Media

In the News

| live MINT | How Adobe is Getting a Digital Makeover

According to a 23 January 2015 report by analysts Kashyap Kompella and Theresa Regli from the Real Story Group, “Practically speaking, all of the current marketing clouds have been patched together based on acquisitions of several disparate products and technologies.” They also believe that marketing requirements are so diverse and varied that no one platform can lay any claim to do it all.

IBM Marketing Cloud, according to the Real Story Group analysts, continues to represent a medley of separate products and a not-so-coherent strategic road map. Oracle Corp., they believe, “is a late convert to the whole cloud model, but (not surprisingly) is now a fervent worshipper at the cloud altar”. The analysts also mention the Salesforce Marketing Cloud portfolio that comprises “several pieces, but it is centred on ExactTarget, which handles customer data, segment creation, and targeting. The social side of the aisle consists of Radian6 (listening and analysis), Buddy Media (social publishing) and Social.com (social advertising solution for agencies and brands)”, and Pardot, which is still sold separately for business-to-business, or B2B, marketing automation.

However, the analysts do acknowledge, though, that the Adobe Marketing Cloud “is ahead of its competition on this front, and offers a decent set of marketing tools under one roof”. But they add that companies must also build their teams’ internal capabilities to take advantage of the “new opportunities made possible by today’s data and marketing technologies”.

Read more about Marketing Platforms at realstorygroup.com.

| eMarketer | Why Do Marketers Find the Cloud Dreamy?

... Yet as Kashyap Kompella, a senior analyst for independent research at consulting firm Real Story Group observed, while CMOs have a greater say in technology decisions and CIOs are expected to be “enablers rather than naysayers,” the chief financial officer is still the person signing off on both CMO and CIO procurements.

... Real Story Group’s Kompella, who tracks the marketing technology space and helps companies evaluate and acquire such products, noted that the marketing cloud is “good shorthand to convey the notion of a comprehensive platform that can address many (if not all) marketing requirements.” Nonetheless, he believes current offerings fall short of the vision being promoted.

“At this juncture in time, fully integrated marketing platforms are like the Himalayan Yeti–sightings often rumored but never confirmed,” Kompella said. He noted that while some vendors are further along than others, most “platforms” are still discrete products at “varying stages of integration.”

| Document Strategy | Approaches for Your Hybrid Cloud DAM and ECM Strategies

Cloud infrastructures can have many variations (software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and managed hosting), and within each of these models, a cloud deployment can be private, public, community or a combination of one or more of these, also known as a "hybrid cloud."

Specifically, within the digital asset management (DAM) and to some extent in enterprise content management (ECM) technology spaces, a hybrid architecture is perhaps the least straightforward. There are many reasons for this, but huge file sizes and security implications, in particular, become paramount. Consequently, you'll find broadly different approaches to implementing a hybrid architecture. Read More.

| Cyber Trend | Document Management if you plan ahead

Apoorv Durga, Real Story Group analyst, says document management done well can bring order to an increasing volume of electronic document, help organizations meet legal and regulatory compliancy requirements, and reduce paper documentation. It can also provide users with a more standardized means of gathering and distributing data, and enable more consistent communication among employees, partners, and customers, among other things.

| Document Strategy | A Guide to the ECM Marketplace
Enterprise content management (ECM) is broad enough technology to touch multiple areas within your enterprise. Here are the most common business reasons to apply ECM technology:
  • To bring order to the ever-increasing volume of electronic documents
  • To meet new legal or compliance requirements regarding the management of information
  • To reduce the amount of paper documentation within the organization
  • To provide more standardized means of gathering and distributing data (e.g., via forms)
  • To re-engineer business processes and increase efficiencies
  • To support business continuity requirements
  • To obtain more value from costly investments in content
  • To more consistently communicate to employees, partners and customers

Read More

| Search Content Management - TechTarget | When buying DAM software, don't gorge at the feature buffet

As companies consider their technology roadmap to manage content and multimedia, skepticism is warranted, experts say. Vendors often promise more than they can deliver, and wide-eyed companies often get roped into buying more costly software than they need.

