Entering The Enterprise Zone

If anything will hasten the recognition of digital asset management (DAM) as a mainstream technology critical for every information-intensive organization, it is today's integration of traditional and emerging e-business business practices.

This is at least the expectation of 75 DAM vendors now targeting the graphic arts industry in one form or another, some of them poised with enterprise-level solutions promising to synchronize companies' print and Web campaigns and create integrated operations able to perform with equal dominance in both traditional and emerging business environments.

"Where we've found the most traction in the last six to nine months is with organizations trying to reintegrate whatever e-business they may have started in the last year or two back into their traditional business," reports Sebastian Holst, vice president of marketing for Rockville, Md.-based Artesia Technologies, a one-year-old seller of enterprise-level digital asset management solutions.

"Consequently," Holst continues, "larger print publishing and production shops are seeing the opportunity to broaden their roles to their customer bases, providing value-added services such as cross-media production, asset hosting, and coordinating across multiple advertising agencies, as well with the customers of those agencies."

The reality in today's business environment is that organizations are tripling their media assets every year.

At the same time, technological advancements in digital video creation, streaming, compression, bandwidth, and other content-delivery technologies are bringing video, audio, and the Internet together as rich media, making the opportunity and scope of reusing digital assets greater than ever. To say the least, managing deployment of these digital assets into multiple media—all the while maintaining branding and producing the job quickly and within budget—becomes a daunting challenge.

According to a recent five-part study conducted by the International Prepress Association, the asset management market is expected to increase to $5 billion or more per year starting this year.

"DAM isn't prepress," a participant in the study concluded. "In fact, it's less like prepress than facilities management. It's more like dealing in a brand-new industry."

The evolving understanding of DAM's capacity in the generation of billions of dollars in the advertising and commercial revenues from video, audio, and Internet technologies has spawned dozens of new companies in the past year offering simple to complex brand content and media asset management. Moreover, it has led asset management vendors previously dedicated to single-user or workgroup versions of products—such as Canto's Cumulus and CreativePro.com's Portfolio 5 offerings—to expand to address the enterprise.

"It is no longer about selling a product out of a box that has a function; it's about selling a solution meant to answer the whole needs of a customer," says Fitzroy Bonterre, director of U.S. operations for Canto Software Inc., a pioneer of asset management solutions founded in Germany in 1990 and established in San Francisco in 1993.

"Enterprise is becoming a workflow," Bonterre adds. "Customers want something as flexible and extensible as they need it to be, visible to business parties all over the world, and with the maximum amount of security.

"The process starts with a needs assessment, finding out what each customer does in their work, and building a solution around that. Customers need an interface to look at the assets. They need a box to put it in, an operating system to run that box, a storage mechanism to hold all the actual assets, and a back-end archive."

Essential elements distinguishing enterprise-level digital asset management solutions from other content management or media asset management solutions, as they are often called, include the following:

• the asset is defined as the single organizing principle underlying security, search results, transactions, rights, and all other system functions;
• each component of the solution, including indexing, cataloging, navigation, transformation, and export must offer comprehensive support for all types of media (including streaming media) and for all traditional and Internet delivery channels; and
• the underlying architecture must assure around-the-clock operations, scalable performance, and distributed access throughout the extended organization.

"All organizations, even mom-and-pop shops, are recognizing that it's extremely expensive to create a shadow organization for the Internet that sits next to their regular business," explains Holst of Artesia Technologies. "To use an old military phrase, 'You can't win a two-front war.' If you're literally fighting two different fronts—severing your business because one part of your business is using one technology and another part is using another—you divide all your talent, resources, and dollars, and you don't have focus on either.

"The key is to figure out how to share single integrated workflow environments, creative spaces, and back offices for collection and billing. DAM, today and going into the future, is at the hub of that reintegration. The technology's new role, for example, is to take intellectual property, image a single truth of a piece of media or content, and then be able to express that through a QPS workflow or a Dreamweaver workflow that goes into a Vignette Web site."

In December, Artesia released Version 4.1 of its Teams DAM system harnessing XML, Java, and Corba technologies to organize assets and make them available for multichannel publishing. All digital assets are ingested into a central XML-managed repository where "transformers" can reformat content while retaining metadata used to capture, access, retrieve, and distribute information.

