month period of operations. As with all other entrepreneurs, our hard work by itself will not suffice without the generous “non-stop support” from our families and all of you who have given us the extra push with your support through our corporate blog, Facebook and Twitter and we extend our thanks to you all.

Stay tuned for more from KeyFruit…

The KeyFruits

Our whitepaper talking about Digital Asset Management systems, their benefits, the trends in storage capacity and content creation is now available on Slideshare and Scribd. Feel free to read, download or share it.

Or try Scribd via this link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20987643/KeyFruit-Digital-Asset-Management-White-Paper

10. Conclusion

The role that digital asset management plays in ensuring quality control spans the content development lifecycle. Starting at the design phase, those tasked with creating new content are able to access approved and brand ready assets (“one version of the truth”) as well as important information about each asset in the form of metadata. The metadata associated with any given asset can include a range of quality control information including usage rights and permissions, prior uses, commentary, and legal instructions such as use and placement of disclaimers.

Core to ensuring quality is the ability to collaborate around the work being produced. A streamlined review and feedback mechanism greatly enhances the creative process by allowing the team at large to share their collective insights and ideas easily and in real-time. And of course, a more thorough review helps to ensure there are no erroneous errors (spelling, brand placement, legal disclaimers, etc). By allowing teams easy real-time access to work-in progress, regardless of location enhances collaboration as well as speeds the overall review and time to approval.

Digital Asset Management and the need for a DAM system are not readily accepted or even acknowledged by everyone. However, the facts given in this paper proves that every company is in need of a digital asset management system whether it is an on-demand system maintained by a service provider or an enterprise solution that is hosted and managed internally. Tomorrow, with the ever increasing amount of digital content created, the need for digital asset management on a personal level will be a necessity rather than a luxury.

The trend that is carrying the entire arsenal of business functions to a web based architecture will eventually make DAM systems, integrated with other online applications to provide an on-the-fly access to all necessary information an employee needs to perform his/her tasks from anywhere and anytime.

Works Cited

1. An Introduction to the World Digital Asset Management Market. White Paper. San Antonio: Frost & Sullivan, 2007.

2. Gantz, John F, et al. The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011. White Paper. Framingham: IDC, 2008.

3. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry. 2. Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1993.

4. Kotob, Hassan. “Business Intelligence.” 28 December 2008. eBiz The Insider’s Guide to Business and IT Agility. 21 June 2009 .

5. Krogh, Peter. The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers. Napa: O’Reilly, 2005.

6. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

7. van Niekerk, A J. The Strategic Management of Media Assets; A Methodological Approach. New Orleans: Allied Academies, 2006.

9. DAM’s ROI

There is no single metric for measuring the ROI for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system within a company. Identifying the criteria and ultimately measuring ROI depends on the use case(s) for how the DAM system is used. Sometimes, DAM is simply used as a means to access “one version of the truth”, while in other times it is integral to the full content development, production, and distribution life-cycle. Business cases justifying the acquisition of a DAM system have included such diverse “ROI” areas as:

• Saving time
• Providing access
• Gaining control of content
• Increasing collaboration
• Ensuring compliance
• Repurposing content
• Identifying new revenue streams
• Reducing technology footprint

To address the many areas that ROI can be demonstrated for a DAM implementation, this paper will break ROI into two primary categories:

1. Hard dollars (tangible measurable return)
2. Soft dollars (intangible measurable return)

a. DAM – Hard-Dollar ROI

Hard-dollar ROI refers to real dollars that have been saved or gained through the introduction of a DAM system. When planning for a DAM implementation, companies should focus on high-value assets in order to realize notable hard dollar return. Adoption and full engagement of the system will be minimized by offering access to low-value, low-use content. Then they should focus on use cases that center around the most costly areas of their business. Most common are the high-cost workflows and functions associated with content development/creation and distribution.

