Adobe to Buy Day Software for $240 Million

In a move to beef up its ongoing play for the attention and purse strings of enterprise customers, Adobe Systems has announced plans to acquire Web content management software provider Day Software for $240 million.

In a press release announcing the acquisition, Adobe said its acquisition of Day will strengthen the company's enterprise software solutions with market-leading Web content management (WCM), digital asset management and social collaboration offerings. This acquisition represents a significant market opportunity for Adobe to help organizations transform themselves by enabling them to create, manage, distribute and monetize content while optimizing the Web experience for their customers, Adobe said.

"The big driver here from a strategic standpoint is that the acquisition is an opportunity for us to upgrade our customer experience management," said Erik Larson, senior director of product management at Adobe, in an interview with eWEEK.

Larson said the acquisition represents an expansion of Adobe's strategy to deepen its enterprise and Web customer experience offerings, building on its $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture last summer. The Day Software acquisition strengthens Adobe's ability to help companies not only create, manage and distribute digital content, but also monetize it and optimize Web experiences, he said.

"As businesses move more customer experiences to the Web, and particularly are using more smartphones to access the Web, we see the Web moving from a marketing and informational tool to more of a transaction environment," Larson said.

Day's Web solutions combined with Adobe's existing enterprise portfolio will enable customers to better integrate their global Web presence and business applications, unlocking value across their marketing, sales and service processes. In addition, Day customers will be able to leverage more interactive application and document capabilities from Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Flex, Adobe LiveCycle and PDF. The combination of Day and Adobe will help customers realize the full potential of the Web in acquiring, servicing and retaining their customers, without disrupting their existing IT infrastructures, Larson said.

"Today with LiveCycle and Omniture, we can support the development of enterprise applications and integrate them into back-end systems," he said.

"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, senior vice president and general manager of Digital Enterprise Solutions at Adobe, in a statement. "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."

"Organizations around the globe have recognized the importance of the online and mobile channel and turned to Day as their enterprise standard for next-generation Web content management," said Erik Hansen, CEO of Day Software, in a statement. "We are excited to join Adobe and combine our expertise in WCM 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."

As part of the expected integration of the two companies, Day will operate as a product line within Adobe's Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit. Day CEO Erik Hansen will join Adobe reporting directly to Tarkoff.

"For us, this is a great validation and endorsement of what we've done on both the business side—with our rapid growth—as well as on the technology side," said David Neuscheler, CTO of Day Software, in an interview with eWEEK. "What we bring is a state-of-the-art Web 2.0 Web content management platform."

Following completion of the acquisition, the next step will involve integrating Adobe's technology with Day's.

Larson said Day Software's technology vision aligns closely with Adobe's. "Beyond that, their use of Java, their pioneering of OSGI and their use of Spring totally gel with our plans. So many things are going to be easier than they would have been back in the old J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] days."

Spring is a key connection. Adobe has some key relationships with SpringSource involving the Spring Framework. Indeed, Adobe has for some time been working with SpringSource to simplify the development and deployment of rich enterprise Java applications through a collaboration that provides integration between the Adobe Flash and SpringSource platforms. This collaboration makes it easy for Java developers to create enterprise-class rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe Flex software, a cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform, and Spring, which has become the de facto standard for enterprise Java.

"There are so many synergies," Neuscheler said of Adobe's and Day Software's technology visions. "I have hardly ever seen two product stacks that work so well together."