Documens Boss

Adobe and Day Software today announced a $US240 million acquisition of the Basel-based software developer. The price offered is 59% above the company's volume-weighted average share price over the last 60 trading days.
 

According to Adobe officials, the acquisition will strengthen the company’s enterprise software solutions with web content management, digital asset management and social collaboration offerings. They implied that there will be changes to current Day products for better integration with Adobe technologies including AIR, Flash, Flex and PDF.
 

"Adobe's acquisition of Day represents a key milestone in our efforts toward delivering best-in-class customer experience management solutions to enterprises and governments worldwide," said Rob Tarkoff, Adobe's senior vice president and general manager, digital enterprise solutions.
 

"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," Tarkoff added.
 

Day CEO, Erik Hansen, welcomed the deal, saying, "We are excited to join Adobe and combine our expertise in WCM (web content management) with technologies that create and deliver rich online and offline experiences leveraging the ubiquity of Flash and PDF. We believe this is a winning combination for both Adobe and Day customers."
 
Document Boss' Take, from Paul Carman, SVP North America:
We regard today’s announcement as somewhat of a shock, although not totally unexpected. Many have predicted more acquisitions by Adobe, but the most likely suspects were companies such as Alfresco and other current Adobe ECM partners. Recent announcements of a huge OEM deal with Alfresco made all of us think that they were squarely in Adobe’s sights - and they may still be.  But no one had predicted it would be Day first!
 

Despite the above, there do seem to be some good synergies, detailed below:

• Brings a quality CMS offering to Adobe; a clear void is their solution set for some time
• Allows solution to be run “in the cloud”, perhaps right out of the Adobe box
• Day is a strong and aggressive technology organization which will help Adobe with Enterprise IT groups
• Day and Adobe share a deep interest in Open Source; Day brings good experience there
• With Adobe’s influence Day will be US-based and benefit from the large US market opportunity
• Great new market opportunities should open up for the Day solutions, as Adobe has a huge customer base and is found on many, many desktops; in Advertising alone there are huge opportunities to leverage that base.
• Access to larger budget and technical resources for the Day team.
 
 
Adobe customers benefit from new potential applications, many of enterprise quality. Day customers benefit from new innovations in the traditional Day offerings, new development monies and opportunities and perhaps, enhanced integration with Adobe solutions.
In the end, it’s all about generating improved revenues.
 

But here is my prediction…WATCH THIS SPACE. There will be many, many more acquisitions and partnerships in 2010 and beyond; we will bring you the insight on them.