North
Plains' announcement earlier this month that they their
DAM solution, TeleScope,
is now being offered as a service in the cloud. Some
market analysts are saying that running DAM in the cloud isn't for everyone
(yet?), but I've heard that 10% of the market is ready now (10% * 1/2B= 50M). North Plains isn't alone is providing DAM
SaaS. Widen is doing it too (as their VP of marketing describes in this video). To relieve concerns about uploading assets to
the cloud, they have created an appliance
that runs within a customer's facility, allowing their assets to remain local,
but is maintained by Widen remotely.
Besides these two DAM vendors, ClearStory
just announced that they are getting into the SaaS market too with ActiveMedia.
Cloud computing is quickly coming to the forefront even in a market that is full of paranoid companies, requires specialized hardware, and is characterized by extremely large media files. It's only a matter of time!
Theresa Regli of CMS Watch says that North Plains isn't really providing SaaS. Rather, North Plains has contracted with a third-party PaaS provider called NaviSite to allow customers to use TeleScope remotely without needing to deploy or manage it, thus making North Plains an ASP. My question is this: What is the difference between a company functioning as an ASP and one that is providing SaaS? I don't see one, frankly.