The Digital & Marketing Asset Management Evaluation Report · backbase red hat act-on tensity somos...

BACKBASE

RED HAT

ACT-ON

TENSITY

SOMOS

ADATA

EQUILIBRIUM

CANTO

WAVE

RAZUNA

NETXPOSURE

EVOLPHIN

EXTENSIS

BRIGHTINTERACTIVE

FOTOWARE

MERLINONE

PICTUREPARK

WEBDAM

WIDEN

WOODWING

RESOURCESPACEBRANDWORKZ

The Digital & Marketing Asset Management Evaluation Report

Excerpt of Comprehensive Product Evaluations

Sample Edition, Sample License

Digital & Marketing Asset Management Sample Edition, Sample Licensei © Copyright 2016 Real Story Group.

All Rights Reserved.

ADAM Software

Adobe

Avid

Brandworkz

Bright Interactive

Bynder

Canto

celum

censhare

Cinegy

EnterMedia

Evolphin

EMC

Equilibrium

Extensis

FotoWare

IntelligenceBank

MediaBeacon

MerlinOne

NetXposure

North Plains

Nuxeo

OpenText

Oracle

Picturepark

Razuna

ResourceSpace

Stylelabs

WAVE Corporation

WebDAM

Widen

WoodWIng

ZONZA

Vendors Reviewed

Vendors Reviewed

This list of vendors reflects the contents of the full report. This excerpt only reviews North Plains Telescope.

Digital & Marketing Asset Management Sample Edition, Sample Licenseii © Copyright 2016 Real Story Group.


Table of Contents (from full report)

Executive SummaryA short introduction to key concepts and individual vendor strengths and weaknesses

What Is Digital & Media Asset Management Technology?Key Concepts

The Business Case for Digital & Media Asset Management

The DAM Maturity Model

DAM and MAM Technology Services How DAM and MAM tools really work

Universal Scenarios: The Key to Comparing Technologies

Image & Brand Management

Publishing

Corporate Time-Based Media Management

Broadcast Media Management

Peripheral / Other Media Asset Management Use Case Scenarios

Vendor Evaluations

Large Enterprise Suite Vendors

Adobe: Experience Manager Assets

Avid: Interplay Media Manager

EMC: Documentum Digital Asset Manager

OpenText: MediaBin

OpenText: Media Management

Oracle: WebCenter Content

Pure-Play DAM: Primarily On-Premise

ADAM Software: ADAM

Canto, Inc.: Cumulus and Flight

Celum: Digital Asset Management

censhare: censhare

Equilibrium: MediaRich ECM for SharePoint

Evolphin: Zoom

Table of Contents

Digital & Marketing Asset Management Sample Edition, Sample Licenseiii © Copyright 2016 Real Story Group.


Table of Contents, Cont.

Extensis: Portfolio Server

FotoWare: FotoWeb and FotoStation

MediaBeacon: R3volution

North Plains: Telescope

North Plains: Xinet

WAVE Corporation: MediaBank Gold

Pure-Play DAM: Primarily Cloud Based

Brandworkz: Brandworkz

Bright Interactive: Asset Bank

Bynder: Bynder

IntelligenceBank

MerlinOne: Merlin

NetX: NetX

Picturepark: Picturepark

Stylelabs: Marketing Content Hub

WebDAM Solutions: WebDAM

Widen: Media Collective

WoodWing Software: Elvis DAM

ZONZA: ZONZA

Open Source DAM Projects

EnterMedia: EMShare

Nuxeo: Platform

Razuna: Razuna

ResourceSpace: ResourceSpace

This table of contents reflects the contents of the full report. This sample report only reviews North Plains: Telescope.

Digital & Marketing Asset Management Sample Edition, Sample License1 © Copyright 2016 Real Story Group.


Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise Ratings Summary

LEGEND: 0 1 2 3 4 Poor Fit –––––––––– Better Fit

Ratings Summary: Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise

Feature Ratings at a Glance

ADAM

Can

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Evol

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Foto

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Med

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Tele

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WAV

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Creation & Management

Ingestion 3

Asset Lifecycle 2

Media Processing 3

Taxonomy Management 3

Metadata, Controlled Vocabulary & Schema Support 3

Basic Search 3

Faceted Search & Navigation 4

Asset Manager User Interface 3

Assembly & Delivery

Collaboration 2

Workflow 2

Localization & Internationalization 2

The full report shows evaluation ratings for every DAM product — so you can quickly contrast the strengths and weaknesses of specific products.