Experts say the syndrome of overbuying is rife in enterprise content management and digital asset management (DAM), where companies may believe they need best-in-class features to handle new capabilities like managing video. But in fact, they often need only "good-enough software" that they can expand on, said experts at the Gilbane Content and Digital Experience conference in Boston last week.

"There is a 'reality spectrum,'" said Tony Byrne, president and founder of The Real Story Group, an IT research and consulting firm in Olney, Md., during a keynote session. "There are vendors who say what their products can do, then there is what the products can really do, and then there is customers' ability to exploit the capabilities of that technology to get business value." Read More.

DAM software vs. WCM software

Part of the confusion in purchasing appropriate technology has to do with the fact that the digital asset management and the Web content management (WCM) software markets overlap. Although DAM software manages rich-text media -- audio files, video, photos -- Web content management surrounds the various capabilities that enable companies to manage digital information and publish content to the Web. Digital asset management can also encompass capabilities like video editing and digital rights management, enabling companies to remain compliant with licensing and get the most out of the content they pay for.

As a result of market convergence, companies have to be discriminating about evaluating software vendors.

But Theresa Regli, a principal analyst and managing partner at The Real Story Group, noted in a session on DAM software that these capabilities are morphing and overlapping. "There is this convergence happening, where vendors that have [a history in DAM] are going more digital and going toward the Web, and at the same time WCM vendors are saying we have to support this DAM space and digitize these historically print organizations," she said.

| CMS Wire | Real Story Group Maps Digital Workplace, MarTech Space

Emerging Trends

One of the most striking trends is the rise of media and asset management solutions as a core enterprise need, along with the growth of new vendor entrants that are filling the vacuum left by “older” players who have been slow to innovate.

It seems that the problems posed by bloated platforms and the solutions offered by agile vendors pervades the entire technology space.

Byrne also expects some consolidation in the marketing automation and social technology marketplace, adding that this would be underscored by the rise of significant new players. Read More.

| CMS Wire | Random Digital Biz Predictions: Tricks or Treats?

Boo. It's trick-or-treat night.

For those who don't celebrate, it's that Oct. 31 tradition where people dress up in costumes and hypnotize themselves into believing that chocolate has zero calories. 

Kids knock on neighbors' doors, asking them, "Trick or treat?" The adults usually go with the treat answer and give the kids candy (of course, not the good candy. Adults save that for themselves for late-night snacking). Read More.

| KM World | Kashyap Kompella on Social Analytics

It’s important to use social analytics in conjunction with other metrics. “Sentiment analysis algorithms have some limitations,” says Kashyap Kompella, senior industry analyst with Real Story Group. “Those analyses can trip over sarcasm or satire, and many of them can analyze only English. But when the data points from social media analytics are used with other metrics, they can enrich understanding.” Read More.

| Search Content Management - TechTarget | How DAM tools can improve brand strategy

Digital asset management can have far-reaching benefits for brand strategy by helping to connect creative processes to business processes.

Theresa Regli, managing partner and principal analyst at the Real Story Group, compared a successful digital asset management (DAM) process to a well-run kitchen, using famed chef Dan Barber's restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, as an example of operational excellency. Her session last week at DAM Chicago 2014, "In the DAM Kitchen: What's Cooking in 2014?" explored the potential of digital asset management technology in the enterprise, at a time when process and information siloes can be more and more detrimental to companies' marketing and branding efforts. Read More.

| North Patrol | Modern CMSs are built for power users – interview of Tony Byrne

One big trend that really came out of Europe was technology to manage global web operations, especially around localization and globalization facilities. This was around mid-2000, and we like to call this the ‘second Viking invasion’ where a number of Scandinavian vendors penetrated North America. Their key differentiator was definitely the ability to support multilingual workflows and websites with multiple languages. Some of the names back then were Sitecore, Tridion, EPiServer. Read More.

| Search Content Management - Techtarget | Web content management systems try to do it all

But the power of these systems -- their ability to democratize the process -- can also be their downfall. "The major vendors are ahead of the vast majority of their customer bases," said Tony Byrne, president of Real Story Group, a technology research and analyst firm. "A lot of users have catching up to do -- in terms of operations, marketing and editorial maturity -- to leverage what these tools can do." Read More.

| Search Content Management - TechTarget | Web content management tools buying tips

Despite what you may hear about "leading" vendors, your enterprise has more viable choices for Web content management tools than ever before.

