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Four ages of DAM

MM: This actually might be a good place just to do a quick reprise of the four major waves of DAM.

EH: Yes.

MM: In the early- to mid-90s, basically, we had multimedia databases. Fetch and Canto, I think, were some of the original ones. They kind of existed on your desktop, and you used them as a personal productivity tool.

EH: Yes.

MM: Then from the mid-90s forward, the web began to show up. We started getting grouped into departmental DAMs. One of the great early ones was Webware Mambo and MediaBank, and other ones emerged as really strong workgroup and departmental DAMs. It tended to be a 2-tier or 3-tier client server system. Where you had a dedicated client on the front end.

Then in the late-90s, and through the early 2000s or maybe 2004 or 2005, we had the real emergence of the enterprise DAMs and media service platforms. Those were full end-tier web service-enabled DAMs. They pretty much assumed that the primary users of these solutions had browsers and big pipes and stable platforms and things like that.

This is where the whole notion of distributing media services through an enterprise — and maybe among some partners — really began to take hold. It was at that point that the marketing functions of large enterprises really started seeing a lot of utility. Whereas the media, entertainment and publishing — because they were kind of content factories, anyway — perhaps saw it earlier.

Then around the 2005-2006 timeframe, we saw the emergence of what we called digital supply chains for content. “Supply chains” kind of implied two or three core ideas. One was end-to-end process integration. But more specifically, process integration of loosely coupled systems.

So you had multiple systems often times owned by very different people. But they had been wired or integrated in such a way that they could pass data and assets in a very controlled way. Hence the term, “Loosely coupled.”

The other aspect of a supply chain is that it’s an economic framework. And more specifically, a procurement framework, for bringing strategic sourcing and competitive bidding and vendor consolidation into a supply network. Thereby integrating these suppliers to your supply chain. They kind of begin to integrate their core processes with your core processes.

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