ADAM

Can

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m

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Equi

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Evol

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acon

Tele

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WAV

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Transformation & Transcoding 3

Multichannel Delivery 3

Personalization 2

Architecture & Management

Application Development 2

System Administration 3

Security 2

Reporting & Analytics 1

Distribution 4

Configuration 3

Customization, Integration & Extensibility 3

Scalability & Performance 3

Storage & Archiving 2

Administrator User Interface 3

Strategic Considerations

Customer Support 1

Vendor Professional Services 1

Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise Ratings Summary, Cont.





ADAM

Can

to

celu

m

cens

hare

Equi

libriu

m

Evol

phin

Exte

nsis

Foto

War

e

Med

iaBe

acon

Tele

scop

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Xine

t

WAV

E

Strategy 1

Viability & Stability 1

Technical Modernity 1

Roadmap 2

Value for Money 2

Channel Professional Services 1

Community Strength 2

Third-Party Add-ons 2

Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise Ratings Summary, Cont.




Scenario Summary: Pure-Play DAM: Primarily On-Premise

Use Case Scenarios

ADAM

Can

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celu

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WAV

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Image & Brand Management

DAM Library or Photo Archive 0

Brand-Centric Asset Management 1

Multilingual Brand Management 1

Marketing & Advertising Asset Mgmt. 2

Publishing

Periodical & Catalog Production & Mgmt. 1

Multichannel Publishing 3

Corporate Time-Based Media Management

Audio & Video Library Review & Approval 3

Audio & Video Production & Reuse 2

Broadcast Media Management 1

Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise Scenario Summary

The full report rates each product in relation to specific business scenarios, so you quickly can determine which products are a good or bad fit.




Vendor by Verticals: Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise

Vendor by Verticals

ADAM

Can

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Evol

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Foto

War

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acon

Tele

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WAV

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Advertising & Creative Agencies 2

Media & Entertainment 3

Fast-Moving Consumer Goods 3

Pharmaceutical, Health Care, & Medical 1

Government 0

Nonprofit, Education, & Heritage 1

Retail & E-commerce 3

Manufacturing 3

Pure-Play DAM – Primarily On-Premise Vendor by Verticals

North Plains Telescope

6 Digital & Marketing Asset Management Sample Edition, Sample License

© Copyright 2016 Real Story Group. All Rights Reserved.

North Plains: Telescope 9 northplains.com

I. Vendor at a Glance

Specsheet NorthPlains:Telescope9

Geography Global

What’s New • Management team changes — again (sweeping and changing the C• suite at North Plains has become an annual event)• A strategic move to create northplains.com in the cloud as an entry point for all

three product offerings (Telescope, Xinet, and On Brand), thereby shifting focus tothe application (products becoming apps) of these three semi-distinct productswith differing workflows

• Aspera plugin for the Telescope Uploader can do multi-job uploads in high-latencyenvironments

Strengths • Broad experience with large companies & global implementations• Among the strongest video management capabilities of any DAM- focused

product, including the frame-by-frame video annotation capability• System can be customized and extended using SQL-like functional rules —

without the need to write Java code• Strong partner network in publishing and broadcasting, including eBook

generation for publishers

Weaknesses • Current roadmap/strategy is a confusing mess, stemming from a lack of vision andleadership at the top of the organization

• Like OpenText and ADAM, it is among the highest TCO (Total Cost of• Ownership) of any DAM product• Rapid pace & turbulence of external investment, executive team change, and

inconsistency in product direction should give buyers pause• System administration requires knowledge of a particular flavor of SQL, something

you’ll need to factor into your training budget• Not strong in multilingual scenarios, but there has been some improvement• Despite a growing services team, customers report that the team is still stretched

too thinly

Potential Fit Marketing & Advertising Asset Management, all Publishing Scenarios, Time-Based Media Management

The full report delivers in-depth evaluations of each product. Below is a sample for just one vendor.




Specsheet NorthPlains:Telescope9

Unlikely Fit DAM Library or Photo Archive, Multilingual Brand Management, Broadcast Video & Film Production

Compare To OpenText, MediaBeacon, ADAM

Delivery Environment On-Premise, Public Cloud, SaaS

Licensing On premise: Per server, per concurrent user, or perpetual license; hosted option (called Telescope On-Demand) also available. A typical deal size is ~$500,000; $750,000 and up with services; large enterprise perpetual license easily exceeds $1 million.

Ownership Privately held

II. Summary• Toronto-based North Plains Systems (NPS) is one of a dwindling number of enterprise-

scale, independent, pure-play DAM vendors.

