New product proposal on Digital Asset Management for Microsoft

By Hsikai Yang Dec. 7, 2011

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.11. NEW PRODUCT DESCRIPTION ...................................................................................................... 3 1.1. WHAT IS DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT (DAM)? ........................................................................... 3 1.2. WHY IS DAM IMPORTANT? .............................................................................................................. 3 1.3. WHY IS DAM FEASIBLE TO MICROSOFT? ......................................................................................... 42. SITUATION ANALYSIS...................................................................................................................... 4 2.1. IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT .............................................................................................................. 4 2.1.1. Company capabilities .............................................................................................................. 4 2.1.2. Competitors ............................................................................................................................. 5 2.2. MACRO-ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS ................................................................................................ 6 2.2.1. Digital data explosion.............................................................................................................. 6 2.2.2. Acceptance of cloud computing ............................................................................................... 6 2.2.3. Increased need for business system integration ....................................................................... 63. SEGMENTATION, TARGETING, AND POSITIONING ............................................................... 7 3.1. DAM MARKET SEGMENTATION ....................................................................................................... 7 3.2. SELECT TARGET MARKET ................................................................................................................ 7 3.3. POSITIONING .................................................................................................................................... 84. PRODUCT STRATEGY ...................................................................................................................... 8 4.1. PRODUCT MIX .................................................................................................................................. 8 4.2. PLACEMENT IN PLC ......................................................................................................................... 8 4.3. LINE EXTENSION .............................................................................................................................. 9 4.4. NAME SELECTION............................................................................................................................. 95. PRICING STRATEGY ......................................................................................................................... 96. DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY ........................................................................................................... 10 6.1. MICROSOFT STORE ......................................................................................................................... 10 6.2. MICROSOFT PARTNERS OR AUTHORIZED RESELLERS ...................................................................... 107. PROMOTIONAL STRATEGY ......................................................................................................... 10 7.1. PROMOTION METHODS ................................................................................................................... 10 7.1.1. Trade shows ........................................................................................................................... 10 7.1.2. Professional publications ...................................................................................................... 10 7.2. PROMOTION MATERIAL SAMPLE .................................................................................................... 118. STATEMENT OF SUCCESS............................................................................................................. 11 2

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.11. New Product Description This document is to provide marketing analysis for new product development of Digital Asset Management by Microsoft Corp. 1.1. What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)? Suppose you are a director in a public museum and you plan to digitize its scientific and cultural collection because many other museums in the world have already utilized web pages to engage their audiences. You might think of it as an easy task of scanning the collections and hiring a web design company to post the contents to the internet. In fact, there are a lot more to be considered and worked out than just web page postings. The first step should be building a framework for the development of consistent, interrelated systems to manage all of the digitized images and audiovisual material. Such a system is often called Digital Asset Management (DAM). A DAM is about storage, retrieval and dissemination of digital assets. Digital assets include all kinds of files: product images, stock photos, audio, video, presentations, CFs and so on. How to store them in designated formats and in secure places is the first task a DAM needs to address. How to organize the assets such that they can be flexibly retrieved and powerfully searched is another big challenge. Lastly a DAM has to manage the distribution of digital assets such that users experience can be consistent across different browsers and channels. Some DAM can even perform on-the-fly conversions for digital assets to be highly adaptable on demand. 1.2. Why is DAM important? Digital assets used to mean those songs and movies created by big-name studios. The landscape is changing. With the technology maturity and escalating expectations from consumers in the past decade, for many other media rich companies or organizations going digital has been more feasible and increasingly a demand. Publishers, news journals, and museums are good examples. Prevalent availability of digital cameras helps to even accelerate the proliferation of digital assets. In business world, company web pages nowadays rely on audiovisual presentations for marketing communications. The ability to communicate visually is deemed as a necessity, and digital contents are valuable assets. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is thus emerged to help organizations to produce, collaborate, store and distribute their digital contents. Without such a system, it is less executable to internally share or re-use valuable or costly assets, digital contents are organized poorly, and consequently messages fail to convey effectively or efficiently to the target audiences. DAM helps to build solid integrated system to manage the storage, retrieval and distribution. Without a sound DAM, it usually takes many man hours to find a digital asset which for instance may be critical to the launch of a new product. Many organizations face similar challenges on a daily basis. Time spent searching for a digital asset is 3

