Adobe announced it was buying Day Software today, filling in a portfolio hole with Day’s web-driven content management technology and looking towards web-driven business.
Summary
For $240 Adobe is fulling a long-standing hole in their portfolio, primarily in LiveCycle, the enterprise-centric part of Adobe. The content management in the LiveCycle and other brands has always been very document centric, as you’d expect the PDF-people to be. The longer-term vision is to build out the emerging category of web-based selling and “engagement” to use an old term of Adobes: allowing companies to use the web (mobile or desktop) as a primary channel for sales and customer engagement.
Much of that kind of strategy hinges on managing the data and analytics associated with tracking customer’s every move (file under “privacy is dead” and “better junk mail”) and integrating that into your sales and account management practices.
Others have hit up the content management angle (there important here-and-now) and the open source angle (which is definitely interesting given Day’s involvement with Apache). I’ll go over one longer term idea of of how the commendation of existing Adobe assets (including, most importantly Omniture) and Day gets close to a new category of IT use.
The Big Vision – eCommerce Redux
Back in the 1990′s, “e-commerce” put companies on the web and allowed them do business in the web. Retail, mostly. That was pretty huge, if you remember. Can you imagine a time before buying an airline ticket before the web? A book? Exactly. It’s almost unthinkable.
After the dot.bomb, e-commerce withered up as a buzz-tastic category – it was mostly done and there was all that Web 2.0 consumer stuff to get excited about. Google was much more interesting than selling PVC pipes over the web.
Recently, the idea of being able to track consumer’s every move on the web (thanks to Google, Facebook, and most of the Web 2.0 world) has introduced the need to return to e-commerce with that huge set of data. It’s like if everyone had a loyalty card whether they wanted to or not. While I cynically criticize this as just “better junk mail,” the point is using that pile of user data to better separate customers from their cash…
