What is Digital Asset Management Software?
During the coming years, the IT infrastructure needed to support access to these digital assets will improve, IDC’s Duhl says. When that happens, look for DAM systems to deliver natural language and other nifty forms of searching, such as matching an image or a few bars of a song (most systems today rely on keyword searches, he says, which have their limits). Digital rights management will also be an increasingly important feature for DAM customers, as they look to share content across the firewall. "There really aren’t any standards there yet," says Garth Landers, a research analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.
Analysts see new markets for DAM in everything from corporate training to public safety (how else will law enforcement agencies manage and analyze the thousands of hours of surveillance videos collected as part of the post-9/11 homeland security drive? Landers asks). "Rich media is the last bastion of unmanaged information," Duhl says. It’s also a fast-growing bastion of unmanaged information?all the more reason for CIOs to start paying attention to the DAM market.
