ShortList Spotlight: OpenText Brings Integrations, Scale & Security to the DAM Party

Liz Miller talks Constellation ShortLists, unpacking the category of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for High Volume Commerce and its leading solutions. DAM has always represented the last mile of hashtag#technology that pulls everything together. It's where the intersection of planning, assets, documents, etc. can meet and be deployed. And in today's world, DAM has to be used everywhere and available at scale.

💡 Liz highlights OpenText as a leading DAM solution for usability, scale, security, and speed. Watch the full video to learn more about using OpenText in your vendor selection ⬇

Check out the full Constellation ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gnwk89qf

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors.)

Liz Miller back again to talk more constellation shortlists. This one I'm going to tell you right now. This has to be one of my favorite categories, digital asset management for high volume commerce, and yes, one of the reasons why damn is one of my favorites, I get to say damn all the time, and no one's gonna scold me for cursing. Sorry, mom. But for me as a marketer, especially as a marketer that was working in any type of commerce field, damn has always represented that last mile, that last mile of technology that pulls everything together. It tends to be that intersection point of where all of your hard work and all of your planning for all of the assets, all of your creative, all of your documentation, all of your product renders, everything that you've done goes someplace can't just be in a big bucket.

Damn represents that place where all of your work meets all of that strategy and then can be easily deployed the new kind of what's different in dam today is that it has to be used everywhere. It has to be used everywhere, across the organization and in high volume commerce. That means some really interesting parts of an organization that's perhaps doing product renderings, prototyping, 3d modeling. You're dealing with people who come from across the enterprise and are dealing with very, very different assets. And all of those assets have a place, but they also have to be able to move at a scale that is churning what feels like every single day. And that's what makes high volume commerce a really interesting place to specifically look at, damn solutions. And I gotta tell you, there's like, 50 to 60 that I look at every single year for this specific shortlist, and it is everything from just simple content storage all the way to up to some of your most sophisticated and, quite frankly, complex solutions that are needed in a commerce setting.

So let's dive in. We're talking about scale. We're talking about usability. We're talking about integrations, integrations into tools that range from everything from your ERP, your supply chain, your warehouse management, you need to know every single thing that's going to be out there that needs to be cataloged, that someone may need an asset to go with, but you also need speed, speed and scale and flexibility, and that's why these solutions are really hard to list. And quite frankly, there's one brand I want to talk about, one vendor that for years, had been kind of the mainstay on the list, but in recent years, drop just below, just below that list that would appear on the shortlist.

And that's open text, and it's not they got bad. It's not that they were somehow not really worthy competition to all of these shortlist vendors. It's just a lot of new players that hit the market, and our executive network was really talking about those, implementing those and really enjoying them, but the call to reassess open text and to really take a deep dive into some of the new innovations that have been placed in the solution really became very loud and clear from a couple of our clients that said, listen, not only have I stayed with Open text, but I'm expanding what I'm doing with open text, so I want to dive into that and talk a little bit about that. Today, open text has been a mainstay, not only in content and content management, but also in asset management. There is a deep understanding as far as how to manage, maintain and support Asset Delivery, as well as asset organization and asset management, and that's really important.

But some of the things we really need to talk about when it comes to OpenText and some of the new, let's say, new mindsets as an organization, they have. The number one thing, integration, integration, integration. OpenText really understands that it is part of a much larger ecosystem, especially when it comes to its commerce clients. You are dealing with platforms and solutions that are not typically integrated and managed into, say, some of your other asset management or some of your other creative management solutions. This is a very different beast when it comes to commerce. And OpenText really understands that. But the number one thing interestingly that every person I talk to, every customer and every end technology user that's using OpenText, media management, it's got to be the integrations. It's probably the first thing everyone mentions to me that everyone who is creating within the organization, they might be doing 3d modeling. They might be doing product prototyping. They might be doing your traditional asset creation and creative asset development. Everyone is able to utilize and integrate easily and quickly into open text. So you might be in Photoshop one moment it was. Trader in the next you might be in PowerPoint, but you also might be in Premiere Pro. You also might be in texture. You might be creating massive 3d models. You are still going to be able to integrate quickly, reliably, and have the uptime and the scalability that you need to be able to pull your assets into the central repository. And let's also point out something really important here. The second thing everyone brought up to me was one word simplicity. There is a big difference between simplicity and simplistic. I bring it up a lot because it matters, right? You can't be simplistic in your tool can't just have a bucket someplace you stick things when it comes to high volume commerce brands, there is a demand there. There is a demand for speed and for scale. And OpenText gets it right with this all inclusive subscription pricing. Customers actually volunteered to me that there was never the sense they were going to get a gotcha invoice. We all know what we mean by that, right that the layers on unexplainable costs.

