Owning the Content Lifecycle: Adobe Acquiring Day Software

Yesterday, Adobe announced its public tender offer to acquire Switzerland-based Day Software for $240 Million ($USD), which is expected to close by the end of 2010. Day Software develops and sells content technologies, including CRX, a Java-based enterprise-level content repository, as well as CQ5, which can be utilized for Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, and social collaboration. The move is an interesting, although not necessarily surprising one by Adobe, a company that has been fairly aggressive with strategic acquisitions over the past few years. Its recent acquisitions of Web analytics firm Omniture and online business platform Business Catalyst have underscored Adobe’s pursuit of moving beyond developing tools to create content, as well as its increased focus on digital content. The Day Software acquisition pushes Adobe further in these directions and brings up a number of considerations.

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Open Text Analyst Event

I had the opportunity to attend the Open Text Analyst Event in Boston on January 13th. This annual event provides Open Text the opportunity to share their current marketing and product strategy plans.  The event format seemed to follow others I have attended as well as past Open Text events (there were no show stoppers or game changing announcements this time around). Open Text provided information to the hungry analysts by way of plenty of powerpoint to chew on in the morning session.  The sound of laptops and tablets tapping away (I chose old school pen and composition notebook) was the background hum to each presenter.  The executive team, some of which are relatively new to Open Text, each presented their area of expertise and built upon the last digging slightly deeper as we went along . In an effort to change the tone (and maybe to push back the post luncheon yawns),  the afternoon provided a “speed-dating” (we all joked about it) atmosphere, sitting with select members of the executive team for short bursts of time.

If you don’t know who Open Text is, they are a multi-national company that manages content for hundreds of brands (BMW, Sony, Citibank, Pfizer and Coca Cola just to name a few) and states more than 100 million users in over 50,000 deployments worldwide. So if you don’t know Open Text, you certainly know the companys whose content they support.  And there is no shortage of content, content that is growing exponentially every day, in fact there is an explosion of content from email, text, social media, traditional business applications, newspapers, video, music and books.

Open Text is essentially an ECM vendor and over the years has amassed many different brands including: Vignette, Hummingbird, LiveLink and Captaris to bolster its position and portfolio. Acquiring many discrete businesses has been no small endeavor and in fact has taken time to rationalize under one “Suite” or umbrella offering. Open Text demonstrated how the suite will serve all layers of the enterprise experience from the user level to process level integration and to the base library level. It remains to be seen just how successful this unified message will carry, Open Text themselves admits a lower than preferred penetration into existing customers

And how is Open Text innovating for the future…by learning to play the game Halo…no seriously, Tom Jenkins, Open Text Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, shared with us his newly acquired skill as a gamer, this Jenkins admits, provides him the ability to truly understand how this next generation consumes content digitally, and their expectation of the digital experience…it was probably fun too!

Expect Open Text to go deep this year…to the heart of the customer, the heart of their own business all with a focus on innovation and mobility.

If you think you know Kofax…think again

Kofax recently wrapped up their annual conference – Transform 2009 in San Diego, California. With over 425 in attendance, this audience was a mixture of partners, vendors and end-users. Kofax, founded in 1985, has undergone nothing short of a complete overhaul in the last 18 months. Most changes are thanks to CEO, Reynolds Bish. Bish, former founder of Captiva, spent his first few months with the company identifying many areas in need of serious modification and then went about implementing this revolution of strategic business change.

One of the first major initiatives was to change the name – formerly DICOM group plc, to Kofax. Meant to eliminate confusion with the brands, and quite frankly bring about global synergy among the disparate business units (which according to Bish was sorely lacking), hence the Kofax name was adopted in February 2008.

Next, Bish set out to renovate the management team, making several changes to business unit heads and senior sales staff. The majority of these changes, according to Bish, were to bring experience and leadership to a company that was operating quite separate.

One of the most interesting announcements from Kofax came in September with the acquisition of 170 Systems. A leading provider of financial process automation software, the Markview suite of products provides invoice processing and workflow functionality.  This acquisition could provide a turnkey A/P solution from a single provider, Kofax.

It became clear that Kofax has been busy…Transform was an appropriate event theme this year. Companies that can demonstrate agility and flexibility will ultimately survive and prosper. Arguably an enormous task, not without consequence and fallout, Kofax has seemingly positioned themselves to address the market, and customer needs with product and services.

Kofax Corporate Mission – To be the leading provider of
document driven business process automation solutions

The Elusive Software Pull-Through?

It started when I saw the open-source model gain momentum in the content management space a la Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Nuxeo, and several others. The no-license model clearly had potential, especially given the associated services and support revenue streams we were seeing. In fact, my own (commercial) ECM market numbers indicated that license revenues were typically less than 1/3 of large deals anyway. Fast-forward.