Within the realm of content development there are costs associated with simply developing and producing custom design – graphics, photographs, video, page layouts, etc. In addition to the time and materials aspect of content creation is the cost of ownership or licensing of content used. Licensing can become quite complex and costly as the content may be used for a variety of mediums (TV, radio, iPod, Web, print, etc.) each requiring its own licensing arrangement. Distribution expenses take on many forms encompassing both the process of distributing for review and approval, as well as delivery of final product — in many cases to a global supply chain. Regardless of the need, inherent in the process are the hard costs associated with preparing the content, burning the media to CD, and ultimately shipping. This process and all its associated expenses will be repeated as changes are made, errors identified, and new materials produced.

The following common high-expense use cases will be addressed:

Repurposing Content

Every marketer knows that there are enormous costs associated with creating new marketing content whether it is custom graphics, photographs, brochure layouts, or materials used specifically for the web. Expenses associated with content development can include:

• Agency Fees
• Freelance Fees
• Licensing Fees
• Legal Fees
• Production Costs

By introducing a Digital Asset Management system, those that are at the heart of creating content have access to a wealth of materials. There are two primary content repurposing approaches:

• Content Reuse – Ability to access and retrieve previously created and/or used content to be used in the same format to save time, money, and maximize the value of the asset.
• Content Transformation – Ability to access, retrieve, and transform previously created and/or used content to another format to further extend the value and use of the asset.

For example, a marketing department might have materials originated as part of another campaign or design concepts and materials unused, but paid for and available for use. In addition to saving money, these scenarios also serve to save time, ensure brand designer layouts, graphics, logos, video, audio, documents, photographs, PowerPoint slides integrity and consistency, and broaden access to a repository of approved content.

ROI Metric: Identify pre-and post-DAM expenses associated with creating new content.

Reducing Distribution Expenses

A subtle, yet very real expense for companies is the high cost of sharing and distributing content. As you examine the development lifecycle of marketing assets, you may be surprised to see how many points content is packaged and shipped (mail, courier, and overnight) as part of:

• Creative Collaboration
• Quality Assurance
• Legal Review & Approval
• Final Review & Approval
• Production/Fabrication
• Distribution to End Consumers
• Archiving

In the context of content development, materials can potentially be shipped all over the world numerous times before reaching final approval. Not only is this expensive, but impacts time to production and market. With a DAM system in place, the review and approval process is streamlined occurring in-real time and accommodating a geographically disperse team. In addition, it effectively eliminates the high cost and time-constraints of delivery services. Those working with an agency can dramatically impact and control fees incurred for such simple tasks as searching, retrieving, preparing, packaging, and sending content for yet another round of review as well as gain greater transparency into the status of projects.

Conversely, agencies with a DAM system can offer customers a value-added service and help customers save dollars that can be reinvested into new campaigns.

Once materials have been produced, they need to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively reach end-consumers. By providing a global self-service option companies can significantly reduce, and in some cases eliminate the costs associated with delivery. With a digital asset management system in place, companies can readily make updates and get materials out into the market faster and far more cost effectively. For marketing departments serving geographically disperse partners and distributors, the ability to fulfill in real-time with only approved and market-ready content is a true value-added service. Some companies choose to provide global partners and distributors with templates and other raw elements allowing them to self-select and create customize materials for their needs and markets. In this scenario the production costs are incurred by the channel.

ROI Metric: Compare annual cost of mail, overnight, and courier services pre-and post DAM implementation.

Addressing New Markets and Distribution Device

Entering new markets can be a costly and unpredictable venture and often requires a complete re-work of existing marketing materials. Components such as messaging, language, and imagery may all need to be addressed in order to effectively speak to a new market. The cost implications of re-creating existing content are obvious.

Similar challenges and expenses also occur when looking to expand marketing reach through new distribution channels such as web, TV, DVR’s, cell phones, iPod’s, etc. With each new device, marketers need to evaluate not only the format, but messaging and imagery to ensure it resonates in the new medium. As seen with the previous hard-dollar ROI examples, the process of re-purposing content for new markets and distribution devices can be significantly stream-lined and accomplished much more cost-effectively with a digital asset management solution in place. Existing content can be accessed, revised, reviewed, approved, distributed, and stored all within the system. A DAM system eliminates the need to essentially start from scratch or seek costly out-side assistance to re-work materials.

