By Matt Forcey
Adobe Systems announced yesterday the $240 Million acquisition of Switzerland -based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company Day Software. This is the latest in a long line of acquisitions of pure-play content management vendors by large multi-solution software manufacturers. Day's ECM platform includes tool sets for web content management, digital asset management, and more recently, social collaboration.
For the past few years, Day's marketing and messaging has been focused on Java Content Repository (JCR) technology and JSR 238-compliant web content management systems, and used JCR as their key competitive differentiator in the marketplace. More recently, they seem to have moved away from this "technology-led" JCR & JSR messaging and are talking more about actual business solutions; Online Marketing and Web 2.0 solutions to be specific.
This change in narrative, along with Day's A-list of consumer goods and services focused clients, should be right at home at Adobe, who already owns the marketer's desktop with their Adobe Creative Suite of products (PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign). Additionally, the decade of enterprise software experience Day brings to the table can only benefit Adobe, who is known primarily for products that enable the individual contributor. "We are excited to join Adobe and combine our expertise in WCM with techcnologies that create and deliver rich online and offline experiences," said Day's CEO Erik Hansen.
In recessionary times, technology buyers move away from building out best of breed solution sets that incorporate multiple disparate software companies, and tend to focus on taking advantage of single vendor relationships. This doesn’t bode well for pure-play companies like Day. But an Adobe that can offer an end-to-end solution set for marketers, from content creation to online publishing, is considerably more attractive.
If Adobe can stay focused on delivering solutions to their core customer set, Marketing and Advertising, and does not use this addition to their enterprise toolbox as a way to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle in the business software market (which they have eluded to in past years), they should have no problem becoming a dominant player in a vertical that is still serviced primarily by small to mid-size solution providers.
Rob Tarkoff, Adobe's SVP & GM of Digital Enterprise Solutions said “With the addition of Day to our enterprise portfolio, we will be able to enhance the value of our offering and deliver on our vision of the web as the hub of customer interaction.” It will be interesting to see if Adobe also embraces the web to deliver their applications (desktop tools and content management) as an on-demand suite of services living in the cloud, ala SharePoint Online and Microsoft WebApps.
First things first though... Adobe needs to kiss and make up with Apple so I can get Flash to work on my iPhone.
Read the full press release from Adobe on the aquisition of Day Software: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201007/072810AdobetoAcquireDaySoftware.html
Learn more about Day Software: www.day.com
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