DAM: Go with the flow

OpenText Media Management 7.2, released in April, supports digital media creation, publishing and distribution for the media and entertainment industries, publishing, marketing and other use cases. Its embedded file transfer technology allows the delivery of large files typical of those industries much faster than previous methods did. "When these large files have to be moved, there is a big impact on workflow," Hellier says, "and this feature accelerates the transfer process significantly."

The latest release also provides new capabilities such as visual collaboration and visual annotation review, which allows a better work-in-progress loop for creatives. That capability augments the primary focus of Open Text's management of digital media, which is on managing intellectual property. A connector to Adobe allows integration from Media Management 7.2 to Adobe Creative Suite, so that designers working in Adobe do not have to leave that application to place an asset in the Media Management repository.

OpenText's system is focused on managing assets as intellectual property, tracking their development and then pushing them out to distribution channels via platforms such as OpenText Web Experience Management. "Workflow is really important when you are developing new assets, and remains important throughout the life cycle. We want to make it easy for users to handle the digital experience from beginning to end," Hellier says.

Digital asset management is rapidly becoming one of the most critical pieces in a company's overall content management strategy, because of its impact on maintaining intellectual property, facilitating marketing and supporting many other functions. Frost & Sullivan predicts a growth rate of more than 20 percent per year in the global market for DAM systems from 2013 to 2019.

"The use of rich media is pervasive throughout every vertical and across many horizontal enterprise functions," says Mukul Krishna, senior global director of digital media at Frost & Sullivan. "In addition, the whole concept of rich media is changing and expanding. For example, videos are now embedded in PDF files, so an asset that would have been static in the past is now dynamic and interactive."