In terms of addressing new distribution devices because of the very nature of digital content, companies can easily identify, retrieve, and transform content to the desired file format to accommodate other communication vehicles. Often these types of changes can be made in-house without having to rely on and engage an outside agency or freelancer. At a minimum, the raw components and marketing concepts exist so that the entire creative process does not need to start anew, but rather is a matter of re-expression. Companies that have executed a well conceived DAM strategy are in a much more advantageous position to begin taking advantage of new and emerging distribution devices.

ROI Metric: Compare historic costs of creating new product and/or penetrating new markets. Evaluate post-DAM system expenses associated with creating derivative works.

b. DAM – Soft-Dollar ROI

Soft-dollar ROI is the measurement of non-monetary benefits such as time, efficiency, and responsiveness. These less tangible areas are no less important and constitute a formidable ‘must have’ need for digital asset management. Many if not most of the soft-dollar ROI results are interconnected or bi-products of hard-dollar ROI use cases. Often times, it is the soft-dollars that serve to promote user adoption and provide the most immediate and obvious end-user benefits. Like its counterpart, the way in which to realize soft-dollar ROI is to evaluate your high-cost use case, or in this case the most pervasive pain points.

The following common use cases and pain points will be addressed:

Protecting Brand Integrity

Assessing the cost associated with maintaining and building your brand is often hard to quantify. There are the tangible activities that serve to deliver your name, tagline, and other brand associated imagery to the market. Such activities can be measured in terms of revenue and customer response. Then there are the intangibles such as the connection and relationship the public has in response to your brand. Regardless, every marketer knows that while it is challenging to build and maintain a brand it is even more difficult to re-build it once brand erosion has occurred.

One of the keys to ensuring brand integrity is consistency; ensuring that only approved branding, tags, messaging, and imagery are presented to the market. If a brand is inconsistently displayed in any form, the outcome can be highly detrimental resulting in loss of revenue and unanticipated expenses to regain and re-establish the desired brand image.

A digital asset management system is a powerful component of a company’s brand-management strategy. Marketers and Brand Managers can gain control over the branded content that is made available to the organization both within and outside their departments. By providing access to only current and approved brand content (“one version of the truth”), companies can have greater assurance that their valuable corporate brand is consistently being displayed.

ROI Metric: While it is difficult to measure the ROI around brand management, it is safe to say that the financial loss by not maintaining control can be significant.

Enhancing the Creative Process

Consumers not only have tremendous choice in the products and services they purchase, they have also gained unprecedented control over how and when they will accept messages. This dynamic places a greater burden on companies to continually produce memorable and engaging campaigns that will be pushed, published, and aired via a variety of devices.

Arming the creative team with a digital asset management system offers greater efficiency, access to a host of materials, and information about the content such as when and how it was used, rights and permissions, and its association with other stored and catalogued assets. While efficiency is not typically associated with creativity, within the context of DAM the burden of non-creative tasks such as searching for physical media, gaining approval for use, accessing hi-res versions, and researching rights and permissions is lifted from the creative professional. Thus, allowing for more time spent dedicated to the core function of developing highly creative, quality, brand conscious and memorable marketing deliverables.

As the digital asset repository grows and establishes a comprehensive historical archive of materials, it can offer a starting point in the creative process. By providing visibility into past campaigns, previously developed work product, and other materials will help designers, writers, brand managers, advertisers, and marketers formulate concepts instead of starting from scratch. While not all content will be repurposed, it can serve as a concept, starting point, and inspiration.

ROI Metric: Increased time spent on creative versus administrative non-creative tasks. Reduced frustration experienced by those working with and producing content.

Ensuring Quality Control

Like the concept of enhanced creative process, quality is often a hard area to quantify and measure. However, when quality is compromised, the repercussions can be costly and significantly undermine a brand. Cost implications can take the form of legal fines and fees, a need for unbudgeted PR assistance, as well as lost revenue.

8. DAM Solution for Business

Education Assets, Information Assets, IT Assets, Knowledge Assets, Media Assets, Social Assets, Software Code Assets are all different types of digital assets. Different departments of a company may create or use any of these asset types for many different reasons. A DAM is necessary for storing, record keeping, access controlling of these digital assets. While every department benefits from DAM, one department stands out from the rest; marketing.

a. DAM Solution for Marketing

TV, Web, cell phones, digital media players, in-store advertising – everywhere you turn rich media is delivering the message. As consumers become more and more accustomed to receiving marketing and advertising content through a variety of distribution devices and formats, marketers are challenged to find ways to meet these expectations.

