CMS Watch EMC Feed

Capture software to the fore

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:46:00 -0500

As we start to look back on the past year, one of the key trends we have seen is the resurgence of interest in capture software. It's early days for sure, but just as there is clearly increased interest in multi-channel publishing and CCM (component content management), so too at the entry point of the content lifecycle, is there an increased recognition by buyers that efficient capture delivers big dividends. Be it forms, paper, xml, pdf, or whatever -- making sense of the incoming information as early as possible in a process is one of the biggest productivity boosters your organization can attain.

Where there remains a disconnect between buyers and vendors - is in just how expensive and difficult good capture technology can be to acquire. For it seems that now OCR (optical character recognition) is commonplace, that buyers still imagine that dealing with the issues of distributed capture, multi-paged documents, multi-languages, in multi formats is somehow easy, and by default should also be cheap.

In fact the difference between the high end capture vendors (such as Abbyy, ReadSoft and Kofax) and low-end OCR is the difference between a bottle of wine vinegar and a bottle of vintage Krug. For at the high end, capture systems not only recognize multipage documents, but also relationships between pages and the context and content on them. They can recognize and capture a paragraph that is written in English, and just as accurately capture the native language Chinese footnotes related to that paragraph. They can capture at a staggeringly fast and accurate clip -- and once configured and running are typically far more accurate and faster than humans keying the same information in to a system manually. And of course, they cost more.

Key advice to buyers: don't underestimate the value of good clean captured data at the start of your process. Remember the maxim, rubbish in = rubbish out. At the same time don't underestimate the capabilities of what are genuinely some of the most technically advanced products in the ECM stack -- as it is likely that just for once, the right vendor may be able to do more for you than you think.

Scalable ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:18:00 -0400

One of the words that makes me most cringe when I hear or see it in vendor marketing is the word scalable. It's no less annoying when buyers ask us "is EMC/FileNet/Hyland/Nuxeo/HP/Etc. scalable?"

Here's why.....ECM systems can be scalable or they can fail to scale well. They can have modular architectures that allow you to simply add more elements as required, rather than multiply the entire system as things expand. They can be scalable in that they have built in high availability, automatic failover support, run on enterprise grade application servers and databases. They can be scalable because they have been tested and proven to handle very high volumes (hundreds of millions of documents) in the repository and/or tested and proven to handle very high throughput rates (tens of thousands per hour or minute). There are many ways in which an ECM system can scale or not. But the biggest element determining whether the system can scale is your usage of it.

Consider that some users have many files (images/CAD files etc) that are a GB or larger in size, by contrast another may have an average file size in the small kb's (xml fragments for example). One user may handle a very small number of highly complex, large, ever-changing virtual documents, while another one a very large volume of static transactional images. Some firms want to centralize their ECM system and allow access to remote users via the web, others will distribute the architecture widely to combat latency issues.

In other words.....there are as many ways to scale an ECM system as there are to use an ECM system -- and no vendor out there has a monopoly on scalability. For where a SharePoint would be a good fit, a Documentum 6.5 may not, and vice-versa. Where an Alfresco may scale perfectly a better fit in another instance may be an Objective. Additionally it's always worth remembering that the ECM system is only as good as the operating system, database, application server, storage hardware, and the network that it runs on

The key of course as always is to fully understand your needs first, then match those needs against the capabilities of the products currently available, alongside your own architectural environment. And though it can be argued that some systems are more scalable than others, remember that every vendor will claim their product is scalable, you have to ask yourself "what does scalable mean to me?" And then test their claims accordingly.

Autonomy, centralizing control of MOSS

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Every day I am assaulted by a barrage of press releases, almost all of which contain nothing of interest. So it was a pleasant surprise to be hit early on a Monday morning by this one from Autonomy, "ControlPoint unveiled for Microsoft SharePoint information governance."

In short the firm is releasing an updated system that they claim will provide wide records management capabilities across disparate and federated SharePoint environments. It is a system that builds on Autonomy's acquisition of Meridio technology in 2007. A closer look at this announcement reveals more in the way of federated records management than governance as such, providing a centralized RM policy hub to manage classification, preservation, and disposition of content assets. Governance is of course far more than this....but that's PR for you.