A vibrant marketplace of global players, regional contenders, cloud-based vendors, open source alternatives, and industry-focused technologies awaits you. You can find powerful platforms with expansive scope and extensibility, as well as simple products that you can deploy within hours. Read More.

| PC Today | Better Collaboration - Get Your Teams on the Same Page

The theme of the July PC Today issue is Collaboration. You can download the full PC Today article here.

FACTORS TO STANDARDIZE
Various issues concerning em-ployees, customers, clients, and the organization ultimately drive some companies to standardize their col-laboration tools. Kashyap Kompella, industry analyst with Real Story Group (www.realstorygroup.com), says these fac-tors pertain to more than the collabora-tion tools. Typically, enterprises review their entire IT portfolio every three to four years, invariably finding a need to “consolidate or rationalize the multiple tools that exist for accomplishing the work objectives,” he says.

Using a “use case approach” is an-other option. “As tools mature and new capabilities are available, think of whether they support radically new use cases or help improve existing use cases,” Kompella says. For example, enterprises have always had expert finder applications, but these are now “turbo-charged” with added enterprise social networking features, he says. “Employee town halls take advantage of unified communications and social networking capabilities. Syncing of documents between different devices and locations— between desktop and mobile, between local and cloud—this is a new use case,” he says.

| Processor | Manage Employee Use Of File Sharing

Apoorv Durga, senior analyst at Real Story Group, recommends companies involve key IT staff to assist with critical data management, security, and integration challenges and involve key business stakeholders in ensuring a solution addresses practical needs and is relatively easy to use. Read More.

| KM World | New for ECM: mobile, sync and offline access

Here’s an overview of what has changed, and how you need to adapt your ECM strategy:

  • Mobile access
  • File sync and offline capabilities
  • Vendor activity

Read More.

 

| KM World | Tony Byrne on SharePoint's Web content management (WCM) capabilities

Ever since Microsoft began adding Web content management (WCM) capabilities to SharePoint in 2007, customers have been asking themselves when Redmond would get serious about providing a platform suited not just for intranet use cases, but for marketing-oriented websites as well.

With the advent of SharePoint 2013, it’s time to reassess functional improvements, and evaluate whether Microsoft has truly expanded the product’s target scenarios for Web publishing.

Below I’ll describe the implications for changes in SP 2013 in some key areas... Read More.

| Intranatverk 2014 | Ready to inspire: Tony Byrne

What would you say is the most exciting thing about intranets?

We’ve been watching them evolve over the last 15 years and it’s been really interesting seeing the whole evolution of the phenomenon. I’m quite excited about the next couple of years because I’m a believer in this notion of redefining the problem as one of what is the right digital workplace environment. And if you look at it from that perspective you’ll start asking yourself more interesting questions, with perhaps unexpected outcomes. Read More.

| CMS Wire | 5 minutes with Irina Guseva

Inside the content management universe, there are vendors who promote their technologies, customers trying to pick just the right one and analysts who try to bridge the gap.

One of the most colorful analysts in the enterprise information management space is Irina Guseva, senior analyst for the Real Story Group and an occasional contributor to CMSWire.

Starting her career as a broadcast, print and online journalist, she later worked as a web CMS practitioner and industry consultant. In all, she has more than 15 years of experience with content technologies — a very long time in an industry that evolves so rapidly.

In the first of a new feature for CMSWire, we asked Guseva five questions to take her pulse on the state of the industry. Read More.

| EContent | The Evolution of WCM: From Usability to Mobility

Irina Guseva, senior analyst at Real Story Group, makes the point that most WCM users are now much more comprehensively up-to-speed on the processes and tools that make for good mobile experiences. In her view, it's the vendors that now need to catch up.

"Mobile remained on the forefront," Guseva says, "but compared to previous years, organizations are more educated and experienced when it comes to developing and managing mobile apps, mobile web, and hybrid apps. They realize that WCM tools are rarely the best tool for these types of activities-with the exception of mobile web, perhaps-and are seeking best-of-breed mobile platforms to integrate their CMSs with. Not many vendors focus on the fact that HTML5 friendliness is not driven by their tools, but by the code that is put into those systems." ... Read More