Digital content is having a profound impact on a wide variety of industries, and no single department in those industries is more affected than marketing. Regardless of industry, marketing is a ubiquitous function and one that has traditionally managed the lion’s share of a company’s rich media such as logos, collateral, TV and radio spots, photographs, graphics, and presentation materials.

Marketers managing both established and emerging brands need to understand that today’s multi-channel, digitally-oriented environment requires a well conceived digital asset management plan to ensure ongoing brand integrity and meet sophisticated and evolving distribution channels.

b. Embracing Marketing Operation: What’s in it for DAM professionals?

It is fair to say that the abbreviation for Marketing Operations — MO — is an apt descriptor of its potential impact in organizations. Marketing Operations is poised to literally change the modus operandi of Marketing. And a new modus operandi for Marketing in organizations is great news for all of us. So whether you are a DAM project manager or business user, it is definitely in your best interest to become a passionate advocate of MO.

The emergence of MO as a formalized discipline in enterprise today creates tremendous opportunity for all of us. MO paves the path for DAM, MOM and other comprehensive technology initiatives by:

• Spawning a new breed of professionals whose sole purpose is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of their enterprises ’ marketing departments

• Injecting left-brain thinking into the typically right-brained-heavy Marketing function

• Building a marriage between Marketing and IT, as well as other interdependent stakeholders

• Creating a predisposition toward deploying marketing automation solutions to address such challenges as optimizing scarce resources, capturing ROI insight and sharing knowledge.

c. How does DAM Help Marketing Through its “Evolution”?

The incredible speed with which the current marketing environment changes, definitely leads to certain problems:

• Migration from a mass market to a highly segmented market, potentially 1-to-1

• Existence of more products in more variation with shorter product life cycles, potentially heading into the direction of “tailor made solutions”

• Communicating different kinds of information

• Communicating via an increasing amount of interactive media

As in every evolutionary process (i.e. biological, technological), growth in information transactions occurs exponentially. Every year the amount of data stored doubles. Even if innovation in technologies can keep up with the speed, people need to revise their skills in order to adapt to the changing circumstances and processes need to be adjusted to changing volumes. Marketers definitely experience the fall-back of this growth. It is impossible for individuals to keep up with this information expansion. Managers have the feeling that they have less control over what “goes out”, they suffer more stress and are heading for “Information Fatigue Syndrome”, the 21st century burn out.

The sheer magnitude of this information growth and the requirements on how to accommodate these volumes is highly underestimated by many people. This psychological phenomenon originates from the fact that people experience change, but it is perceived as a linear growth. Even an exponential curve approximates a straight line when viewed for a brief duration. Our intuition tells us that situations will change with the current pace.

Technology can be a great help, but will not offer the overall solution. Implementing a content management system, for instance, does not mean that you have content. The obvious conclusion is that we need to develop an environment that can adapt to rapid change and creates overall visibility and control. DAM offers a helping hand.

d. What is Mobile DAM?

“The Possibilities of Archived Streamed Media for Marketers”

As converged mobile devices, such as phones or PDAs become more predominant both in the office and the home, the use of rich mobile media for marketing or other business activities is likely to increase. Although beset by a bewildering array of formats, protocols and device hardware, the principle of mobile DAM, or archived streamed media, is quite straight-forward. Web-enabled mobile users can either request or be served video or similar ‘rich media’, stored in an online digital archive. Furthermore, it is now possible to enable users to record video on converged mobile devices and upload it to the very same archive.

The possibilities for marketers and other business professionals are numerous. First, and perhaps most obvious, are the possible applications for B2C marketing. Video can be pushed to ‘opt-in’ targets to advertise your latest product or service offers. This provides a highly effective method of communicating in competitive arenas such as consumer electronics, FMCG or other consumer retail markets.