Nevertheless, the Meridio technology was good technology. It seems to be getting some decent R&D invested in it, and overall I am happy to see it remain a solid option, particularly for those looking for more centralized control of broad MOSS environments.

As subscribers to CMS Watch services know, we have long believed that SharePoint's Achilles heel for the enterprise is governance -- or lack of. Many of the complaints we hear of regarding MOSS relate in one way or another to buyers and users failing to apply appropriate governance practices at an early stage, resulting in many cases in MOSS sprawl and non-compliance. This has at times had us labeled as "SharePoint bashers" by some who have clearly not read our reports, or taken our online education courses. If they had they would know that we remain enthusiastic about MOSS, but urge all buyers to apply the brakes before unleashing it throughout the enterprise.

Just like any other ECM system or content development platform, SharePoint requires the same vigorous procurement and technical vetting process, you would apply to the likes of EMC Documentum or Objective. It also requires the same pre-planning, business analysis, and governance work in advance to ensure success.

In praise of user group meetings

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:58:00 -0400

I have decided that I love user group meetings, and I want to go to more, so please invite me to yours...

Last week Dave Giordano of TSG invited me to attend and speak at the Documentum Mid West User Group meeting in Chicago, and a fine time was had by all. In fact I have been to quite a few user group meetings over the years both here in the US and in Europe -- and they are quite simply invaluable. For those of you using or contemplating using software from one of the larger vendors out there I would advise you to check these local groups out. If you are on a limited budget, make sure you prioritize such groups over the yearly vendor fests that are typically held (at great expense) in warm and glamorous locations.

At user group meetings you get the Real Story, you talk to your peers. Whereas at the vendor's own annual event, you endure hours of sales pitches, and ecstatic announcements of new bells and whistles to come in the next release. Of course few people really care that much about the next release; they care about getting value from the release they currently use, typically some version well behind the latest.

In this regard the meeting last Friday in Chicago was typical - the talk was mainly about EDMS, DQL and WebTop, with nary a mention of Web 2.0 and REST. Sobering and valuable stuff. And where else than a User Group meeting would you get a quote like this one? "We are mainly paper-based, except for the Word files the users have to create the paper with"... a classic!

Is CMIS RESTful? Or merely HYPEful?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:22:00 -0400

Not long ago I blogged about the newly announced Content Management Interoperability Services specification, which is a joint effort of EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft. If you close your eyes and sniff, CMIS smells a bit like JCR minus the coffee aroma. It's a high-level spec aimed at making content repositories reachable via platform-neutral (RESTful and SOAP-based) protocols.

As such, CMIS opens the way (in theory, at least) to faster development, easier integrations between the ECM and enterprise-middleware worlds, less dependence on proprietary SDKs (thus less vendor lock-in), and so on.

At first glance, CMIS seems too good to be true. Certainly it seems well motivated (as was JSR 170, which failed to set the world on fire), and it has drawn considerable attention based on its use of technologies like Atom Publishing Protocol and REST.

But there are those who think it's all a bit strange... including Roy T. Fielding, the father of REST.

Fielding said in his blog yesterday: "I am getting tired of big companies making idiotic claims about REST and their so-called RESTful architectures. The only similarity between CMIS and REST is that they both have four-letter acronyms."

Fielding continues: "REST is an architectural style, not a protocol, and thus announcing it as a protocol binding is absurdly ignorant behavior for a group of technology companies."

In reality, Fielding says, CMIS is actually "a Web Services interface for document management." He adds wryly: "It should be renamed WS-DMS and tossed on the same pile of other specs from that genre."

It's not just the non-RESTfulness of CMIS that perturbs Fielding, though. The real problem is the implied data model. According to Fielding, CMIS is just "a thin veneer on RDBMS-based data repositories that provides a data model for document-like objects within filesystem-like folders ... exactly the kind of document model one would expect within a legacy document management system that is backed by a large relational database and authored via Microsoft Office applications."

Some would argue that Fielding is not necessarily an unbiased observer, since he works for Day Software. But I think his analysis of CMIS in the context of "conventional CMS wisdom" (whether you agree with it 100 percent or not) offers a refreshing counterpoint to the breathless hype surrounding the original CMIS announcements. To have the merits of CMIS debated openly (after seeing IBM et al. present it to the world as a fait accompli) can only be a good thing.

