The IT Benefits of the Third Wave of DAM

In April 2023, marketing data stack expert, Lee Hammond, stated that “We’re entering a new era of MarTech, a composable era. […] Composability provides an agile and iterative approach to MarTech by connecting existing systems and teams.”

As we’ve written previously, this evolution is driven by the emergence of a new era of DAM that acts as the critical infrastructure layer enabling omnichannel marketing, asset transformation, and targeted distribution.

This “Third Wave of DAM,” as we call it, will bring unprecedented levels of automation, configurability, and simplicity to the DAM management and content production processes. This has significant implications for IT professionals within the companies that adopt a Third Wave DAM.

The IT Benefits of the Third Wave of DAM

Third Wave DAM is made possible by MACH architecture (Microservices, API-first, Composable, Headless). This approach to DAM — and MarTech in general — has a wide range of benefits for IT.

Ease of IT management

In first and second wave DAM systems, infrastructure was siloed and monolithic. This created too many applications for IT to manage in terms of passwords, servers, access controls, configurations, etc.

With Third Wave DAM systems, all your core infrastructure is operating out of the same port. This makes it easy to use a single SSO and identity provider across the organization. In addition, this drastically reduces the number of servers that require management. 

Non-technical staff can do more on their own

The headless nature of Third Wave DAMs decouples Creative and UX from the back end. These platforms offer low-code, no-code, and web-based to accomplish tasks that previously required assistance from development and IT. 

This means that customers and non-technical users with no coding knowledge can customize and configure elements on their own.

Now, your internal teams can configure their DAM workspaces with intuitive drag-and-drop module selection — instead of asking devs to configure workspaces in the code.

Marketing and content teams can also create content tailored for different devices, channels, and audiences on their own. The Create Once, Deliver Everywhere nature of Third Wave DAMs unlocks the ability for anyone to compose content for different channels without the need to build new application stacks.

Bottom line, giving non-technical users the ability to do more on their own means less tickets to IT and development personnel.

Fewer tickets = more time to focus on value-adding tasks

Without a constant influx of tickets from less technical teams, your IT and dev teams can now focus their time on bigger fish. This can include: 

• Making your product operate more efficiently
• Working on new integrations
• System upgrades 
• Troubleshooting bugs for your end customers

This also helps non-technical users, who no longer have to wait for their perpetually-swamped IT team to free up to get their projects done. 

Reduces server management demands

With the auto-scaling functionality of MACH-based systems, your DAM can scale server capacity up or down automatically based on demand. 

From a business perspective, this means that you only pay for the resources you need, when you need them. From an IT perspective, this means no need to manually manage servers and no more fire drills to ramp up servers due to demand spikes.

Added automation

The API-first nature of Third Wave DAM platforms allows you to automate data exchange between different systems and use your DAM as the engine of your MarTech ecosystem. 

Two-way communication between different systems can be created with API call scripts to connect the data between different points along the digital supply chain (while reducing human error). 

API-first systems also create the ability to automate repetitive manual tasks for anyone across your organization. From IT, to Creative, to Legal — any time you can automate mundane tasks gives your team the ability to focus on more important work that moves your enterprise forward.

Future-proof your tech stack

Moving away from the monolithic tech stack into the modular tech stack will make it easy to add new applications and replace legacy systems over time. The API-first Third Wave of DAM orchestrates your tech stack in a modular fashion, allowing you to easily swap out legacy systems individually without affecting your MarTech ecosystem as a whole when changes are needed.

Additionally, as new channels arise, the Create Once, Deliver Everywhere model of content creation will allow your organization to seamlessly incorporate new ways of marketing without the need to build out additional code or add new distribution applications.

Continued reading

If you’re interested in learning more about the Third Wave of DAM and how this next generation of digital asset management technology can lighten the load on your IT teams, you can view these additional resources.