Further, video can be distributed to customers as an after-sales service. For example, technology vendors can send video installation guides to recent customers of products such as plasma TVs, which in turn provide further up selling opportunities. Media-rich mobile communications can therefore be considered an increasingly essential component of CRM programs and the wider marketing mix for these types of businesses.

But it is in B2B markets where the opportunities are most diverse. Video podcasting is gaining ground as a pull-marketing strategy for businesses ranging from the hi-tech industries to the public sector – and mobile DAM provides an excellent platform for these sorts of business communications. Rich media can be used to assist professionals in the field. Consider the use of detailed video footage of specialist operations for engineers or architects lacking that experience and who are on-site. From marketing to operational activities, mobile DAM has varied uses for modern businesses.

Where mobile DAM truly becomes leading-edge is via its reverse application, i.e. enabling mobile users to record and upload media from converged mobile devices to an online digital archive, accessible by corporate or public users. In this scenario, videos or photos, etc. can be stored and shared in organizations, almost in real-time, offering many advantages for professionals in the field, such as civil engineers or press officers. As the uptake of converged mobile devices spreads, this use of mobile DAM technology has potential for B2C marketing operations also.

Already forward-thinking businesses who target youth markets have used this technology to enable consumers at their sponsored events to record and upload their own videos to public websites or similar.

In summary, mobile DAM provides a host of opportunities for business from almost any sector. Such systems can be used to push media-rich content to end-users as well as enable mobile users to upload, store and share rich media with corporate or wider networks. Mobile technologies, in particular mobile DAM, will be indispensable tools for marketers and other business professionals in the not so distant future.

7. DAM Global Market Status

Products in this market were initially custom built solutions to meet the specific needs of individual firms. Now product suites have modular architectures so that customers can pick and choose the functionality they require instead of buying the entire product suite. Product architecture is also very open to allow full integration with other third party systems. Most architectures are now built on a web services platform to ease integration. Though most of the platforms currently use J2EE, many vendors are now working on a .NET strategy as well. Vendors that do not use either platform do have XML based APIs to facilitate interoperability and integration.

a. Competitive Ecosphere

Products in this market were initially custom built solutions to meet the specific needs of individual firms. Now product suites have modular architectures so that customers can pick and choose the functionality they require instead of buying the entire product suite. The number of competitors in the world DAM market continues to be dynamic as new vendors crop up while others drop out of the market each year. No vendor even has 5 percent of market share. There are over 70 vendors worldwide that provide DAM solutions in some form and many more who claim to provide DAM and have very basic indexing and search capabilities. In 2006 there were different tiers of competition within the vendor landscape for the DAM market.

These included:

• Large broadcast equipment manufacturers that sold DAM to the media and entertainment (M&E) market
• Large storage and software companies that sell DAM to enterprise and M&E markets
• Small and highly specialized DAM software companies that sell high-end DAM solutions as installed or hosted solutions
• Small DAM software companies that sell low-end DAM solutions mainly as workgroup solutions

The industry has started seeing a lot of investment and consolidation activity since 2002. Many DAM vendors found themselves in too much of a niche market. Customers felt that they needed more collaborative bids as their needs were better met by the implementation of a suite of products from various vendors. This led to strategic partnerships across the DAM value chain. With tight capital markets these partnerships have been turning towards consolidation. Vendors feel that they can be more competitive by having a more enhanced product suite through consolidation and also get funding more easily. Many outside parties are also seeing this industry as very lucrative and looking to invest into companies in this area. Vendors that do not use either platform do have XML based APIs to facilitate interoperability and integration.

b. Significant Vendors and Important Acquisitions

Significant vendors in the DAM market include (in no particular order): EMC, NorthPlains, Interwoven, OpenText, Corbis, Canto, Avid, Getty Images, Widen, ClearStory Systems, MediaBeacon, Harris, Extensis, Xinet, Paxonix, Blue Order, Vizrt and Apple to name a few in this heavily fragmented market.