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:00 -0400

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

A short while ago, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

The Content Management Interoperability Services specification (soon to be submitted to OASIS) is a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of repository content. Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture.

Notably, CMIS leverages the Atom Publishing Protocol in its REST model (and indeed requires compliant repositories to honor APP, although they can optionally honor additional transfer representations, such as JSON). SOAP is written into the spec as well, for what that's worth.

The press releases around CMIS are loud and proud, trumpeting the spec's ability to enable platform-agnostic content mashups, easier cross-silo federation, rapid application development made possible by a common API, cleaner abstraction of content and content services from application logic, and so on.

We've heard these sorts of claims made before, of course. Proponents of the Java Content Repositories spec (originally JSR 170; now JSR 283) pushed JCR using exactly the same selling points. In fact, with just one exception, the originators of CMIS (IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft) were the proponents of JCR: They were all, except for Microsoft, on the JSR 283 Expert Committee (and still are).

JCR achieved relatively little traction in the WCM and ECM worlds, though. Why should we expect CMIS to fare any better? After all, if JCR (with the same promoters as CMIS) floundered, why won't CMIS?

The answer could turn out to be quite simple. As I noted in an earlier blog, the main impediment to widespread adoption of JCR has always been the 'J': the dependency on Java. The whole world doesn't run on Java; therefore it was never realistic to think the world would embrace JCR. (Certainly Microsoft was never going to advance a Java standard.)

With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way).

A short while before he posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody.

I tend to agree. Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews.

This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

If there is one thing in particular this latest research has shown us, it is that SharePoint did not (as many predicted) kill the ECM market, but rather the ECM market has embraced SharePoint -- and we are all the better for it.

Of course there are some stinkers out there, and as buyer you need to exercise caution, but we hope the advice, critiques, and "insider" detail we provide in this report will help mitigate your risks.

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

Microsoft SharePoint and the CMIS standard

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:54:00 -0400

In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way. Presumably, this standard will enable organizations with multiple content repositories manage and present (to various applications) those repositories as a virtual content store.

If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint "accelerator" to take advantage of this new standard. As we've pointed out in the SharePoint Report 2008, SharePoint is not particularly well suited for certain content management functions (e.g,. hardcore document management, document imaging, etc). As such, I suspect that Microsoft may take a similar approach with firms like Open Text and EMC as it has with its other partners: continue to build and support SharePoint's core services and let others figure out how to apply those services in given scenarios. As you probably know, both Open Text and EMC today boast about their SharePoint connectors, providing long-term document retention and archiving, while SharePoint continues to act as the dynamic collaborative space to create those documents.

Going forward, with CMIS, this could become more "out of the box" between SharePoint and other tools, as opposed to a varying bevy of 3rd party add-ons. In the long run, it could potentially eliminate companies like Vorsite from the integration space.

Standards being what they are, we'll have to wait and see what actually happens. For CMIS to help with your SharePoint implementation, both Microsoft and the other vendors in question would have to support it in code as well as their press releases. Today, there are no implementations available for any of the products involved. As such, it remains to be seen how much support any of the participating vendors will really provide, let alone their partners or clients. That said, this is an interesting step and could lead to a far more unified content management approach and certainly more traction for SharePoint, since it would no longer be required to "carry" the whole ECM stack.

ECM buying tips from the experts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00 -0400

This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points.

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

First, when it gets close to the end of the quarter, vendors sales staff are desperate to boost and close any outstanding deals. Theoretically this puts you the buyer into a strong position. Theoretically you have maximum leverage. But theory is not the same as practice. Just as I would not go into the ring against Mike Tyson, you should likewise recognize that against an experienced account executive from EMC, IBM, Oracle, or any other ECM vendor, you are way out of your league. The great deal you negotiate -- for example the 300 extra seats you got for the price of 150 -- may not seem such a bargain in the long term. When prices drop, the next major upgrade is announced or you simply find them sitting on the shelf racking up maintenance costs. Buy what you need, no more, and stay away from Account Execs when they are trying to close out the quarter.

