Analyst, Forrester, have published a report on their assessment of the DAM market:
“In Forrester’s 15-criteria evaluation of the DAM market, we identified 12 significant vendors in the space — ADAM Software; Adobe; Autonomy, an HP company; Canto; celum; EMC; Extensis, a Celartem company; MediaBeacon; North Plains; OpenText; Widen Enterprises; and Xinet — and then researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings on how DAM vendors measure up and plots where they stand in relation to each other in order to help AD&D professionals select the right solution for their rich media management needs.” [Read More]
They evaluate a number of ‘significant’ DAM vendors, using a baseline criteria of $5m annual revenues to filter the number of participants down. I’m not sure that criteria necessarily leads to the best selection of vendors as some of the smaller players in this market often outstrip their larger peers for both product stability and innovation (in my experience) but procurement managers tend to favour larger turnovers, even if the finical stability of the vendor in question might be illusory and constructed using accounting smoke and mirrors.
The Forrester report costs $2495 to purchase. Competitors, Real Story Group, want a similar amount for their one at $2,450 but they cover 29 vendors, including some open source ones, although the inclusion criteria appears more arbitrary and is non-transparent (although perhaps I just missed it and they don’t use the previously described revenue model to sub-divide the market). I am not aware of what the licence restrictions are for the Forrester report (many analyst reports stipulate that organisations must purchase additional licences depending on the number of readers – as software vendors often do). The Real Story report allows you to share it with 5 colleagues before you need to buy another. Real Story also offer annual subscriptions with updates and to allow buyers to purchase multiple reports.
What neither of them reveal, as far as I could find, is whether participation requires payment to change hands between the analyst and the vendor. Real Story Group are fairly clear about what they will not do but I couldn’t find any actual reference that says vendors are not charged to ‘pay to play’ - as some have called it. Since they highlight their robust stance towards vendors, one would expect they compete with them for their client’s budgets rather than viewing the subjects of their evaluations as a potential sales opportunity too, but that would be a point I would want to know before I was willing to judge whether the report was worth the asking price or not. ”Double-dipping” by analysts certainly does take place in the tech sector and while it might be legal, one would need to question how impartial an analyst evaluation can really be and, therefore, the ultimate value of it.
I am unsure to what extent these reports are sold more as a form of insurance for corporate buyers (as in, ‘we asked the best people’ etc). Although I have to acknowledge that if you’re spending hundreds of thousands (or millions in some cases) of your company’s funds on DAM technology then it is understandable that you would be reticent to make a decision without some kind of second opinion as a back-up – and that might be a major factor driving the demand for this type of product.
In my mind, the real issue remains the monolithic procurement process for corporate DAM that transforms the exercise into a minefield of risk for the staff of the buyer. Perhaps changes bought about by Cloud distribution models and open source might begin to change that. Then end users might be better able to make more incremental procurement decisions based on proven business need and tangible usage experiences, which might reduce the need for this kind of assistance to begin with. I am not about to hold my breath for that change to become reality, however.
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