Apart from companies within the DAM space consolidation is also occurring from allied industries. Key acquisitions since 2000 include Documentum’s acquisition of Bulldog and then EMC’s acquisition of Documentum; Savvis’s acquisition of Wam!Net; Interwoven’s acquisition of Mediabin; Stellent’s acquisition of Ancept followed by the sale of Ancept to North American Systems International; Avid’s acquisition of NXN; Corbis’s acquisition of eMotion; OpenText’s acquisition of Artesia; Autonomy’s acquisition of Virage; Apple’s acquisition of Proximity; Vizrt’s acquisition of Ardendo; Oracle’s acquisition of Context Media and INSCI’s acquisition of Webware to form ClearStory. In all these examples the acquiring company belongs to an allied market. This shows how, as the DAM market evolves, vendors from allied markets looking to enhance their product offering are going to try and achieve this through buying into the DAM market rather than reinventing the wheel on their own. Similar acquisition is also expected between DAM and another growing market – The Marketing Process Optimization Solutions (MPOS) market. Many MPOS vendors already partner with DAM vendors and/or have some light DAM functionality built into their solutions. The ability to integrate with third party systems and collaboration platforms has become very important. Vendors achieve this through either a Web Services architecture or through XML based APIs for integration.

The use of DAM as the central platform that enables workflow integration with other third party systems is a growing trend. Some DAM vendors are trying to position themselves as such a platform themselves by virtue of being built around a Web Services platform, while others are exploring partnerships with infrastructure providers to achieve that. Many third party solution vendors that provide components which integrate into a DAM system as a module are finding lucrative OEM partnerships deals as well, since DAM vendors are now more open to such OEM partner integrations rather than spend time and resources to develop the module themselves. These modules are usually around deep video indexing, transcoding and emerging application modules such as presentation management.[7]

The chart below shows the market positioning of key DAM vendors within the competitive landscape.

c. Core Competencies (Benefits of DAM)

Global Access

Global Access provides any user or program with a single logical view of an enterprise’s digital asset inventory through the most appropriate devices and with role-based views.

Business Problems Solved:
• Easily find/access important information
• Save the time needed to search or recreate assets
• Gain trusted access to existing content and their associated rights to generate new revenue
• Reliably identify rights related to assets
• Exchange assets and corporate knowledge with partners/stakeholders securely

Business Benefits Gained:
• Providing a best-of-class solution improves relationships and increases satisfaction
• There is an opportunity for new sources of revenue when there is a higher degree of self-help in the licensing of digital assets

Digital Asset Warehouse

A digital asset warehouse can be defined as the enterprise solution for storage, organization, search and retrieval of digital assets and their associated rights.

Business Problems Solved
• Can reliably manage large volumes of heterogeneous digital assets
• Centralized logical infrastructure prevents
• Knowledge flight (IP)
• Lost assets
• Recreating existing assets
• Loss of brand consistency across divisions and distribution channels
• Lack of efficiency in locating assets and their associated rights
• Efficiently Track and Protect Rights
• Generates and protects revenue
• Facilitates digitization initiatives rescuing deteriorating physical assets

Business Benefits Gained
• Creating the digital future requires effective control of your digital assets.
• Better control of digital assets and improved reliability of asset integrity delivers better margins.
• Globalization and market fragmentation have pushed traditional content management systems to their limits
• As other technologies associated with delivery, customer relationship management and web content management have matured; the weak link is now the ability to strategically manage, control and deploy assets.
• Managing advertising campaigns and images to enable reuse, coordinate branding across multiple advertising and PR firms, leveraging communication channels while avoiding expensive and wasteful content recreation.

Rich Media Production and Distribution

Rich Media Production and Distribution is the process of creating and producing media (streaming and non-streaming) and delivering various combinations of these assets across lines of business, to trading partners and out to customers.