Enhancements are said to include improved Web-based access, meaning that digital assets can now be imported via the Web.

The user can search for assets, edit descriptive properties, check files in and out, delete content, create static and dynamic collections of assets using sets and saved searches, and export individual or grouped assets as Web pages or PDF documents.

Canto's new Cumulus 5 Enterprise Edition, priced at $33,000 and completing the Cumulus product line of a single-user and workgroup editions, is also aimed at file sharing and management as well as project collaboration over a network.

User benefits include automatic detection of usage and cross-referencing of assets (e.g. the detection of links and placed assets in compound documents), live filtering to determine exact categories and records that a specific user or group needs to access, and check-in and check-out functionality via the Internet.

Additional benefits include category field-linking for automatic routing of job ticket information into proper category fields, category field search enabling users to find jobs or other groups of assets rather than single files, and extended database connectivity.

Among the new entries to the asset management space, Milpitas, Calif.-based Chuckwalla, Inc. has positioned itself as an enterprise-wide deployment solution for "high-volume users of rich content in Web sites, print applications, or multimedia materials." Central to its open, scalable architecture is its FileSmart technology that breaks complex assets like QuarkXPress or video files into manageable media elements.

Says Jon Lewis, vice president of sales for the nine-month-old company, the intent is to give structure and intelligence to these unstructured elements, and thereby create media objects that are dynamically shared by graphic artists, corporate customers, printers, and Web developers at Internet speed.

"While DAM started off as nothing more than an intelligent storage system for printers, enabling them to effectively replace their file rooms of film, it has evolved into a mission-critical technology for not only them, but more importantly their customers—the organizations out there that are building brand and initiating brand," says Lewis.

He continues, "We need to think of it as concentric circles reaching outward. By necessity, the technology has evolved itself from a workgroup focus to reaching out now across the enterprise and across the extranet, where folks who are involved with the creation and production of that content external to the core organization can share in the creation, production, and possibly the distribution of that content, out finally to the Internet where there's some public consumption of that content. Where this intersects the printers—and it's actually a very big intersection—is in being able to manage disparate rich content for their customers."

Banta Integrated Media, a Cambridge, Mass.-based pioneer of enterprise-level DAM for the graphic arts, has offered its B•media enterprise content management software to publishers and catalogers since 1998.

Recently, Banta released its fourth upgrade, Version 2.6 of B•media, aimed at lending more speed and efficiency in setting up a DAM system, including populating databases and integrating with other computer systems and platforms within an enterprise.

In addition to searching for content based on document attributes, the new release's full-text search-and-retrieval features leverage the underlying functionality of the Oracle 8i platform to find and retrieve content based on strings of text found inside QuarkXPress and Microsoft Word document files. The feature is designed for production coordinators and designers who can search for content based on text found within a document.

Another new feature is e-mail notification, which affords the ability to link to a customer's current e-mail system.

"Enterprise-class means it crosses a broad range of users, including graphic artists, Quark specialists doing page layout, and content experts," explains Banta Integrated Media director of product management Karen Anderson, who says that setting up a DAM system requires then establishing a committee (with representatives from each of all the departments involved) to devise a system tailored to the specific needs of the different groups within the organization as well as outside its walls.

"For example, the committee must look at the level of granularity for the information stored in the asset management system, and how it meets the needs of the production group, the writing group, and so on," says Anderson. "You don't want to have one set of requirements that only meets the production group's workflow, or only meets merchandising workflow requirements."

She adds, "The departments are looking at how they're going to track this information as well as the metadata or attributes they're going to use. Many times this represents the first time these people have ever come together and have really communicated as a team. The key is coming to some kind of consensus."

As for the applicability of installing an enterprise-level system at smaller firms, Anderson points out that enterprise-level software can be installed at a groupware level, giving smaller firms the potential to grow into enterprise-level as cross-media needs of customers continue to expand.

Price will vary depending on the number of geographical locations and groups involved.

"In this economy, it may make sense for people to start at a smaller level and then grow into it," she says. "The issue is scalability and a firm's ability to integrate with other systems."