Tag: Acquisition

Hyland is acquiring Alfresco

I saw the news this morning that Hyland is acquiring Alfresco in a deal to be finalized in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Hyland cites Alfresco’s global reach and their open source core as the primary drivers behind the move.

An acquisition of this sort is not unexpected–back in February of 2018 Alfresco announced they were being acquired by a private equity firm (blog post). Subsequent management changes and layoffs were likely aimed, at least in part, at making Alfresco a more attractive acquisition target. In hindsight, perhaps the acquisition earlier this year of one of Alfresco’s key professional services partners, TSG, was also part of that strategy (blog post).

I don’t know much about Hyland so I don’t have much to say about the strategic, technical, or cultural fit of the two companies. I have had recent inquiries from prospects looking to move off of Hyland OnBase and onto other technologies primarily to reduce software license and maintenance costs, but that is completely anecdotal.

My advice to my customers is the same I would give in any acquisition scenario: Don’t panic. It can take a significant amount of time for acquisitions to impact customers in any real way.

Should you re-evaluate your investment in Alfresco? I think you should do that every year or three with all of your vendors. Make them continue to earn your business with a great product that fits the way you want to do business. Don’t let them take that license and/or maintenance revenue for granted.

We’ll have a better idea for how this is going to playout next year.

Alfresco acquires Technology Services Group

Interesting news today in the Alfresco world. The software vendor has acquired Technology Services Group, a Chicago-based Alfresco partner that delivers both professional services and software solutions to the document management and case management market (press release).

TSG has been in the ECM market for a long time. I remember when Documentum was their bread-and-butter. But they’ve definitely widened their aperture over the years and have expanded beyond traditional consulting and into product development, which is typically hard for a professional services firm to get right. It will be interesting to see how TSG’s team, which includes people who are often simultaneously client-facing consultants and product-focused engineers will be integrated into Alfresco, where professional services and product development are much more segregated.

TSG has a deep bench of talented developers, but beyond the talent acquisition, Alfresco can now add some additional products to the price sheet. OpenContent and OpenAnnotate products will likely be the first that Alfresco will push.

OpenContent provides a user interface on top of content repositories such as Alfresco and others. The demos I have seen were very focused on Case Management, but other use cases can be satisfied.

OpenAnnotate, as the name suggests, allows users to markup documents and videos without leaving their web browser. Alfresco has other partners that provide annotation add-ons, but I’ve never really dug into any of them, including OpenAnnotate.

It wasn’t mentioned in the press release, but OpenMigrate is another offering from TSG where I see interest from clients. It can help with complex migrations from one ECM platform to another. Making it easier for clients to move off of FileNet or Sharepoint to Alfresco is a no-brainer. It might be a bit frustrating when customers use the tool to go the other way, but Alfresco can use that as a selling point: If you don’t like us, here’s a tool to help you leave.

TSG has been doing a lot of promotion lately around its own NoSQL-based and cloud-native document management solution, which can definitely be seen as an alternative to Alfresco’s more traditional repository built on a relational back-end. Alfresco has been busy working to decompose its monolithic stack into a set of more focused, containerized services, but it is still fundamentally the same architecture that has been in place since 2005. Dave Giordano, TSG’s owner and founder, will be taking on the role of Chief Strategy Officer for Alfresco. Might he be able to convince the rest of Alfresco that such a fundamental architectural shift is necessary for Alfresco? We shall see.

I’ll also be curious to see if any of the TSG offerings become freely-available as open source. TSG has always used the “Open” moniker on their product names, and briefly dabbled in making their code available as open source, but sources say they saw only downside, so they made their source code available only to their customers. Maybe the acquisition will mean that TSG’s products will shift to open core. That would certainly open up the TSG product catalog for implementation by other partners and potentially the community beyond that.

Every acquisition will face integration challenges. I hope those are met and overcome quickly and that this is more than a superficial product grab because this could be a chance for a much-needed injection of vision and innovation into Alfresco.

Adobe acquires Day Software for $240 million

I’ll admit it. I did not see this one coming: Adobe announced today that it will acquire Day Software for $240 million USD. (Thanks, @pmonks, for the heads-up tweet).

Honestly, I thought Adobe would acquire Alfresco by the end of last year and I was surprised when it didn’t happen. They had done a big OEM deal making Alfresco part of LiveCycle and they did a gigantic Alfresco implementation as part of standing up Adobe’s acrobat.com site. Heck, Adobe even hosted Alfresco’s community event back in 2008. All small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, I know, but 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.

Day has a FAQ up on their site. As you would expect, Day promises that current customers have nothing to fear and that the products will continue to live on.

Day has some really cool stuff in both their commercial products and their open source projects (Sling, Jackrabbit). I hope the acquisition gives Day a huge injection of resources they are able to invest in the open source side of things.

Congrats to Erik Hansen, David Nuescheler, Kevin Cochrane, and the rest of the Day team!

OpenText administers Vignette mercy killing

OpenText issued a press release today saying it would buy Vignette for $12.70/share. Vignette has been struggling lately losing customers to complex and costly upgrades and laying off employees (CMSWire post) so I see this as a mercy killing of sorts. Naturally, OpenText views the acquisition more optimistically, saying it will “extend the breadth of our offerings and further Open Text’s positioning as the leading independent ECM vendor in the marketplace”.

I’ll be curious to see exactly what OpenText plans to do with the technology. I don’t follow them closely, so I’m not sure what they were after. Vignette’s Portal? Their collaboration stuff? I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll see some analysis today in the blogosphere.

I’ll bet we’ll see an increase in Vignette customer churn as is often the case in these acquisitions so this should be a good thing in Open Source ECM Land.