Business Solutions
• Offers an infrastructure and a set of processes that will scale to support the impending growth in digital assets
• The processes around creating, using and reusing rich media can be simplified and automated
• Digital channels are used effectively
• Creative collaboration is streamlined and distributed

Business Benefits Gained
• Accessing and managing existing assets is as important as creating new ones
• Digital content growth will justify business process improvements to better leverage new media
• The digital divide will become increasingly important at the enterprise level and organizations that cannot integrate their operations and collaborate with their trading partners via digital channels will be increasingly perceived as lesser partners.

d. Opportunities and Forecast

Digital content has grown in popularity and is expected to do so over the forecast period. Traditionally companies in the media and entertainment market have been the main users of these solutions as they have had the maximum amount of content that needs to be digitized and managed. Though media and entertainment continues to be a major source of demand for digital asset management (DAM) systems, there has been a shift in focus towards other markets for DAM system implementation, especially as a tool to facilitate marketing and corporate communications. This shift in demand has primarily come about because of the extensive and increasing use of media documents (audio, video, images, and animation) in other segments. Companies in the corporate horizontal market not only maintain much of their brand equity as rich files but also have accumulated and are continuously creating a large amount of rich content in corporate communications and training. This has created an ever-increasing demand to manage this content.

Enterprise Markets – where DAM is primarily used as marketing and corporate communications tool. This also includes the marketing and corporate side applications for media and entertainment companies. DAM systems provide archive and management for digital assets used in the business process of these organizations. The content or digital asset itself is not the product being sold in these markets. DAM makes a good case for enterprise wide deployment in these markets.

Media and Entertainment (M&E) Markets – where DAM is primarily used as a tool to archive and manage content through the creation, re-purposing and delivery phase of the digital asset and for these markets the content is the actual product being sold. DAM systems typically see work-group level deployments in these markets.
The percentage split in revenue contribution is expected to be initially in favor of the enterprise market with the M&E market overtaking the enterprise market by 2011. This is because of the explosion of digital media in the M&E segment which has made content creators, content owners and content aggregators start looking at asset management solutions seriously.

Apart from healthcare, telecommunications and the mobile wireless markets, increasing DAM applications in fields such as legal, engineering, manufacturing, retail, financial services and architecture are expected to help fuel growth. These verticals should continuously increase the demand for DAM solutions over the forecast period.
The market has an immense amount of growth potential, which is largely driven by the explosion in the use and creation of digital media and the associated value proposition of increased efficiency, cycle time acceleration, reduction in the cost of lost or misplaced work, repurposing of assets and resources among others. Another big driver for the market is the rapid acceptance of DAM as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). More organizations are now open to outsourcing their content management needs and have hosted applications help them free up some of their IT burden.
The biggest challenge faced by this market is the deep fragmentation that exists. This has created a lot of market confusion as many vendors, despite their claims, do not have a true DAM solution but because of such claims customers get confused about what is a true DAM solution. This at times leads to bad customer experiences and reluctance towards further technology investment for DAM.

The industry will continue to grow towards maturity and revenues will continue to increase, though from 2011 growth will be at decreasing rates as the market matures. The DAM market is expected to cross the billion dollar mark in 2011. As DAM implementation increases over the forecast period and current restraints decrease in impact, overall market revenues should grow to well over a billion by the end of the forecast period.

e. Key Future Competitive Factors

There is vast potential for digital asset management (DAM) solutions in the future. As the digital age is transforming day-to-day life, increasingly digital media applications are being found in every vertical market segment creating a huge amount of content and in so doing also creating the need and demand to manage these digital assets. Despite the persistence of some amount of economic sluggishness and tighter capital markets, this market has proven its viability in today’s business environment. This has led companies like EMC, Apple, Oracle, IBM, HP, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems among others to also take active interest in this market either through acquisition or by creating facilitating technology platforms. Successful companies in this market will be the ones that can leverage their technologies with strategic partnerships with others in the DAM space and with vendors in complimentary markets in an effort to consolidate their core competencies to gain market share by targeting multiple verticals instead of using a niche strategy.

Key competitive factors in this market include:

• The ability to integrate with third party systems using a Web services architecture
• Providing DAM through a SaaS model for customers looking at deploying DAM functionality without burdening internal IT
• Modularity to provide customers with the flexibility to choose from the most relevant modules for their business processes
• Enhanced metadata models for more refined indexing and search capabilities, especially for video
• Highly scalable solutions to help customer future proof for increased usage
• Conditional access and DRM (Digital Rights Management) integration to provide enhanced security
• An increased number of file types/formats that can be handled by the system help customers deploy a point solution for all their asset management needs

[7](An Introduction to the World Digital Asset Management Market)