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1 time not spent creating revenue. Worse yet, if the desired assets are not retrievable, recreating them costs even more. For external consumption of digital contents, availability and accessibility are the major concerns. A good Digital Asset Management backbone should be able to carry and exchange the metadata as the assets move along the workflow so that they can facilitate locating users‟ interests. Efficient distribution of the identified contents is another challenge. A good DAM can help the value chain reach the target end. 1.3. Why is DAM feasible to Microsoft? Microsoft has already owned most of the core technologies needed for entering this growing market. What remains are the development needed for DAM‟s specialty and the integration of various existing components for offering a total solution. The existing reseller and partner channels for most of other Microsoft business software products can be easily extended to this new product. The same volume licensing and pricing practices can also be applicable. By taking advantage of the economy of scale in the established business software product line, Micrsofot can lower marketing cost for this new product. From corporate point of view, there is synergy effect of diversifying into the DAM market because it can bring in new customer base to existing products. To DAM customers, Microsoft‟s bundling offer with other business software such as SQL server can lower their total ownership cost. It is an obvious win-win situation for both.2. Situation Analysis 2.1. Immediate Environment 2.1.1. Company capabilities The three main functionalities of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system are asset storage, retrieval, and dissemination. Microsoft has already owned most of the core technologies needed for entering this growing market. As a leader of system software and business application software in the global market, Microsoft is capable of offering total solutions to DAM. For digital asset storage, Microsoft‟s SQL Server is a mainstream database management system to create data platform. Many tools used in the media industry have adopted SQL Server and thus the new DAM product built on top of SQL Server can be interoperable with other subsystems, both internal and external. Besides storage, SQL Server is good at data mining. Together with Microsoft‟s Enterprise Search, a search server, they enhance DAM‟s information search and analysis capabilities even further. 4

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1 For digital asset dissemination and cloud computing, Microsoft is in an advantageous position due to its rich set of decades-long development efforts. The SharePoint server is a popular tool used on Windows platform to set up websites for sharing information and managing documents. Lync is a communications server to transform communication into an interaction that is collaborative, engaging, and accessible from anywhere. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), one of the underlying technologies behind Bing and Windows Live, enables data, logic, and infrastructure resources to be organized as a service and be accessed by routing messages between network interfaces. IIS (Internet Information Service) is the second most used web server in the world, after Apache HTTP Server. Moreover, Microsoft‟s strong footprint in media technologies is a weapon that is lacking in the conventional IT firms, such as IBM, HP or Oracle. Microsoft Windows Media Format is widely used in the world. Windows Media Player is the default player on every PC. The DirectX family of media technologies is under-the- hood engine of many media production tools. Microsoft is indeed in a unique position to enter the DAM market. 2.1.2. Competitors Whereas DAM is not new, the adoption rate is low compared to other IT counterparts. Besides two mainstream IT providers – IBM and HP, niche companies play the important roles in this market. Most of the niche companies started from a specialized area such as photo library services, brand asset management, etc. and evolved to generalize their products. However, the DAM market so far is still pretty fragmented. Without surprise, in the past decade there have been a few rounds of consolidation and acquisition. The timing is now good for Microsoft to enter and shake. The following table lists the major players and their products. Company Available Products Avid Media Manager ActiveContent Manager Cinegy Cinegy Archive Cinegy Workspace HP Media Control Media Storage Media Workflow Master IBM Content Manager Enterprise Edition FileNet Content Manager Ancept Media Server Open Text Media Management EMC Documentum Digital Asset Management NorthPlains TeleScope WAVE Corporation MediaBank Canto Cumulus ADAM Software Adam Studios Adam Connectors Widen Digital Asset Management Software 5

