Today, Forrester published The Forrester Wave: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q1 2024. Despite performing well in the 2022 version, Forrester decided not to evaluate Tenovos this time due to a revised and materially higher financial threshold.
Companies like Tenovos rely on analysts to help give their brand and credibility a shot in the arm, which is particularly important in a 20+ year-old category such as Digital Asset Management (DAM), where it can be tough for innovative and fast-growing companies like Tenovos to get mindshare against larger suite vendors who have acquired their way into the DAM category and have amassed years of legacy revenue.
You can imagine my delight when Tenovos landed as “Strong Performers” on The Forrester Wave: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q1 2022, released two years ago. It’s extremely rare for a vendor to land in such a high position for their first-ever Wave; typically, a vendor is introduced at the “Challengers” or “Contenders” level.
This position was a testament to our approach to disrupting the DAM category, not only with our vision but also with our modern platform, enterprise customers, and, of course, our people.
Since The Forrester Wave: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q1 2022, Tenovos has only gone from strength to strength
Our vision – The alter-ego to the Customer Data Platform, Tenovos provides a 360° view of your content, from creation to consumption, marrying productivity and performance analytics so global brands can efficiently create optimized content at scale. It continues to be well received in the market, especially by executive teams looking to be smarter with their content spend.
Our platform – We never stop innovating. From built-in rights management, workflows, and PIM framework to dynamic content localization, AI features to boost productivity and more. Our product continues to evolve monthly, and our customers get a say about what we prioritize -only a few companies offer that.
Our architecture – There’s a growing trend in the DAM space to replace monolithic vendors that offer a vast suite of products and services (which can come with a hefty price tag for a small fraction of the functionality you’ll use). Today, tech-savvy brands want to use different best-in-breed technologies across their media supply chain rather than being handcuffed to one vendor for everything.
Tenovos was the first DAM in the MACH alliance, with our platform being built upon the core MACH principles of developing technology that leverages microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. A first we’re very proud of.
Our customers – They’re the reason we do what we do. Since our original Wave inclusion in 2022, we’ve added dozens of incremental, amazing global brands to our portfolio, including Reckitt, Skechers, Mattel, and many others my mum has heard of. More impressive is that our customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) is north of 50, which I can’t recall ever seeing in my 20+ year career. We’re proud to provide a DAM that our customers love.
Our people – Some companies focus on logo acquisition, but if you’ve ever bought a DAM, you know it’s not only about the technology. Having a killer DAM strategy and a vendor that can demonstrate a vested interest in your long-term success is just as important. We’ve seen our competitors stretch themselves thin, and being focused on logo acquisition, they don’t have the time or resources to support enterprise clients with the personalized and dedicated approach they need and deserve. We don’t say yes to every deal, but when we do, we partner with them to achieve their specific goals and ensure they get the most out of their investment from day one.
With that said, you can imagine my surprise when we were told we wouldn’t be evaluated for the 2024 version of the Forrester Wave, when our internal goal was to land as “Leaders.”
The only difference - an inexplicable increase in Forrester’s criteria for meeting a minimum revenue (not TCV) threshold.
I’ve known this news for some time, and while initially disappointed, I’ve had time to muse on it. While I don’t think it reflects well on Forrester from an inclusion perspective, as it favors legacy vendors who captured much of their DAM revenue stream through acquisition, I’m not concerned about it.
Tenovos will survive our exclusion and continue to grow from strength to strength. We may need to sell and market harder than we’ve done in the past, but those savvy DAM buyers will let OUR technology, people, and, most importantly, customers do the talking, not an analyst firm. We won’t increase our prices to achieve higher revenue targets; instead, focusing on providing value for our customers aligned with sound ROI.
To all those vendors out there who didn’t get their day in the sun because of an arbitrary metric or shift in criteria despite all your hard work, I say don’t worry; keep doing what you’re doing – it’ll make you even stronger for it.
If anyone wants to reach out and talk about the Tenovos platform in more detail, don’t hesitate to contact me below.
Michael Waldron
CMO
Tenovos
mike@tenovos.com
