Today, Adobe announced its intention to acquire Swiss Day Software in a deal valued at approximately $240 million. The acquisition, which is expected to close in Q4 2010, is designed to help  flesh out Adobe’s enterprise software portfolio, plugging the gaps between the company’s document-centric solutions (Acrobat and Acrobat Reader), BPM platform (LiveCycle), web conferencing application (Connect Pro), and its online suite of collaborative services (Acrobat.com). Day’s CQ5 platform combines web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), and social collaboration capabilities which help marketing organisations to create and manage social websites, as well as monitoring and managing the organisation’s broader social media activities.

It’s an interesting and surprising acquisition from Day’s perspective—the company has been growing strongly with increasing revenues and cash, largely thanks to a complete rewrite of its platform about 18 months ago, which brought in the social tools and social media monitoring capabilities that have no doubt been a significant contributing factor to Adobe’s decision to acquire. However, the standalone web content management market has been consolidating and contracting steadily for several years, while the market for social media and collaboration tools becomes increasingly competitive. So perhaps it is not surprising that the company wants to join forces with Adobe—not only for the financial stability and global reach it can provide, but also for the opportunities it presents in terms of Adobe’s Flash and rich media-friendly customer base as well as being part of a broader suite of applications.

Adobe of course is no stranger to the acquisitions process, notably its acquisition of Macromedia back in 2005, and of Omniture last year. Nevertheless the company has some serious work ahead in terms of pulling its technology and messaging together into a coherent package, once the deal is closed. In order to sell enterprise software effectively, the vendor’s overall story is at least as important as the individual technology components, and it is this messaging and strategy that the company will have to nail if it is to take maximum advantage of this acquisition (and all its previous acquisitions). The Day acquisition will bring new skills and ideas into Adobe—the question is whether this will be the catalyst it needs to finally get a handle on how to successfully sell enterprise solutions.

You can read our Vendor Capability Assessment of Adobe’s collaboration software offering here.

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