Alright, hands up who didn’t approach the Adobe acquisition of Omniture with some puzzlement and surprise? Well, now it’s making sense as these proud parents arrange the wedding of their blushing analytics bride to a handsome CMS beau that should deliver the web engagement off-spring that they crave.
I say web engagement; some say web experience, Forrester say persuasive content and these guys are saying:
a customer experience management platform – that engages, contextualizes, and optimizes user experience and interactions to build brand awareness, loyalty, and revenue.
The Day FAQ can be found here and the press release from Adobe here.
In either case the idea is the same, using web analytics data to provide insight into your visitors to deliver relevant content – and I’ve got to say if its web analytics you want and a great content engine you need – then on paper it’s difficult not to be excited by what the marriage of Omniture and Day can bring to this space.
I obviously caveat that with ‘on paper’ – my experience of getting insight out of Omniture to deliver dynamic content was not easy (although I understand that Genesis has really come on since then) and I’ve witnessed first-hand the challenges of maintaining the post honeymoon sparkle of an ‘on-paper’ marriage made in heaven.
I’ve painted the Adobe role in this as merely paying for the wedding, which might be unkind and reflective of my bias/experience in viewing this space – I get the Omniture/Day thing, the Adobe strategy there, but from an Adobe product perspective I don’t think we are seeing that yet.
As an aside, and to torturously extend this dating/marriage analogy – this is an interesting observation from Jeff Potts (an active Alfresco community member) as we all wonder what this means for Adobe/Alfresco relationship:
I can’t help but feel like the proud parent who’s daughter brought home a keeper, only to find out the guy’s been dating a hottie from Switzerland the whole time.
So, first impressions – this looks positive, it could mean an injection of resources into recent resurgence we’ve seen of Day (certainly in the UK) – but, as ever, the opinions and experiences of joint customers will be the ones to listen to.
…and yes, I’ve busted my ‘not mention vendors’ rule on this blog, but these opinions are mine, etc..
Image of wedding cake couple courtesy of randomwire edited and reproduced under creative commons license.
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I wonder how much Adobe’s intention in acquiring Day is really to “wed” it to Omniture, as I see more immediate relevance of Day’s technology to Adobe’s core products.
Integrating CQ, possibly the most WYSIWYG-oriented enterprise CMS I’ve seen, with visual tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build CQ templates wouldn’t be completely out of left field.
The persistence flexibility in CRX and DAM is well-suited to sparse and malleable data sets – exactly the kind of metadata we can expect to find on multimedia assets which haven’t historically been the domain of information workers and which might be organized in any number of ways by a creative agency. We might see an injection of Day’s infrastructure principles into Adobe’s LifeCycle or CS Live offerings.
Here’s hoping Adobe’s use of Day breathes some life into content management by getting past an antiquarian notion of “pages and documents” and acknowledging the diversity of content in all its forms.
I’m not sure that Adobe know how to do business in the Enteprise space.
They spent years trying to build their LiveCycle brand, but have achieved little traction. And their Cloud solutions are very unfocussed.
So far, the evidence is that they really only understand Desktop Apps – not the business of enterprise.
(this may be partly due to the loss of Bruce Chizen, who was a sales guy through and through. Shantanu Narayen is a great techie – but maybe not such a genius when it comes to sales.)