Likewise my friend makes a very good point about ELA's (particularly popular in large ECM and Archiving deals). These license schemes have been driven in part by the demand of large enterprise who in the past have bought modular licenses and found themselves stiffed when they need yet more modules at every turn. "Oh no madam, you don't have workflow as part of that deal....or frankly anything you need to make that system I bought you operable, you will have to buy more appropriate licenses from me." ELAs seem to make a great deal of sense, since you get everything for a single price.

But they bite in two unexpected ways. One, the ELA almost certainly excludes some vital component that you will only find in the fine print once it's too late. Secondly and potentially more serious: once you have signed an ELA, no matter how big the deal, you are no longer of any interest to the vendor sales team, who have moved on to the next client. I can personally attest to watching a deal worth over $20 Million US get signed -- and watching the account exec leaving the building within 30 minutes, even though they were scheduled to remain for the next two days. Once you have signed an ELA you have lost any and all leverage with the vendor. Think hard about whether you want to be in that situation...

More ECM acquisitions for Oracle

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio. Both Skywire and AdminServer are specialist vendors who have developed niche offerings for the Insurance and general Financial Services sectors. Oracle have already seen some success in Insurance, but the acquired technology -- and just as importantly the domain expertise -- gives Oracle a bit more heft against EMC and IBM.

Of the two acquisitions, the Skywire one is the more interesting. Skywire provides multichannel, component-level publishing software. Though currently selling mainly into the Insurance sector, under Oracle's ownership this could expand into the much broader CCM marketplace.

As with any acquisition, the devil is in the detail. Oracle appears to have bought a couple of strong offerings, but integrating such small niche firms into the huge mass of Oracle is will be a challenge, as will porting the software into the UCM and Fusion stack. As always it will take some time before things settle and we really see how this will all work in practice, and as always you can rest assure we will continue to evaluate the progress in detail in our ECM Suites Report.

The basics of selecting an E-mail Archiving and Management system

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 07:51:00 -0400

In our most recent report, E-mail Archiving & Management (EAM), we struggled early on in the research process to differentiate in a meaningful way among the vendors in this sector. It was a good struggle to have, as it turned out that through our research we found few buyers or even other analyst sources had tried to categorize this sector either.

Like all markets, EAM can be sliced and diced in various ways, but as a starting point to buyers I tend to suggest first subdividing the vendors between those that are Policy-centric and those that are Archiving-centric. And of course figure out which particular category has more appeal and fit for your particular organization.

The Policy-centric vendors we evaluate in the report are those that offer the most advanced and sophisticated functions to provide records management-style capabilities to e-mail. Most typically these vendors sell into larger enterprises and government departments. As such you'll find them at the higher end in terms of cost and complexity to deploy, configure, and run. This higher cost and complexity is justified for customers in heavily regulated environments or any enterprise that needs to closely monitor e-mail content. It is also justified for those trying to filter out non-business related mails, archiving only true records. Vendors we consider to be in this category include CA, Open Text, and Symantec.

Archiving-centric vendors, just like their policy-centric competitors, sell mainly into larger enterprise or government markets. Though most of them provide some kind of policy management capabilities, their real appeal lies in their approach to archive optimization. These vendors tend to market more to the IT buyer than the business buyer, as their approach centers on backing up and actively archiving mail servers to maximize server and storage optimization.

In some cases vendors accomplish this through novel and unique hardware and storage arrangements (Mimosa, ZL, and HP); others approach it through a deep and long understanding of broad archiving requirements (AXS-One and EMC).

Of all the technologies we evaluate EAM is arguably the most difficult for a buyer to compare options side by side. But sometimes just some simple slicing and dicing can help the process.

Cloud Computing and Content Management

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:43:00 -0400

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing. It's a great term, "Cloud Computing," as it conjures up visions of an invisible Internet -- an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future.

In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants -- many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C0₂ emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate -- often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields, then consider further that according to market research firm IDC, there are over 7,000 major data centers worldwide, and many more in the process of being built. By the way, just because they are big does not make them efficient; it is estimated that around 1/3rd of Data Center servers continually sit idle.

