Chuckwalla: Digital Asset Management Beyond The Enterprise

Digital Asset Management (DAM) has become one of the digital content delivery industry's most familiar buzz phrases. Coming out of the enterprise database management space, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Chuckwalla, Inc. is developing Digital Asset Management technology that manages rich content across multiple communications channels.

"What Digital Asset Management has done for a number of industries is establish a difference between elements stored in a database that have value and those that do not. An asset has value," says Jon Lewis, vice president of sales & marketing for Chuckwalla.

"There are three sets of tools in the digital asset management space," Lewis continues. "There are desktop products, workflow tools, and enterprise models that are client server based." Chuckwalla develops products for the entire enterprise. "Because digital content comes in multiple formats, we have to be agnostic to all content," he says. "That's the only way to ensure that once an asset has been created it can be used over and over again."

One of the biggest problems content-owning companies and even major corporations face according to Lewis is the inability to locate specific materials once they have been created. "No one ever loses an asset," says Lewis, "but they often can't find one when they need it. And that's what asset management is all about: being able to find what you need, when and how you need it."