SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Open Text (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), announced the third major expansion of an already successful strategic relationship to include Open Text Digital Asset Management (DAM), a key component of the Open Text ECM Suite and a part of marketing resource management (MRM) and intellectual property management (IPM) capabilities of the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application. Through a new global agreement, SAP will resell the enterprise DAM solution from Open Text under the name the SAP® Digital Asset Management application by Open Text.
SAP has had great success reselling Open Text Document Access, Open Text Archiving and Open Text Invoice Management solutions, and the companies announced in October an expansion of the agreement that enables SAP to resell Open Text Extended ECM (see "SAP and Open Text Expand Global Reseller Agreement"). Today's announcement allows SAP to resell one of the industry's leading DAM solutions as a part of an overall MRM and IPM solution with emphasis on enterprise marketing departments across every industry, as well as media industry publishing houses, entertainment firms and broadcasters.
DAM Drives Integrated Global Marketing Campaigns
With increased adoption of digital marketing channels, marketers need to develop higher volumes and more sophisticated digital assets that require collaboration with multiple departments, all while reigning in costs and achieving measurable return on marketing investments. Still, many marketing organizations suffer from a lack of standardized processes concerning content asset creation, publishing, maintenance and distribution. These problems can lead to marketing inefficiencies in lost or misplaced assets, or in having duplicate or misused assets.
To address these problems, marketers are turning to digital asset management solutions for centralized, global visibility across all marketing assets and usages. This enables them to simultaneously deliver integrated campaigns that span multiple products and regions to ensure consistent communications and branding. Further, organizations are using these tools to create marketing dashboards that monitor program effectiveness in real time.
When used in conjunction with the marketing capabilities of SAP CRM, SAP Digital Asset Management can support the entire marketing process from planning, developing content, execution and results measurement. It offers comprehensive functionality for collecting, managing, finding, using and distributing all types of content. Use cases range from strategic brand management to investor relations and partner collaboration, among many others.
"Many marketing organizations are making an investment shift to digitized marketing channels, thus creating a need for those organizations to develop, manage and distribute higher volumes of digitized content in a more systematic way," said Susan Popper, senior vice president, Marketing Communications, SAP. "By providing a robust and well-proven DAM solution with the marketing capabilities of SAP CRM, we can help customers deploy a flexible, efficient infrastructure marketers need to achieve more with less, and succeed in the evolving digital media landscape."
Integrated DAM Drives Competitive Advantage in Media and Entertainment
For media companies, the continued rise of digital content and its distribution channels dramatically increases the need for fully integrated, standardized media and asset management solutions. The SAP Digital Asset Management application allows editors and producers at media companies to more efficiently ingest, log, access, transcode and conform, distribute, reuse, monetize and archive rich media content. When used in conjunction with the SAP® Intellectual Property Management application, SAP Digital Asset Management provides media companies with a seamless process for organizing, collaborating on and tracking digital content to streamline their overall production and distribution processes.
Open Text is a strategic SAP software solution partner for ECM with multiple products that have achieved SAP-certified integration status. The two companies have been working together for over 20 years to help more than 3,000 SAP customers manage enterprise content more efficiently. Open Text is currently the only ECM vendor with a number of ECM solutions resold by SAP.
"There is significant opportunity to help enterprises create more value and drive more influence from their existing content and to lower the costs associated with creating and managing new content," said James Latham, Chief Marketing Officer, Open Text. "The continued growth of fast-moving digital media and online content make DAM solutions imperative. We are excited to see the continued expansion in our relationship with SAP. This ability to reach, serve and integrate marketing assets with business processes will further accelerate the adoption of DAM among enterprise customers and media companies alike."
