Trends in the Current DAM Market and the Implications For 2019
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This article has been written by Ralph Windsor, DAM News Editor and Project Direct of DAM Consultants, Daydream.
In this article, I want to assess some underlying trends in the Digital Asset Management software market that have been prevalent during 2018 and see if they can be used to predict what may happen in 2019.
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Hi Ralph, thanks for nice article!
As a co-founder of a Lite DAM solution (Daminion) I would like to put my 2 cents and share my vision of why large DAM vendors failed to enter into the DAM Lite market.
DAM Lite is a dead path for many DAM vendors because this business requires a completely different economic and another approach. Sales/Marketing efforts that work for a DAM with 50k/year price doesn’t work for 3k/year product.
User acquisition cost, user support costs, deployment costs should be minimal for Lightweight DAM vendor.
Deployment of DAM isn’t as simple as the deployment of Adobe Creative Suite, Office suite or a CAD system. In 99% cases implementing a DAM system is a complex and long process that requires a lot of time. 5% of our clients who invested in Daminion could not get started using it because they couldn’t find time/resources to consolidate/ingest/annotate their digital assets.
The process of DAM integration is much easier, though, for large organizations that can allocate people for this job and even have a digital asset librarian position in a company.
In Daminion, we provide a deployment service, including help with migration from other DAM systems or from file-servers. But we can’t afford it for small orders, because this process might take 1-2 months and lots of our resources.
Another problem is that a demand for DAM system is correlated with the company size and a number of DAM system users. A value of a DAM investment for large companies is huge, while small companies expect less demand and might stay with file sharing services or file structure for a long time. I am not talking about ROI but about a product value for clients.
Marketing efforts for a lite DAM should be completely different because it requires to use sales/marketing channels with very low customer acquisition costs.
Third-party integrators also are not interested in Lite DAM systems so clients in most cases need to go through the deployment path by themselves.
It is also much harder to offer an on-premises DAM Lite solution, that requires more resources for deployment in comparison to a cloud deployment. Plus vendors must deal with thousands of different platform configurations, and thousands of technical support requests.
What helps Daminion to be profitable and grow each year is that we had started our business with a focus on small teams, although we’ve also recently started selling Daminion to mid-sized companies to add extra buoyancy to our business. Plus we launched a cloud version in a test mode to address a demand for a lightweight simple DAM solution for small teams.