OpenText [NASDAQ: OTEX]: Trailblazing Digital Asset Management

The colossal growth of digital data is both a boon and bane for companies that operate in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) sector. Driven by catalogs, websites, mobile devices and the application economy, this data is exerting big pressure on the management overhead. Meanwhile, M&E companies can effectively utilize these digital assets for generating new revenue streams. However, digital media is expensive to create, can be a challenge to control and distribute in volume and has critical Intellectual Property (IP) requirements. This is the challenging environment where OpenText [NASDAQ: OTEX] has positioned itself as a market leader, with a robust Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that can solve even the highly complex asset management challenge.

OpenText's DAM solutions are designed to facilitate a 'digital relationship' between an organization, its users, partners, agencies and digital media network with greater transparency. By allowing access to media assets and intelligent control to distribute content to the right channel and user devices from a number of available systems, apps or output channels, OpenText allows the clients to use their digital assets to enhance the brand and drive value. Its unique capabilities include the ability to centrally manage media objects in the context of their product catalogs and deliver a consistent omni-channel customer experience.

OpenText provides the core enterprise infrastructure, key platform components and capabilities supporting the DAM ecosystem with the efficiencies of “create-once, use-many” to repurpose, re-express, reuse, and re-create. The customers benefit from automated collaborative processes and a centralized searchable repository. Standing at the forefront is Media Management, OpenText's workflow-driven solution that has multichannel capabilities for producing, publishing, and distributing digital media and content through a secure, scalable platform.

Media Management at its Best

Media Management offers global enterprises a better, smarter way to work by assisting them in managing, creating and using digital media to connect messages and brand in all of their communication channels. The suite helps transfer dynamic content into custom branded home pages based on user groups. It gives user groups a custom look and feel and a “Widget” component that lets customers customize the capabilities, such as drag and drop or add new assets. By using the intuitive search, users can drill down and find what they need—including suggestions, advanced search, saved searches, and recent searches. With multiple options to browse, along with a responsive design and touch-enabled compatibility, the suite has become a favorite tool for many organizations across the globe.

For instance, Public Broadcast Network, America’s premier media enterprise is using OpenText Media Management to manage and distribute marketing, promotional, and program content for all their member stations. To build new digital experiences online, PBN wanted to re-purpose content rapidly in ways that no one could in the past. Having the content readily available in Media Management made it easier for PBN to find, repurpose, and build out those beautiful digital experiences.

Unique Possibilities

OpenText also offers MediaBin— another powerful product from the broad portfolio of DAM solutions. Available on-premise or in the cloud, the solution helps even the largest organizations with globally distributed teams deliver a more engaging and consistent customer experience by effectively managing, distributing, and publishing thousands of customer-facing digital assets.

MediaBin helps organizations gain benefits from higher-impact marketing and communications, greater agility, stronger brand equity, increased team productivity, and the security of knowing valuable corporate assets that can be fully leveraged and preserved for future use. It makes assets easy to find, reuse, and understand, like text-based files, so that firms can automatically cross-reference information with any other form of relevant data.

MediaBin automatically extracts and analyzes key concepts from audio, video, and image file content, and categorizes assets, removing the need for hours of reviewing and tagging images with automated meta-tagging and labeling. Users can identify whether there are people in images, recognize faces in videos, identify logos and barcodes and even perform optical character recognition—all the capabilities that make it easier to find the right images for organizational campaigns. It also recognizes sophisticated traits, such as color, to provide a highly detailed, time-encoded range of searchable data. The automatic speech-to-text conversion allows users to search words that are spoken in video files–making the process of finding the right 10 second video clip, easier than ever.

This intelligence, altogether, allow firms to locate the right asset for their campaign without even knowing exact keywords associated with the file, saving time and exposing a more accurate selection of files. Assets can also be viewed in context with other content within the extended enterprise, across social networks and web search.

Additional Features

OpenText's DAM solutions allow customers to respond to the ever-growing industry demands by adapting latest technological trends. The company assists enterprises with flexible deployments, whether on premise, on the OpenText private cloud or the public cloud. The cloud flexibility allows advanced end-to-end workflows and features for creative production, review, approval, publishing and distribution of assets—easily enabling M&E companies to use digital assets and drive value.

"Across the world, OpenText will be connecting directly with thousands of our customers and presenting OpenText's vision of a digital world and the future of information"

The company’s Media Management module also gives on demand features through a SaaS-based digital asset management functionality for marketing and advertising organizations, which ensures quick start-up and implementation with little or no support required by internal IT staff. On the other hand, OpenText’s Video Services helps customers build their brand, sell products, improve communications and learning, and increase advertising revenue by providing advanced video management and delivery capabilities that are integrated with OpenText content management solutions. Recently, SAP and OpenText announced a major expansion of an already successful strategic relationship to include digital asset management (DAM). Under a new global agreement, SAP will resell OpenText’s enterprise DAM solution under the name the SAP Digital Asset Management by OpenText to enterprise marketing departments and on the media industry including publishing houses, entertainment firms and broadcasters.

Reimagining the Future

The key strengths of OpenText DAM can be summarized as adaptability, resilience and scalability; adaptability through the powerful user and application interfaces, resilience in a critical business environment and scalability to manage asset anywhere from a small but valuable asset collections to many millions of assets and terabytes of data. Examples of this adaptability can be seen in the productised SAP integration which enables digital media to be shared with business applications like CRM for Marketing Resource Management, PLM for product lifecycle and master data repositories like ERP. This integration opens the door to many other complimentary OpenText solutions to further transform and enhance a firm’s capabilities. “From rich customer engagement to deep business insights, information is the key differentiator that drives innovation and growth, helps our customers to discover new opportunities and enables them to remain competitive market leaders,” says Mark J Barrenechea, CEO of OpenText. “Across the world, OpenText will be connecting directly with thousands of our customers and presenting OpenText's vision of a digital world and the future of information.”