The term “asset” refers generically to anything that is owned by an individual or an organization that has financial value. With the advent of desktop publishing and the radical connectivity among and between seemingly everyone and everything, the need to manage all the content being created and flowing through ever bigger “pipes” emerged. This led to a new class of enterprise software first created in the mid-1990s called Digital Asset Management (DAM).

DAM provides a centralized platform for storing, accessing, managing, organizing, and distributing assets. DAM captures the active state of content that is essential to any innovative organization or enterprise's IT infrastructure and business process. The DAM market is rapidly growing, and this has been influenced by the growth in investment and its focus on digital marketing and integrated technology.