Adobe today announced it has reached a deal to acquire ECM vendor Day Software. In a telephone interview, Erik Larson Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe, cited Day’s technology’s scalability and social features and the company’s support for open-source software as the primary factors driving the acquisition. According to Day’s website, “Day Chief Scientist Roy Fielding was co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, author of the Apache Software license, and creator of the Apache web server.” Day has contributed to 12 Apache projects and 25 other open-source projects.
Day, founded in Basil, Switzerland in 1993, is a somewhat lesser known player in the ECM market – and Gartner predicted last year the company’s market position would decline. However, it has an impressive portfolio of clients including GM, Audi, McDonald’s. Larson praises the company for its early recognition of the potential of the web and for designing software that was built from the ground-up for scalability and interactivity.
Larson says Day’s content management and content repository software will compliment Adobe’s enterprise software offerings LiveCycle and Omniture (which it acquired last year) to create a full suite of enterprise technologies.
Larson’s vision for the enterprise revolves around “customer experience management,” which combines the discipline of user experience design, interaction design, process management, content strategy and customer service into a unified field for web-based customer experience. Larson predicts in the near future, if this isn’t the case already, customers will expect to have most of their interactions with companies online – and citizens will have most of their interactions with governments online as well. To this end, Adobe hopes to position LiveCycle, Omniture, and Day’s offerings as a customer experience suite to compliment its existing web development technologies.
What the acquisition means, if anything, for Apache remains to be seen. The Apache Software Foundation is of course a very independent entity, but it’s hard not to see this acquisition by Adobe as a play to get closer to the world’s most popular web server. Update: Paolo Mottadelli, a sales engineer at Day Software, said via Twitter that the “acquisition shouldn’t mean anything for Apache but hopefully more contribution.”
