johnp’s blog

Day Software acquired by Adobe

July 28th, 2010

The WCM market has been one of the most fragmented in enterprise software and today’s announcement of Day’s acquisition was inevitable. This is further evidence of consolidation of the proprietary software market and we have seen the disappearance of proprietary WCM as a stand-alone market with a logical progression to developing marketing applications. Other examples include:

• Vignette acquired by Open Text
• Stellent acquired by Oracle
• Interwoven acquired by Autonomy
• Tridion acquired by SDL
• RedDot acquired by Open Text
• Mediasurface acquired by Alterian

Pure-play WCM vendors like Day have focused on marketing departments and marketing applications with a traditional enterprise sales model.  With Adobe’s new customer engagement model this acquisition makes sense particularly with the acquisition of Omniture and made Day the obvious target for the missing WCM capability they needed to execute on this vision.

This is a very different strategy to Alfresco’s which focuses on CMIS, developers, content services platform and using an open source distribution model. Adobe has used this platform as an important part of LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services and we are committed to providing Adobe with the best possible support and content services.  This use case of Alfresco is very different from the use cases for marketing solutions in which Day is engaged and we rarely see each other in competitive sales engagements. Unlike Day, Alfresco’s model for WCM has been to provide tools and a platform for developers to build rich content services for web sites with an open source distribution. We continue to invest in this area and will be previewing the next iteration of our WCM product in September.

Alfresco’s strategy of supporting CMIS is shared by the widest consortium of ECM players from IBM, EMC, Microsoft as well as Adobe. We were especially pleased when Day committed to CMIS.

It has been a long and winding road for Day since it was founded in 1993. I wish the team at Day well and look forward to continuing to work with them and Adobe on CMIS and on joint sales engagements.

Entry Filed under: Adobe, ECM Market