Yet there is very vocal group that thinks the Cloud is the future of ECM and Archiving -- so, why bother to dispose of data? Why not just send it to the "Cloud" with its limitless processing and storage capacity? The people who run the Data Centers, and those that sell equipment to run them such as Sun Microsystems and EMC, would all think that a good idea.

What puzzles me though is the contradiction between good Archiving and ECM practices versus a demand for ever greater processing and storage capacity. Aside from the fact that Cloud computing by definition means that your data has to move to and from a distant location, and latency issues (and simple physics) will always dictate that this will be slower than on-site deployments, there are much more important issues to consider.

For if you only stop for a moment you will see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Archiving/ECM equation. Take E-mail Archiving for example. Almost all EAM systems promise (and typically deliver) a reduction in storage capacity needs of about 80%. Good e-mail management can reduce that still further, till ultimately your e-mail mountain has dropped to less than 10% of its original size. In other words the efficient management of content can reduce server farms to single servers, with active archiving and disposal of redundant data keeping the volumes from growing exponentially. Now that is not only Green Computing, it's smart computing, because in reducing the data volumes, you increase the processing speeds by as much more than an order of magnitude and you leave a tiny carbon footprint. So much better than the SUV -- sorry, "Cloud" -- approach to computing.

High Stakes for Documentum

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:47:00 -0400

CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe headed to Vegas last week to participate in the annual EMC World show. Amid partying storage sales guys and dazed content management developers he witnessed a Documentum product line-up getting increasingly eclipsed by other EMC offerings. For EMC it's a reasonable bet, but for Documentum software customers, the stakes are high indeed...

Announcing the E-mail Archiving and Management Report

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:29:00 -0400

This may well go down as the busiest period in CMS Watch's history as this month we launch yet another new technology evaluation report, The E-mail Archiving & Management Report 2008. From our release:

EAM technology has become critical to both commercial and government enterprises -- but for a variety of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. This has led to a similarly diverse set of approaches from EAM suppliers...

It's somewhat surprising that this report -- which provides comprehensive comparative evaluations of 14 leading EAM vendors -- is one of the first of its kind anywhere.

Subscribers, you will be getting your copy very shortly. Others can order a copy or download a free sample here.

The report loosely groups EAM vendors into three categories:

Policy-Centric: Autonomy, CA, Open Text, IBM, and Symantec

Archive-Centric: AXS-One, EMC, HP, Mimosa, and ZL Technologies

SaaS: Dell, Fortiva, Google, and Microsoft

The research has taken more than six months to complete, and in the process we have talked to many customers and users of EAM systems. The conversations were illuminating and we look forward very much to continue those discussions moving forward.

Announcing The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 7 May 2008 08:34:00 -0400

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. While we've followed DAM and blogged quite a bit about DAM and MAM (Media Asset Management) over our 7-year history, this report represents our first comprehensive comparative evaluation of 18 DAM tools, and our first aggregation of DAM and MAM best practices.

Subscribers, you'll be getting your copy shortly; others can download a free sample here.

For several evaluations of major enterprise DAM vendors (Open Text's Artesia, Interwoven's MediaBin, EMC's Documentum Digital Asset Manager, and the IBM FileNet / Ancept Media Server pairing), we built on the foundational DAM research in our ECM Suites Report 2008. We then looked at several pure-play DAM vendors, including ClearStory, North Plains, Canto, WAVE, Widen, and ADAM. You can see the full list of vendors covered here.

As always, the core of our research centers on talking with customers, the real everyday users of DAM systems. Our goal is to cut through the marketing hype and report people's real-world experience with the tools, and help you, the buyer and implementer, understand which tools are most appropriate for which situations. As with all the technologies we cover, the DAM industry has seen many failed or abandoned investments because of poor product selection or implementation practices. We want you to go into your product selection and implementation with full knowledge of a product's strengths and weaknesses.

My fellow DAM analyst Kas Thomas and I will blog a lot more about DAM and MAM in the coming months. We both had a great time putting this report together, as it's a rather fun and sexy technology. We also hope to see you at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York City next week; my Wednesday tutorial, "Sorting Out the Content Technology Marketplace," will present an overview of this new research, along with some of our latest ECM and WCM findings, as well.