• The company’s Telescope product line (now more than a decade old) is noted for itsrelatively straightforward installation and configuration requirements, its elegantdistributed architecture, and the relative ease with which it can do some fairly powerfulthings using a SQL-based scripting language (eliminating what would otherwise be anonerous amount of Java coding).

• Similar to OpenText, NPS is an acquisitive company. After a growth equity investmentfrom Accel-KRR in 2011, the firm acquired UK-based MRM/WCM vendor, VYRE, andpre-press vendor, Xinet.

• The company is in perpetual management turmoil, having changed CEOs 4 times in 5years.

• The current roadmap plans to merge the three products (Telescope, Xinet, and OnBrand) into a cohesive whole by introducing northplains.com as a central hub in anattempt to “appify” the three products.




III. BackgroundNorth Plains Systems (NPS) began with (then) Macintosh programmer Steve Sauder in hisToronto basement in 1994. Today, North Plains claims 450+ customers. Overall, the lastseveral years have been an intense period of change for North Plains; we wonder if things willever settle down as investor pressures mount.

The Telescope product line used to include four main offerings, but it has dwindled to two since North Plains abandoned its more affordable, workgroup-oriented options. Today the offerings are:

• Telescope Enterprise – This is the top-of-the-line product. It supports Microsoft SQLServer and Oracle; can use Microsoft IIS, Apache, or Oracle web servers (for running“Telescope.web” — see discussion under Architecture); and the media hub can bedeployed to Tomcat or Apple WebObjects. The system can be extended via the use ofSDKs (there are separate SDKs for separate subsystems).

• Telescope OnDemand – This is a hosted (SaaS) offering, configured to order, withhosting by NaviSite (a well-known hosting service with more than a dozen data centers)on quad-core Oracle servers. Note that only about 10 percent of North Plains’customers are using this service; most customers still favor an on-premise Telescopeinstallation.

With Telescope version 9, the interfaces for creative users and administrators took a leap from a techie look to a more creative and usable one, with clearer iconography and better application of drag-and-drop functionality.

Customers feel that the UX remains old-fashioned and non-intuitive relative to other products on the market. Additionally, there are reports that the UX is inconsistent across different browsers.




IV. Scenario FitTelescope is too heavy and expensive for anything but the largest DAM Library or PhotoArchive, or for Brand-Centric Management. However, it could be well suited to Marketing &Advertising Asset Management scenarios, and most Publishing scenarios. Non-broadcast,corporate-oriented, Time-Based Media Management is also a fit for Telescope.

Use Case Rating Analysis

DAM Library or Photo Archive 0 This is overkill and too expensive for this purpose; consider alternatives with a history in the cloud.

Brand-Centric Asset Management 1

Except in multi-brand, agency scenarios, Telescope is overkill; consider alternatives with a history in the cloud.

Multilingual Brand Management 1 Telescope has little experience in Multilingual Brand Management. Only a few foreign language packs are available (German & Japanese).

Marketing & Advertising Asset Management 2

Telescope supports many large enterprises and agencies in this scenario.

Periodical & Catalog Production & Management 1

Telescope’s has little experience in Production Management.

Multichannel Publishing 3 This is one of Telescope’s sweet spots due its long history with publishers, agencies, and media companies.

Audio & Video Library Review & Approval 3

Telescope has some of the strongest video ingestion, review, and approval capabilities of any DAM vendor.

Audio & Video Production & Reuse 2

Telescope has adequate features for video sampling, clicking, and transformation.

Broadcast Media Management 1 There is no integration with high-resolution production broadcast tools.


10 Digital & Marketing Asset ManagementSample Edition, Sample License


V. Strategic Considerations

Consideration Rating Analysis

Vendor

Customer Support 1

Customers are often displeased with responsiveness. One customer told us, “We’ve had to escalate our issues up the chain of command on several occasions, but eventually, we do get heard.”

Vendor Professional Services 1 The professional services group has been a revolving door of staff, hindering the overall quality.

Strategy 1

North Plains is attempting to combine three distinct products with distinct architectures and code bases under one roof. By provisioning these onto one platform (northplains.com), North Plains is trying to improve flexibility and switching platforms under the covers will be easier. We question how straightforward this will be.

Viability & Stability 1 Vendor product and corporate change is excessive.

Product

Technical Modernity 1

Telescope is burdened with a large legacy codebase. North Plains currently uses the cloud to dangle the carrot in front of longstanding customers, attempting to encourage them to upgrade to newer versions. But the issue of vastly different code among the products — as well as data migration — remains.

Roadmap 2

Whether there will be a slow transition to the new northplains.com, or three, separate systems will continue to be integrated with one another superficially remains an unanswered question.