Why do I all of a suddenly have to play that? Yes, I know my storage got bigger, but the subscription pricing and the way that OpenText has structured a lot of their pricing and their availability makes sense to not only the CFO, but also to the Chief Digital Officer, to the Chief Marketing Officer, to everyone involved in this new CX, this new asset ecosystem. Everyone understands what the expectation is, and everyone understands where that invoice is going to be. And that is wildly important, especially when commerce can change on a dime. The other thing that's a differentiator, at least in my own analysis, is a lot of the AI models that are used here, I think a lot of times, especially in modern conversations, when we talk about dam, we really quickly get into a conversation around generative AI and asset manipulation, right? And yes, dams have to have that. You have to be able to personalize. You have to be able to use the right image for the right situation, for the right implementation, but you also have to be able to have standard data. You also have to be able to translate. You have to be able to have data standardization that is not just normalized, but it's also harmonized across all of your metadata, across all of the categorization, and if you're in high volume commerce, you know just how much that takes. Right?

Again, with Media Manager, you can extend a lot of these media support. And it's this limit, this idea of this limitless media support, that's so important that you can really extend well beyond, say, marketing assets or your product and your commerce assets you're looking again prototypes, Lydd models, complex video documentation, it allows you to think about your content and your assets differently. Do we really need multiple locations where we're putting all of this, or can we start to harmonize this so that the data that we're pulling into our system starts to grow and build, and in true AI fashion starts to actually make things like tagging, things like categorization, that much smarter and that much easier, because at the end of the day, we still have to think about damn as being that last mile to experience delivery, Whoever is having the experience our shopper, our retailer, our partner, our market, people, internal to the organization. It's supposed to be easy to use, and I think somewhere along the line, especially for a lot of damn solutions, we lost that idea and we lost that understanding, but open text has done a really nice job of bringing all of that back and bringing in innovations and solutions that feel purpose built for the setting that we're in. Because at the end of the day, we're really here to create profitable relationships with our customers and a lot of times and a lot of experiences. We have to do that through assets. We have to do that through what they see, what they hear, what they experience, what they're searching for. Does it make sense these AI models and all of these tools and the intention behind these actions from OpenText make me understand that. Yeah, they get it. They absolutely get it. But there's something else I want to bring up about OpenText that I think is really important, and it certainly weighed very heavily when I started looking at this short list, it's the strategy for the rest of the company.

In recent years, OpenText has put in a lot of investment into really becoming a security company. And for those of you who've heard me get on my soapbox before, y'all know I really love security, but it's super important when it comes to commerce and assets, when it comes to a damn. You don't want something that's just rule based, role based, oh, sure, people can't get in it. You want an organization that, to its core, fundamentally understands, respects and implements security, security measures that allow access, that allow that identity of the user who can. Get into the system, but also who understands what's getting into your system. So the fact that there are native aggression integrations across open Texas platform and its portfolio is really important, and it's really important for someone who is looking at a damn solution to look at security as a massive measure of what's important to bring into your organization.

So with that, hey, congratulations to OpenText, back on the shortlist, certainly back on that literal shortlist of solutions that here at Constellation, we recommend that executives start to look at to make that buying decision around solutions and complex solutions like dam for high volume commerce, just a little bit easier. You.