The market for mobile development frameworks will see dramatic changes
After acquiring Day Software and their Communique 5 product, Adobe expects to operate this product line within Adobe's Digital Enterprise Solutions business unit. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Adobe's 2010 fiscal year.
Web analytics is an important addition to WCM systems
To achieve a high conversion rate from visitor to customer, an organization must analyze every interaction with its website to understand visitors' behavior and preferences. By doing this, it can optimize its website to enhance the visitor experience, and can also target potential customers with goods and services likely to appeal to them. The web analytics solutions required for this are increasingly being combined with WCM systems to provide customer experience management solutions. These allow organizations to create and manage websites, which they can optimize by drilling down into each website session to gather detailed profiling data such as how visitors are navigating their way through the site and what the most popular content is. By analyzing this information, marketers can gain a better understanding of what visitors are really looking for and what their intentions are, and the organization can enhance the site to improve the user experience and speed up the time to conversion.
Realtime analytics provides information about each visitor's experience including the positive experiences. The identification of problems such as failed logins, failed searches, and dead links can enable an organization to react speedily to address any issue. It also enables marketers to identify the content that is successful, attract many customers and locate the content that is not so attractive. By gathering metrics on the number of new and returning visitors to different areas of the site, profiles of individual visitors and types of visitors can be built and used to segment customers.
Web analytics is often deployed as a stand-alone product supplied by niche vendors that provide integration with many of the leading WCM systems. There are obvious benefits to be gained from implementing a combined WCM and web analytics system. Those include cost savings from simpler licensing, support, maintenance and ease of implementation and use.
Adobe's acquisition of Day Software will benefit both sets of customers, and if the two products are fully integrated, it will also help Adobe to build its market share in the WCM and online marketing areas. However, it needs to move quickly to undertake any integration work because following an acquisition, unless they can see clear benefits, organizations can abandon a product in favor of competitors' solutions as a result of uncertainty about future development plans for the product.
Day Software customers can enhance their web presence with capabilities from Adobe's enterprise portfolio
The acquisition will greatly enhance Adobe's portfolio and plug a gap in its functionality, but it will also provide benefits for Day Software's customers. Adobe has a large portfolio of interactive application and document capabilities including Adobe Flash, Flex, Adobe LiveCycle, and PDF. These can enable organizations to create more innovative web content to help them acquire and retain customers, and users of Communique can also use these capabilities to enhance their customers' experiences.
In addition, the acquisition will allow Adobe to compete in a new market that will put it into direct competition with WCM vendors that have web analytics capabilities, such as FatWire, Alterian, and Autonomy. It should also raise Adobe's profile as an applications vendor.