Value for Money 2 Telescope remains among the highest TCO in the industry.




Ecosystem

Channel Professional Services 1 The NPS partner network is weak since the company built its own insufficient services team.

Community Strength 2 NPS enjoys a somewhat large community.

Third-party Add-ons 2 There’s a decent array of third-party connectors, but customer satisfaction has been mixed.

VI. Vertical Expertise

VII. AnalysisTelescope has a large presence within Media & Entertainment as well as with product-focused verticals such as FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods), e-commerce, and Manufacturing. It has little to no presence in Nonprofit or government organizations. Companies with smaller asset libraries and brand-oriented businesses should consider more lightweight products.

VerticalExpertise

Advertising & Creative Agencies 2

Media & Entertainment 3

Fast-Moving Consumer Goods 3

Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, & Medical

1

Government 0

Nonprofit, Education, & Heritage 1

Retail & E-commerce 3

Manufacturing 3

“Telescope is burdened with a large legacy codebase. North Plains currently uses the cloud to dangle the carrot in front of longstanding customers, attempting to encourage them to upgrade to newer versions. But the issue of vastly different code among the products — as well as data migration — remains.”




VIII. Functional Considerations & Drawbacks

Findings Impact

Creation & Management

The UI/UX still lags its competitors, most notably enterprise-leaning celum and Canto Cumulus, as well as new and punchy vendors such as Bynder and STYLELABS.

Plan for major configuration work to achieve a simplified interface. To ensure user adoption, plan for adequate training.

North Plains’ integration with Aspera’s Fasp™ technology provides accelerated bulk ingest.

This adds secure transfer features as well, but download the plugin to ensure it’s compatible with your browser.

Feature Ratings

Architecture & Management Application Development 2 System Administration 3 Security 2 Reporting & Analytics 1 Distribution 4 Configuration 3 Customization, Integration & Extensibility 3

Scalability & Performance 3 Storage & Archiving 2

Administrator User Interface 3

Feature Ratings

Creation & Management Ingestion 3

Asset Lifecycle 2

Media Processing 3

Taxonomy Management 3

Metadata, Controlled Vocabulary & Schema Support 3

Basic Search 3

Faceted Search & Navigation 4

Manager User Interface 3

Assembly & Delivery Collaboration 2

Workflow 2 Localization & Internationalization 2

Transformation & Transcoding 3

Multichannel Delivery 3

Personalization 2




Findings Impact

The principal metaphor is the Catalog, which is simply a logical collection of related assets.

Note that a Catalog is just proxies of assets; it doesn’t contain the actual assets, and a smart Catalog is just a saved search. Catalogs can be populated with Catalogs (nesting is supported), and they can be global (viewable to others) or local (viewable to a particular user).

Telescope is a rare breed of DAM that truly can handle video and audio at a more complex level. Frame-by-frame video annotation, time-coded descriptive metadata, and clipping to create rough cuts are just some of its features.

The combination of scalability and transcoding abilities renders the platform an enterprise DAM system that performs almost as well as a Broadcast Media Management System.

The “Creative Hub” extends the control you get from DAM out to the creative workflow. Borrowing technology from Xinet, the Creative Hub is designed for satellite creative teams to be part of the workflow by working collaboratively with the business owners in the enterprise DAM system.

Creative Hub is not just a “window into your DAM,” it’s a place where third parties can check assets into your own Adobe CS environment, without being on-site or a fully registered Telescope user. This extends lightbox-style access, which provides external users deeper inclusion in the creative process, without the need for full read/write access.

Assembly & Delivery

Telescope’s Media Portal can build personalized branded portals.

You can repurpose and present branding collateral. Rather than adopting a CMS approach where assets are “pulled” from the DAM, Media Portal is more of an extension of the DAM system that syncs with Telescope and updates in real time.

In addition to standard faceted and range search, Telescope can do full-text searches of the content inside a file or group of files. Here, advanced users can take advantage of a fairly elaborate search syntax (with operators for OR, NOT, AND, proximity, and stemming), with parenthetical groupings of sub-expressions.

There’s no shortage of search capabilities in the product, and the associated UIs are both natural feeling and powerful.

System Administration & Management

A separate Telescope Administrator client allows a system admin to define end-user “Welcome Pages” (landing pages), to manage user rights, set up custom searches, define metadata templates and ingest behaviors, connect extra hubs and LDAP directories, view database statistics, create file migration policies, manage licenses, monitor user activity, and to perform other miscellaneous maintenance tasks.

Telescope’s management features are quite powerful, but expect a steep learning curve.




