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On the one side are companies offering enterprise content management (ECM) and trying to encompass all of the pieces of asset management under a single system. On the other side are those who insist that more than one specialized system is needed for asset management to be successful. "I think there is a need to specialize to some extent," says Tom Moran, director of marketing for content management/distribution service provider WAM!NET, "because the individual customers and certainly the vertical markets have unique workflow requirements." Having some level of expertise in what your customers do is essential to creating a successful DAM system, he says. Moran points to Artesia, another DAM pioneer that focuses on workgroup solutions operating in a local environment for marketing and media production applications. By their very nature, customized software solutions present a challenge to vendors, since they involve specialized components that may or may not be relevant to the next customer. "That becomes a challenge because as a software or services vendor, you're obviously looking to standardize requirements across your customer base as much as you can," Moran says. "That's not easy to do with DAM." DAM vendors often also face a lack of knowledge on the part of potential customers getting involved with DAM for the first time. Conferences can help, but as Moran points out, the 400 people who attended the symposium are only a tiny fraction of the people who are involved in projects. First-timers present several challenges, among them a "shot in the dark" approach that can sabotage even the best intentions. "A company's IT department might be building them something from scratch in which case they don't have a very good perspective on what features and functions they need the most," Moran says. "Those companies that are just starting out don't know what they don't know. If you're basing your assessment of what you need on product service information that is available from vendors, there is kind of a disconnect there. Vendors in this space almost universally encourage customers to define their own requirements clearly and precisely—not only in the customer's best interest, but the vendor's as well." Is there a way to bring all of the departments together under one solution? Companies like Documentum think so. "We have a central unit, our platform group, which builds everything that is common to all content management types," says Mark Arbour, general manager of Documentum's rich media business unit. "We have different business divisions that focus on building best-of-breed extensions to that common platform." Basically, a customer can buy the common component, plus the DAM pieces, for an ECM solution. Moran and Mike Barros, Artesia's VP of business development, think it's tough to deliver on the promise of bringing it all together under an ECM approach. "ECM is a misleading term," says Moran. "It implies that very large enterprises do or could have some sort of stable or centralized system for managing their content. In theory, that's possible. In practice, I'm not aware of any organization that has an ECM," he continues. The organization that Moran says has come the closest to realizing true ECM is Universal Music Group, which has all of its media organized in a single DAM. Most companies don't even get that far, he says. "Universal is very progressive," he says. "Sony is similar. It probably has to do with the economic conditions of the music industry." He believes these entertainment companies are further ahead than other companies because they have been forced to respond to market conditions in a much more aggressive way than have other companies. Barros' thoughts on ECM echo Moran's. "I think the pendulum has swung too far," he says. "People say they have an ECM solution by putting this broad label on their core technologies such as document management, records management and Web publishing. I don't think any one vendor can deliver on an ECM solution as it is broadly defined. It's a marketing catch phrase for those not really in touch with the business. To us, ECM is simply DAM, an enterprise solution to manage your rich media or content—not documents, not records, not emails, and not Web publishing." Documentum's Arbour strongly disagrees. "We didn't realize there was such a big difference between DAM and ECM until we became part of an ECM company," says Arbour, who worked for DAM vendor BullDog when Documentum purchased that company in 2001. He gives the example of pushing out content around the world on the Web simultaneously and in different languages. "It's an area DAM doesn't even get into," says Arbour. "A DAM solution may able to put information on the web, but doesn't do nearly as much as an ECM system can." What about the "best of breed" argument in relationship to ECM—the belief that the strongest solution is usually bred from several different components? Arbour says Documentum is actually in a better position to offer best of breed than any of the smaller companies are. "We had a development team at Bulldog of about 40 people. Thirty of them worked on that core central piece of the solution, and 10 of them worked on adding rich media capabilities." But now, at Documentum, each area has 50-100 people working on it. As for companies not needing an ECM solution, Arbour says Documentum has about 1000 companies that have implemented DAM, records management, collaboration, and Web publishing in their system. While it is possible to get different solutions from different companies and integrate them, integration is not likely to be smooth and costs can be horrendous, Arbour adds. "The way we are set up is that we are best of breed-integrated." The result of the differences in opinion? This industry is no different than others: consolidation is likely to continue as solutions are defined and redefined, and the industry matures, analysts say.
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