Adobe Systems has announced that they will be acquiring Day Software Holdings AG in a stock purchase deal valued at approximately $240M at current exchange rates. The deal will be executed as a public tender for outstanding shares of Day Software at CHF$139 per share. The latest financial results available from Day Software put revenue at CHF$36.3M (FY2009), placing the deal’s value at slightly over seven times revenue.
Day Software specializes in content and asset management software. Their flagship product is the CQ5 Web Experience Platform, intended to combine management of web content, digital assets, and social collaboration in an easy-to-use form for marketing. They primarily use the Content Repository API for Java (JCR), an open standard.
One of the interesting points here is that Adobe will gain Day Software’s Chief Scientist, Roy T. Fielding. If you’ve heard that name, it’s because Dr. Fielding is a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, author of the Apache license, and one of the creators of the Apache web server. He’s also one of the creators of HTTP, URI standards and the primary architect of REST and HTTP/1.1 standards.
Day Software is a driving power in Open Source standards for web management. They contribute to over 12 Apache projects and 25 independent open source projects on a regular basis according to ohloh.org tracking; even Day CTO David Nuescheler is a regular contributor to several projects. Neither company has said whether the acquisition will have any effect on these contributions, but it’s doubtful that it would.
Reality Check
Looking at the big picture, this acquisition fills a gap in Adobe’s software portfolio. Most of Adobe’s products revolve around two key areas; rapid content creation, and rapid application creation for marketing. But outside of Bridge, Adobe has no product to manage or deploy these assets. This acquisition will give them an end-to-end package for creating and deploying marketing campaigns in multiple places and multiple languages quickly on the web.
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