The latest version of our DAM vendor evaluations brings significant updates to three vendors.

North Plains

Perhaps the largest pure-play DAM vendor, North Plains is going through a seemingly endless turbulent transitional phase, trying to amalgamate its three distinct products into a cohesive whole, while annually sweeping and replacing its C-level management team.

In the future, Telescope, Xinet, and On Brand will allegedly become "apps" running off a unified platform, functionally owning different touch points along the asset lifecycle. Telescope, as perhaps the most all-encompassing of the three, sits at the heart of this strategy. In our report, we weigh in on this strategy, to clarify a confusing situation for most customers.

censhare

censhare is a Germany-based DAM vendor with a deep history in print publishing. As we recently wrote about in our advisory paper about Digital Marketing reference models, DAM forms part of larger enterprise picture of marketing, print and social media software for end-to-end delivery of publishing and marketing workflows.

censhare's version 5 includes a completely revamped web client and an improved UX, but implementers report that the back-end is still highly complex, and proprietary elements linger. We weigh in on the latest version here.

Vizrt

Vizrt is a longstanding vendor in the media asset management space, whose product Ardome is riding into the sunset in favor of Viz One. Viz One is more of a MAM + multi-platform distribution solution, and compared to Ardome, Viz One can be deployed more quickly out of the box. Unlike many MAMs, Viz One offers many pre-packaged components and a decent UI, though to be sure it still has its weak points.

If you're a lingering Ardome customer or wondering if you should upgrade to a more modern MAM, be sure to read our latest evaluation.

If you're not yet an RSG subscriber, contact us for more information.