Early this month, on an earnings call with HP, our hosts implicated that they’re playing in a “free license” market. Their competition was giving away software, they claimed, to capture coveted services and support revenue streams across a contract. Once again, I was intrigued but not altogether shocked — this was, after all, a buyer’s economy for technology solutions, and shrinking license margins were no surprise. Fast-forward once again.

EMC recently announced that they were giving away developer’s editions of Documentum. Although it will likely improve their overall revenue ‘ecosystem,’ it’s certainly a new move for a platform that otherwise costs developers plenty to work with in the past. Just another drop in the bucket, though.

Enter FatWire and their PR a few week ago– Read more »

Get on the DAM Boat!

Bryan Yeager and I spent Monday of this week at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in NYC. For those unfamiliar with the space, digital asset management (DAM) technologies are used to manage multimedia assets such as images, digital photos, audio, video, 3D renderings, and Flash-like animation. We’ll be posting video InfoCasts with vendors from the event this and next week as well as a more detailed analysis for clients.

Why should you care about DAM?

InfoTrends research in 2006 indicated that over 25% of ALL business content is in multimedia form, excluding presentation formats that often embed this media. Read more »

Analyzing the 2009 Federal Budget – $71B in IT spend

I was researching some government data this afternoon and noticed that the 2009 Federal budget had been posted as well as some analytical perspectives.

Let’s skip right to page 157 in the analysis, a section titled INTEGRATING SERVICES WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, which provides a discussion of the “$71 billion for Information Technology (IT) and the associated support services” that the President (Bush) had proposed. This represents a 3.8% increase over the 2008 budget, but it’s possible additional or reduced government spend by the Obama administration may change this figure. Read more »

Obama’s Plan: Focus on Healthcare, Part 2

In my last post, I discussed some recent research conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine regarding Electronic Health Record (EHR) solutions in light of President-elect Obama’s proposal to invest $50 billion in these technologies. In this post, I’d like to broaden the scope of the discussion to include market dynamics, Google’s and Microsoft’s roles, and what the future may hold. As before, you can access a more robust audio/PPT webinar, which also includes some discussion of enabling technologies.

(Webinar note: although I briefly mention the importance of back-file digitization strategies in deploying an EHR — including capture hardware and software — this element should not be understated. Healthcare remains a paper-intensive vertical market, and strategies for digitizing the paper-based information that will continue to be created are at least as important as capturing the mass of legacy documents that are already in existence.  To this end, InfoTrends perceives growth in distributed capture hardware and software, which allow these paper documents to be ingested by EHRs closer to their point of origin.)

There seem to be two somewhat-competing camps in the healthcare records space: Read more »

“In 2 years, we won’t have laptops anymore”

Thus spoke Open Text CEO John Shackleton at the opening keynote for Open Text’s 2008 user conference, aptly named Content World. Those of you working with Open Text are likely more familiar with the “LiveLinkUp” event of the past, which was renamed this year to promote the ‘one voice, one vision’ theme. In line with this shift, I’ve found that a few product lines are moving towards a single-brand identity, with the (former) Red Dot Web content management (WCM) solution being referred to more often as WCM for LiveLink.

So maybe Mr. Shackleton is a little off in his perceived timing for this next evolution of information technology, and more than likely, this was a rhetorical statement. Then again, for those who saw InfoTrends’ President Jeff Hayes’ keynote at ODS, we all know “the cloud” and “mobile” are coming. Read more »

ODS Follow-up: Continuing our SharePoint conversations…

For those of you that attended our SharePoint keynote panel yesterday morning, I wanted to reach out and offer the opportunity to continue the conversation. Unfortunately, we ran a little bit over the allotted time and didn’t have the chance to address audience questions (nor several of my own). So that said, feel free to e-mail me directly, or post some questions/comments under this post. I’ll follow-up with our panel and post their responses here!

Based on what we heard during the keynote, it seems SharePoint could be a real disruptor for our markets and especially important as the convergence of hardware and software (and of workgroup and enterprise solutions) comes to fruition. The Microsoft ecosystem could be an ‘in’ for hardware manufacturers, workgroup ISVs, as well as enterprise ISVs to approach end-to-end solutions in a truly process-centric manner. Read more »

Some pretty good earnings, eh?

The last of the major ECM vendors to report earnings this quarter has done so… Canadian software developer Open Text beat the street on Monday, reporting 11% YoY growth in revenue and 88% YoY growth in net income. Anecdotally, it’s hard to keep calling these guys “Canadian” when they have offices on almost every continent and annual revenue approaching $1B.

Open Text also announced the close of its Captaris acquisition and roadmap, which has important implications for the covergence of ECM solutions and OEM hardware. (InfoTrends’ report on the acquisition is available to Office group clients as well as through the Pub store here.) Read more »