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1 MediaBeacon MediaBeacon R3volution 2.2. Macro-Environmental Factors 2.2.1. Digital data explosion According to an IDC research, between 2010 and 2020 the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world will grow to 35 trillion gigabytes as all major forms of media - voice, TV, radio, print - complete the journey of digitization. The amount of files will be 25 quintillions (1018). If all those data are stored in DVDs, the stack would reach halfway to Mars. The volume is even larger if we take into account security data and personal medical records required by government regulations. As a consequence, how to store and manage those data are both a challenge and an opportunity to DAM vendors. By 2020 there might be a significant gap between the amount of digital information created and the amount of available storage. From Economics we know that there is never unlimited resource. The efficiency in storing, retrieving and disseminating digital assets is the core value DAM products can offer. 2.2.2. Acceptance of cloud computing According to the same IDC research, by 2020 more than a third of all digital information will either live in or pass through the cloud, either public or private. As the cloud technologies get matured, consumers and enterprises are more confident to host, manage or store data as cloud services. To meet the trend, DAM vendors are expanding into Saas (software as a service) segment as more customers realize the cloud service can lower their IT overhead. 2.2.3. Increased need for business system integration Many DAM customers are no longer satisfied that DAM functions as a „silo‟ in the whole business system. Since many niche companies in DAM market grew out of a specialized area, their products tended to focus on solving a specific issue first before extending to a more general purpose product. The result is not as satisfactory as expected. On users‟ side, different departments tried to solve their problems and adopted different tools. Now customers want DAM to be easily integrated into the whole business workflow. Such a trend is a good opportunity to Microsoft because the system integration requirement is in Microsoft‟s familiar battle ground. 6

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.13. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning 3.1. DAM Market Segmentation Segmentation by application areas  DAM for photo archive services; examples are  Museums  Traditional libraries  DAM for corporate communication or marketing promotion; examples are  Brand library management to share, distribute and protect the assets  Advertisement production  DAM for time-based assets; examples are  Broadcasters  Newspaper publishers Segmentation by complexity and deployment scale  Enterprise DAM; major requirements are  Need to integrate into larger enterprise architecture  Support of enterprise-level workflow  Capability of high scalability  Mid-Market DAM; characteristics are  Need to integrate into desktop applications such as Adobe InDesign  Adequate support of collaborative commenting at least on department level  Lightweight DAM; characteristics are  Basic support of content publishing and records management.  Provision of lightweight media functionalities of ingest, preview, download or simple transformation. 3.2. Select Target Market Due to Microsoft‟s strength in business software market, obviously Microsoft should target the enterprise DAM and mid-market DAM segments. Lightweight segment can be ignored. Microsoft can offer enterprise edition and professional edition, one for each segment. The customers in Enterprise DAM segment could be large-scale movie studios or TV broadcasters. Professional Edition can be sold to advertising agencies, retailer chain, and smaller production studios, and so on. 7

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1 3.3. Positioning Value Proposition  You can trust Microsoft to ingest digital assets into your system and manage them through entire lifecycle.  Microsoft is committed to aggregate your assets into your final product and deliver to your audiences or customers.  Microsoft has the strongest and most unified back-end support for the architecture and interface of your media services.4. Product Strategy 4.1. Product Mix Among Microsoft’s wide product lines, system software, business application software, internet software & service, and entertainment & multimedia are the most important. Groups of products in each line are listed in the table below. System Business Internet Entertainment Software Application Software & & Software Service Multimedia Operating Biz Talk Server Internet Explorer DirectX System Exchange Server CRM MSN Windows Media Office Dynamic ERP Bing PhotoDraw .NET Silverlight Internet Assistants Media Player Back Office Server Digital Broadcast Windows Live XBox Manager Data Access Merchant Server Component Visual Studio SQL Server Internet Information Outlook Server 4.2. Placement in PLC DAM market is less than 10 years old. It started from several niche companies trying to serve specialized customer segments such as photo library services or brand asset management. To create more revenue, some of them endeavored to generalize their products. The evolution path is similar to that in other technology products. DAM market should have passed its introduction stage of PLC because the need for DAM products has been well recognized. As previously described, between 2010 and 2020 it is expected to have explosive growth in digital data. DAM market is entering the rapid growth stage. 8

