Technology Overview: Digital Asset Management
Regardless of the nature of a business, the chances are
good that sitting around on a server somewhere are
copious amounts of video, audio, and other digital assets.
Knowing what's there, let alone how to take advantage
of it, can be a challenge for any business.
The challenge grows exponentially when you're a Big
Five car maker such as General Motors. GM's Media
Archives Group in Detroit manages more than 3 million still
images, 2,000 movies, 10,000 video masters, and more
than 250,000 digital files, some of these assets dating back more than 100 years. Every year, GM adds another
10,000 digital assets.
GM manages its archives with Artesia's Teams software,
one of a variety of sifting, sorting, searching, and storage
tools companies are introducing to help keep businesses
from drowning in a digital deluge. Calling their services
digital media asset management, rich media management,
enterprise digital assets management, or just DAM
("dahm") for short, these companies and products are
geared toward storing in easily retrievable formats the
growing wealth of multimedia information their clients are
amassing, both on- and offline.
DAM differs from traditional database storage in that it
encompasses text, animation, still images, documents,
Web pages, audio, and video. Content can range from TV
commercials to marketing brochures. As the Web
expands, the need for ways to manage all the information
on it will continue to expand, too, according to Arianna
Breitstein-Arazi, an analyst with the Giga Information
Group. The numbers back her up. According to research
firm Gistics, DAM sales are expected to reach $3.2 billion
by the year 2002.
Companies offering DAM services, like Artesia
Technologies and the Bulldog Group, bundle audio and
video searching, sifting, and sorting tools into their
products. They provide a broad range of tools that allow
users to manage their images, text, and video.
"Our premise is that as these bricks are turning to clicks,
traditional businesses' boxes are turning to bytes," says
Sebastian Holst, vice president of marketing for Artesia.
"Their literal assets are becoming digitized, and
companies need to manage these the way they manage
all of their assets."
"The way you manage rich media is fundamentally
different from the way you manage any other type of
content," Holst continues. "If you were to take streaming
video and put it into a traditional content management
system, that log would devour the entire system."
Browser-based Solutions
Artesia uses its Teams software, a browser-based
application, which runs on Windows NT and Solaris, to
differentiate between assets and find the most
appropriate solution. In the case of the GM system, some
of the users are company employees, but a number are
outside the company. They include suppliers, partners,
production companies, trademark partners (Matchbox
cars, for example), and the press.
Created with Enterprise Java Beans, the Teams
architecture is modular and has plug-and-play capabilities
for indexes, user interfaces, search techniques, and
rights and permissions services. "We use XML internally
to model all of our metadata, and we have an open
metadata structure," said Holst. "The system comes [to the client] understanding and knowing huge volumes of
metadata based on data format." Artesia can support 250
different formats, according to Holst.
Like Artesia, the Bulldog Group has an impressive
clientele and partner list; clients include Sony Pictures
Entertainment. Its Bulldog Two.Zero application offers a
Java client and a recently added HTML client, according
to John Windsor, a Bulldog strategic alliances manager.
"We have shifted the balance to a more Web-centric
one," said Windsor. The HTML interface looks just like a
browser and is easy to customize. "We make sure that
the interface is intuitive and easy enough for anyone [to
use]," Windsor said.
For many companies who utilize Bulldog's system, the
in-house job of managing the company's assets falls on
an archivist whose responsibilities include "ingesting" and
"extracting" the assets. For example, at Sony Pictures,
one archivist is responsible for the company's millions of
pictures, but another person may be in charge of
uploading all the images from a current film.
Cleaning out the files
But even if the software can handle voluminous amounts
of data, the volume may be intimidating to human
managers--especially when it comes time for the digital
equivalent of spring-cleaning. In order to make the chore
less onerous, both Bulldog and Artesia have made it part
and parcel of their systems. Any archives that have not
been accessed for a certain amount of time (six months,
for example) are moved to storage accessible by, but not
on, the system. After another six months, they are moved
offline to a remote location. "This alleviates the burden on
the system and on the management of the system,"
explains Windsor.
PAM, not DAM
As impressive as current technologies might be, DAM
systems still have a way to go, according to Jeremy
Schwartz, an analyst with Forrester Research. Simply
storing the assets isn't enough, he says. "Asset
management solutions that focus solely on production
issues are not enough in the current business market,"
Schwartz stated in a recent report on leveraging digital
assets. "Companies need a strategy that also creates
new revenue streams from digital media
assets--proactive asset management (PAM)."
Opportunities can include licensing media assets or
making them available on the Net through a fee-per-view
basis, according to Schwartz. To do this, PAM systems
must comprise not just storage and search and retrieval,
but also delivery and distribution.
Gold is waiting to be discovered in historical archives,
according to Schwartz. Once companies discover how
to effectively manage these archives, they may find that
what once was a cluttered closet is now a
money-making mother lode.<<
By Liz Garone