Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Sue Clarke
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Digital asset management (DAM) solutions provide a means for organizations to manage digital assets such as photographic images and video and audio content. These assets often need to be presented in 3D, as spinsets, and delivered as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences so organizations can provide engaging, highly personalized, and relevant user experiences.
The growth in online shopping and the need for organizations to become increasingly innovative in the way they showcase products mean that DAM has taken on a new importance in recent years. Time to market has become critical as well because companies compete in an increasingly crowded online marketplace, with the largest brands creating hundreds or even thousands of assets every day.
Given these requirements, many DAM vendors are investing in automation capabilities to help speed up tasks, including the workflows that handle mundane tasks such as moving an asset between participants during a review process, auto-tagging to make it easier to find the right asset to use in a marketing campaign or for a personalized experience, and intelligent cropping to ensure that the main subject of an image is optimally positioned.
A DAM system can’t be used in isolation, and therefore, integration is vital. The best integrations are seamless, allowing users to access DAM assets from within a third-party application. Many vendors offer a large selection of out-of-the-box connectors to other solutions, including digital experience platforms (DXPs), customer relationship management (CRM) tools, product information management (PIM) tools, and applications that can extend the capabilities of the DAM. Tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud and others for digital rights management (DRM), AI, analytics, and collaboration are common types of applications DAM solutions may need to natively integrate with.
In a matter of months, generative AI will move from being a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” functionality for DAM vendors if they are to remain competitive. Vendors therefore need to consider how they can use the technology both in their own products to make tasks within the product less complex, perhaps by dynamically providing suggestions on the next stages in the implementation, and by generating or manipulating assets to make the lives of marketing and creative teams easier.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key digital asset management vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating DAM Solutions,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
This is our first year evaluating the digital asset management space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:
- Support for a wide range of assets
- Auto-tagging
- Search
- Ability to organize assets in collections
- Taxonomy support
- Workflow
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.