How Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials is uniquely positioned in the lightweight DAM solution market

With the accelerated shift to digital and increase in the pace of global online content consumption, having the right digital asset management (DAM) strategy in place has become more important than ever for every organization. According to IDC’s Worldwide Digital Asset Management Software Forecast, 2022-2025, the worldwide DAM software market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.4% from 2020 to 2025 and reach $1.2 billion in revenue in 2025.

Content is everywhere, but organizations are struggling to effectively create, manage, and deliver digital assets across multiple channels. Creative, marketing, and other teams working in silos lead to losses in productivity and reduced efficiency from content creation to publishing lifecycle. All these challenges can be resolved if an organization has the right DAM solution.

What is a digital asset management solution?

Digital asset management solutions help organizations store, manage, search, share, and deliver their digital assets using one single source. These assets can include images, photos, videos, creative files, audio files, documents, and more. DAM solutions help organizations reduce the manual and repetitive efforts that their teams spend in their routine work.

Having a centralized DAM solution provides organizations many benefits, including easy access and governance, removing duplicate assets, collaboration across multiple teams, improving efficiency, security and access management, and asset sharing and usage tracking.

Enterprise DAM vs. lightweight DAM

The lines are blurry when we try to identify what differentiates an enterprise-grade DAM solution from a lightweight DAM solution.

An enterprise DAM solution is built to store, manage, and deliver huge volume of assets for large organizations across different departments. Enterprise DAM solutions provide advanced asset management capabilities, security and rights management, customization, extensibility and integration, content automation, complex workflows, and media portals.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets is an enterprise-grade DAM solution that provides all the capabilities required in an enterprise DAM solution. And it also provides unique artificial intelligence (AI) features. Experience Manager Assets, powered by Adobe Sensei, provide features like smart tagging, smart cropping, face recognition, color recognition, content automation, and more. These capabilities are paired with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that supports emerging media files and dynamic media capabilities, which sets the solution apart from other offerings in the industry.

In fact, Adobe has even been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q1 2022.

A lightweight DAM solution, on the other hand, is typically a trimmed-down version of an enterprise DAM solution, which is ideal for small and medium businesses or for individual departments in a large organization. It provides a digital asset library with basic assets management capabilities like asset preview, asset sharing, and simple search to put digital assets in the hands of more users. But it doesn’t allow customizations, extensibility, or integration.

Lightweight DAM solutions are offered either as a standalone product or as an integral part of another content management or martech solution or as an add-on to other products.

What is Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials?

Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials is a lightweight digital asset management solution with an easy-to-use interface to store, discover, and deliver digital assets. It allows organizations to quickly manage their assets from day one, and it’s easy to configure. Organizations can extend access to assets to more teams, unify the content lifecycle, distribute assets, share assets, and more.

Assets Essentials is available as a standalone product or as an add-on to Adobe Workfront. Assets Essentials is also included with the initial purchase of Adobe Journey Optimizer.

What are some unique capabilities of Assets Essentials?

• AI-powered capabilities to improve content velocity
  Not many lightweight DAM vendors in the market have AI-powered capabilities. Adobe uses its huge assets library of Adobe Stock to train its Adobe Sensei algorithms. These Sensei-powered algorithms are utilized in Assets Essentials to generate auto-tags with higher accuracy.
• Integrations across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud
  Assets Essentials offers native integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud applications and Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications, which enables marketing and creative teams to work off a single source of truth repository. This makes it seamless for teams to collaborate and operate directly from the applications they’re already comfortable working in.
• Light image editing
  Assets Essentials offers marketing teams the capability to edit images with smart crop to use specific renditions, spot healing, image resizing, and other light-editing capabilities — right within the application.
• Seamless upgrade to enterprise DAM as the business need arises
  Though Assets Essentials is a lightweight DAM solution, it’s also built on the foundation of Adobe Experience Manager Assets. As such, assets within Assets Essentials are being stored in the same cloud native repository as Experience Manager Assets. As your business needs and requirements grow, you can opt for a seamless upgrade from Assets Essentials to enterprise-grade Experience Manager Assets. This is a strong use-case for organizations looking to invest in a DAM solution that can expand as their business grows.

Learn more about the wide array of Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials features.