Whit AndrewsI got a briefing from ClearStory Systems not long ago, and one of the questions I had for them was if video was something they saw as important. They weren’t deep in video at the time — they did most of their investment in images, so video wasn’t a heavy place that they invested. But video’s blowing things out, I remain convinced. In fact, The Feed Room, a video provider, just bought ClearStory. Anybody in the file management trade of any kind these days is working through the issue of convergence at the same time they’re thinking through the fact that they have a bunch of content-enabled vertical application categories to value and select.
So, in other words, the decision process looks like this: What file types do I handle? Where do I let the enterprise handle the file types (on-premises, Saas)? What do I know that other vendors I deal with DO NOT know? Another example of this sort of specialty is Bremy, a fairly small digital asset management vendor who briefed us today, that is going after the retail and marketing material market. Bremy’s focusing on generating collateral, including printed collateral, that people use to sell stuff. Specialization like that is critical when money starts to ebb away from the market, the way it is now in some places.
How bad will things get? Well, there’s our official research, which says, “under this scenario, worldwide IT market growth drops from 8.9% to 7.3% in 2008 and from 5.8% to 2.3% in 2009…” And then there’s anecdotes. I emailed a bunch of enterprises last week to see what they decided about their digital asset management purchases about which they sought advice in the last two years, and several have responded that DAM projects weren’t funded or have been postponed. I still think managing video, images and other digital assets is a critical capability for the next few years, especially as the YouTube phenomenon plows through companies — but cost containment and reduction stories will be critical to make sales.
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