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1 4.3. Line Extension The proposed DAM product perfectly fits into the business application software product line. This report suggests Microsoft to offer a product suite containing the following components as a line extension to its business application software. (1) Microsoft Media Transformer The functionality includes automatic transcoding, automatic interfacing to database, etc. (2) Microsoft Meta Engine The functionality includes media data mining, semantic net analysis, interoperable metadata, etc. (3) Microsoft Media Exchange The functionality includes media streaming, distribution, web service, etc. 4.4. Name Selection “Media Pipe Robo” is the product suite name. Its three components or sub- products are named as (1) Microsoft Media Transformer (2) Microsoft Meta Engine (3) Microsoft Media Exchange, respectively.5. Pricing Strategy An aggressive pricing strategy is adopted. The “Media Pipe Robo” product suite will offer two versions: Enterprise and Professional which are priced at USD $250,000 and USD $30,000, respectively. The prices should be very competitive because they are in the median of the market price range, considering that the “Media Pipe Robo” product suite is expected to contain much more superior functionality than competitors. One of the rationales is to lure media-centric customers into Windows platform so that Microsoft can boost its weak market share there. For the existing customers who need to do digital asset management, such a fascinating pricing would serve as a reward to retain loyal customers. 9

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.16. Distribution Strategy The “Media Pipe Robo” product suite will be distributed through the same channels for other business software products. 6.1. Microsoft Store MicrosoftStore.com is Microsoft operated on-line store for either B2C or B2B products. The Professional Edition of “Media Pipe Robo” product suite will be available at Microsoft Store as packaged software. 6.2. Microsoft partners or authorized resellers Customers can buy volume licensing program through Microsoft partners or authorized resellers. There are two web sites for customers to find a reseller. A reseller can help the customer to review program agreement terms, pricing, and payment during the ordering process. Three types of licensing are available; they are (1) open value (2) open value subscription (3) enterprise agreement.7. Promotional Strategy 7.1. Promotion Methods Since the “Media Pipe Robo” product suite is in B2B technology market, trade shows and professional publications are the two most effective communication channels to promote. In addition, several technology-oriented on-line forums, blogs or media have significant influence on CIOs or decision makers, and thus it is important for Microsoft to frequently provide updated technical specifications or white papers as infomercial materials. After the product is launched, forming a special- interest user group (e.g., Microsoft Digital Asset Manager Forum) is helpful to collect customer feedback and build customer loyalty. Webinar is also a popular way to interact with users. 7.1.1. Trade shows  NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show  IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) Show  SMPTE Technical Conference & Exhibition  Digital Asset Management Conference 7.1.2. Professional publications  Journal of Digital Asset Management  Advanced Media Workflow Association 10

New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1  Post Magazine  CNet  IT News  PC Magazine 7.2. Promotion Material Sample The graphics below is to be used as print advertisement on professional magazines.8. Statement of Success The Media Pipe Robo product suite is Microsoft‟s solution to Digital Asset Management and will be a market leader based on the following findings in this market research.  DAM market is in the rapid growth stage of its product life cycle.  Microsoft has already owned most of the core technologies needed for entering DAM market.  Marketing cost is low because this new product can take advantage of the economy scale of the established business software product line.  DAM customers can lower their total ownership cost by also adopting other business software on Windows platforms. 11

New product proposal on Digital Asset Management for Microsoft

by HKYANG on Dec 18, 2011

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