Findings Impact

In order to set up user and group rights on certain items (such as searches), the administrator must be comfortable writing or modifying SQL queries. This makes the system quite powerful, because rights specifications can employ “where” clauses to constrain user operations (searches, in particular) in sophisticated, context-dependent ways.

Ensure that the skills of your administrator are a fit; NPS resources are scarce, in general.

Actions in the system are tracked and stored in the SQL database so audit data is readily accessible. A few UI screens can monitor user activity and histories, and the product provides a plethora of reporting features.

Competitors such as MediaBeacon and OpenText focus more on analytics. If you need detailed reports, plan to mine the system database yourself, using Crystal Reports or a similar product.

IX. Technical Services: Considerations & Drawbacks North Plains Telescope is written in Java; however, North Plains has been late to take advantage of open source or open-standards components. The system does support major standards like XML, LDAP, JDBC, and SOAP, but you’ll look in vain for technologies like Lucene, Hibernate, or Spring. What you will find is SQL. This is a heavily database-oriented product where user-initiated actions tend to trigger stored procedures.

Findings Impact

The Telescope architecture has several major pieces. Assets are stored on a file system, and metadata is kept in a database (including low-resolution proxies). The two main server runtimes are Telescope Hub and Telescope Web Server. The former can be considered a repository-services layer, whereas the latter brokers requests from web-based (browser) clients.

Despite the “Hub” appellation, the architecture is less hub-and-spoke oriented than it is peer-to-peer. The Hub is more of a services-discovery layer. Requests are handled by brokers. Agent processes (with names like Authentication Broker, Session Broker, and Ingestion Broker) intercept client requests, in effect mediating every client/system interaction, so that no actor talks directly to another (making the entire system a kind of SOA microcosm).

Telescope supports multiple hubs and a federated repository.

This affords considerable flexibility in setting up large systems with disparate geographical Hubs. (If you’re planning such a setup, consider performance issues carefully; you may need to budget for WAN accelerators and other hardware.)

A rarity these days, Telescope relies on an older (pre-Web-Services, pre-SOA) technology known as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) — a legacy technology that’s reviled for its poor performance, firewall unfriendliness, and overall complexity.

Depending on how many files you have, how big they are, how many locations your network serves, etc., perform extra diligence when testing a North Plains system.




Findings Impact

The product’s main extensibility mechanism is something called Functional Rules, which is essentially an API-based on SQL.

Functional Rules are the key to customizing Telescope; you won’t get far without them. Unfortunately, to use them requires that you buy a special SDK and attend training. The alternative is to get your hands dirty with Java with other competitive systems. Pick your poison.

X. ConclusionNorth Plains has an impressive roster of big-name customers that have rolled-out some trulymassive systems involving (in many cases) millions of assets (terabytes of storage) and tens ofthousands of connected users. The product’s ability to scale up and out is not in doubt.However, Telescope is a technology that feels somewhat arcane relative to a conventionalJ2EE-oriented system.

As North Plains expands its offerings and makes acquisitions, the buying puzzle becomes more complex. Telescope is the Ferrari of the DAM world; it's complex, full-featured, and not everyone will be able to drive it. Telescope version 9, we’re told, is a million and a half lines of code. This is a company struggling with leadership and strategic direction while caught shifting to cloud-based services. The company must integrate three product ranges into one, cohesive offering and communicate this in a clear manner. This will affect its staff — as well as current and potential customers. Until a unified approach is determined, this remains a company embroiled in troubled times.

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Testimonials

Testimonials

“Theresa Regli and the Real Story Group are doing an exhaustive coverage of globally available Digital & Media Asset Management Research products. I have seen their sample reports and have compared them with the ones by Gartner and Forrester. Real Story Group’s report on DAM systems is the best in the world.”Punit Dhandhania, Content Architecture, Workflows, Systems & Strategies Consultant, Independent Consultant

“I expected the quality and you absolutely delivered. What I did not expect are the laugh-out-loud moments of your humor shining through. Your report is a masterpiece of technical writing liberally laced with truth and a dash or two of snark. It is FUN to read. I can’t remember the last time I had fun reading technical information. Thank you for this awesome experience.”Leona Coffee, Director, Central Web Office National Academy of Sciences

“This research is an excellent review of the DAM technology marketplace. For anyone considering a DAM deployment or taking the next steps to build on an existing system, Digital & Media Asset Management Research is an essential reference. Whatever your background or role in your particular project, you will find the information and answers that you are looking for.”John Gaylor, Head of Product Marketing, Gorkana Group

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