1. By Hsikai Yang
Dec. 7, 2011

2. New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1
1. 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? ......................................................................................... 4
2. 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 ....................................................................... 6
3. SEGMENTATION, TARGETING, AND POSITIONING ............................................................... 7
3.1. DAM MARKET SEGMENTATION ....................................................................................................... 7
3.2. SELECT TARGET MARKET ................................................................................................................ 7
3.3. POSITIONING .................................................................................................................................... 8
4. PRODUCT STRATEGY ...................................................................................................................... 8
4.1. PRODUCT MIX .................................................................................................................................. 8
4.2. PLACEMENT IN PLC ......................................................................................................................... 8
4.3. LINE EXTENSION .............................................................................................................................. 9
4.4. NAME SELECTION............................................................................................................................. 9
5. PRICING STRATEGY ......................................................................................................................... 9
6. DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY ........................................................................................................... 10
6.1. MICROSOFT STORE ......................................................................................................................... 10
6.2. MICROSOFT PARTNERS OR AUTHORIZED RESELLERS ...................................................................... 10
7. 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 .................................................................................................... 11
8. STATEMENT OF SUCCESS............................................................................................................. 11
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3. New Product Proposal rev 1.0.1
1. 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 audio-
visual 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
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4. 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.
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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
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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.
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3. 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.
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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.
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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.
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6. 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
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 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.
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