Adobe Named a Leader in 2019 Forrester Wave for Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience

The all-too-common refrain I hear from businesses today is “We have a content bottleneck.” Put another way, they’re saying they are struggling to achieve the level of content velocity needed to keep up with the demands of omnichannel consumer experiences. While we’re talking about getting bogged down by the amount of content a brand must create, manage, and deliver — and the speed with which they need to do it — we should also talking about rethinking the content life cycle in order to get the most out of our content investments.

When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), this means that today’s marketers need a lot more than just a place to store their assets. DAM is no longer a junk drawer where content goes to be filed away — and sometimes forgotten — but should rather be a dynamic content engine that fuels personalized experiences across every screen size and channel. I recently sat down for a conversation with Nick Barber of Forrester, and we discussed how DAM seems to be going through a renaissance. At the intersection of upstream creative and downstream experiences, DAM is now a critical piece of the martech stack.

That’s why Adobe is transforming the vision of what a digital asset management system can be.

Adobe has made a significant investment into executing on this end-to-end vision of DAM, and I’m happy to announce that Adobe Experience Manager Assets has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q4 2019. The report evaluated 14 vendors against 28 criteria grouped into three high-level buckets: Current Offering, Strategy, and Market Presence. In addition to being named a Leader, Adobe possesses the highest-ranked current offering out of any of the 14 vendors analyzed, and Adobe received the highest possible score in the Market Presence category.

We believe this position as a Leader endorses Adobe’s uniquely holistic vision of DAM as a dynamic, end-to-end experience management and delivery platform. The success we’ve achieved working with the largest organizations on the most complex use cases validates this end-to-end vision.

DAM reimagined: A dynamic content engine

We believe Adobe Experience Manager Assets is the only DAM on the market that injects efficiencies into every step of the asset life cycle, providing seamless access to assets directly within Creative Cloud applications, streamlining collaboration with enterprise-grade workflows, and automating the delivery of responsive, device-optimized content across channels.

Manage content with intelligence

Adobe Experience Manager Assets infuses DAM with market-leading content intelligence at every point of the asset life cycle. Users can use trainable algorithms to automatically recognize and apply business-specific keywords to assets upon ingestion, automatically crop content across an unlimited number of aspect ratios, and adaptively deliver image and video content that’s resized to ensure smooth loading experiences regardless of available bandwidth.

Enterprise scale and extensibility

Adobe Experience Manager Assets is deployed in the largest organizations tackling the most complex digital marketing use cases in the market today. Forrester confirms the scalability of Experience Manager Assets in the report: “Reference customers told us that the DAM solution can scale to support millions of assets.” Experience Manager Assets also has the APIs and extensibility necessary to seamlessly slot into even the most complex marketing technology stacks. Experience Manager Assets’ cloud-native technology can also off-load CPU-intensive processes via autoscaling microservices to ensure the DAM maintains responsiveness and performance through ingestion and renditioning.

Next generation experiences, delivered today

Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a future-proof investment, providing robust support for next-generation assets like photo-realistic 3D assets, 360-degree video experiences, and VR/AR viewers. Forrester also called this out in the report: “Adobe’s strengths include solid support for core DAM capabilities under the library services umbrella, highly differentiated support for video and 3D content that’s relevant for retailers and manufacturers, and a clean user interface that requires minimal training.” Forrester recognizes that today’s customer experiences will quickly become irrelevant if they are composed solely of static, noninteractive imagery, which is why this area is so important. Adobe will continue to leverage its massive resources and expertise in digital content and experience delivery to ensure we keep our customers at the forefront of emerging technologies.

To learn more, download the full report, The Forrester WaveTM: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q4 2019