You’re setting your company’s pace, but will your digital asset management solution be able to keep up?
With many enterprises reporting that their content needs double every 12 to 24 months, your digital asset management (DAM) solution may need to handle anywhere between 32 to 1024 times more content by 2028 than it’s handling today.
Not sure if that long-distance view is relevant to your enterprise? Today’s multi-channel business environment is driving the evolution of increasingly large and complex digital assets. If your legacy DAM program can barely handle the volume and types of assets you have right now, no amount of fixes will keep it running smoothly for the next couple of years, or beyond.
Search in DAM Platforms
We’ve worked with some of the biggest global companies to understand where DAM pain points pinch hardest and found that legacy DAM products often get scuttled because they can’t keep up with increasingly complex, rapidly growing assets. Our research shows that each search can drag on for up to 15 seconds — and that’s 15 seconds every time someone adds a filter, changes a word, or otherwise alters the search parameters. The situation can be even worse for international users, and sometimes, searches don’t work at all if too many people are simultaneously using the system.
Slow search speed is one of the biggest tells that your DAM system is struggling. Plodding and unreliable searches and downloads push your teams into creating workarounds to compensate for the product’s inefficiencies and contribute to the maze of ad-hoc processes that arise when they can’t depend on it.
Thriving enterprises depend on collaboration, whether your teams are in the same building, in a different time zone, or on a different continent. The ability to reliably transfer files across far distances is essential, but it takes a modern DAM system with robust, infinitely flexible content services architecture to make it happen. If your legacy product can’t handle high search volumes, advanced searches, and conduct fast full-text searches of assets and metadata, it’s time to move on.
Questions to Consider When Investing in a DAM Platform
It’s crucial to choose a DAM vendor whose commitment to technical leadership is at the heart of their mission. But when every DAM vendor makes that promise and more, how can you distinguish ambition from reality? We’ve got five big questions whose answers can help clear up the confusion.
- Question 1: Can the DAM of your dreams comfortably scale to accommodate asset volume increases of at least 100x over the next ten years while maintaining a high level of responsiveness?
Limits on a DAM product’s scalability will hamstring productivity faster than you think. If you’re not confident that your DAM can hold double or triple the number of assets currently stored, or can accommodate files that are twice as large as those you can upload today without clogging the system, the aging process is well underway – and it may be time to consider a more robust alternative. If you’re experiencing delays in image rendering or video previews, and large file transfers are a “wait and see” proposition, your existing DAM is deep in the danger zone.
- Question 2: Does your DAM vendor have a demonstrated, well-crafted roadmap for future growth, and do they define the boundaries of technical feasibility and product excellence?
If a tech vendor advertises “customer-driven innovation,” they’re only going to invest when customers threaten to flee – not a recipe for staying ahead of your needs. The best vendors strive to push the boundaries of technical feasibility and product excellence. Vendors that commit to true future readiness can see what’s coming – because they’re creating it. It’s not enough for any vendor to compete by adding also-ran functionality, so don’t fall for that when it comes to choosing the right DAM for your needs.
- Question 3: What are your DAM vendor’s capabilities for managing rich media?
The days of DAM as a tool for maintaining static image libraries are long gone. Locating, creating, and reusing the latest rich media should be a piece of cake, whether it’s 4k video, 3D images, complex animations, AR, or any type of cutting-edge asset that may come down the pike.
- Question 4: How will your potential new digital asset management platform scale?
We think the best answer to this is “all the way.” Last-generation DAM products are capable of use across multiple locations in the same geographic region, but run into problems when it’s time to span the globe. Your DAM should make content instantly accessible by any user, wherever they are in the world.
- Question 5: How fast is fast?
If searching takes longer than three seconds and requires pinpoint querying to return accurate results, don’t waste your time. Your DAM should enable full text and keyword searches and return results as fast as a web search – less than 100 milliseconds – regardless of distance, time of day, the size of the system, or the number of users working in the system at once.
To see how Nuxeo’s answers to these questions stack up, visit our Digital Asset Management page!