Any acquisition (and there have been quite a few of them lately) in the content management industry usually makes a splash. Today, it was Day's day to stir up the media, analysts, bloggers, twitterati and industry watchers; provoking pontifications around the announced acquisition by Adobe.

Here’s the first look at what the industry was buzzing about and what are some of the possible implications of the deal: for Day, for Adobe, for the market.

Good Day, Good Half (Or the History Repeats Itself)

Ever since Day started going through major upper echelon organizational changes about two years ago, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the company is getting groomed up for something. Something bigger, something like an acquisition.

On the product management side, we saw births of new products like Social Collaboration and rebirths of the existing CQ DAM, CQ5 Web CMS after fairly significant periods of silence from Basel.

On a financial side of things, Day also started cleaning up the house and producing stronger results quarter after quarter, half a year after another half a year.

Today, yet again, Day reported revenues of 25.1 million Swiss francs (US$ 23.7 million) for H1 2010 — an increase of a whopping 47%. Net income for the period was 3.7 million Swiss francs (US$ 3.5 million).

Day’s CTO David Nüscheler told us the acquisition is seen as validation to Day’s innovation, growth rates and financial performance. Plus, the two are a great technical fit, with a shared belief in the same guiding principles, Nüscheler added.

Erik Larson, senior director of product management for Adobe, echoed the statement with “It doesn’t get much better than [Day’s] H1 numbers.”

Open Source and Standards

There are some iconic figures on Day’s team in regards to the world of open source and standards. HTTP, CMIS, REST and Apache Sling, Apache Jackrabbit and JSR-170, Apache Felix and OSGi, JCR 2.0 and JSR-283, The Apache Software Foundation, The Java Community Process – just a fraction of work, a few notions to throw on the table.

Day’s Chief Scientist Roy Fielding, CTO David Nüscheler and many others on the team (the majority of R&D, in fact) are long-standing and frequent contributors. Some initial reactions to the acquisition were positive, hoping for a boost of activity around Apache Jackrabbit, which is the foundation of Day’s Java Content Repository.

Understandably, others were concerned with the emphasis on Adobe’s proprietary technologies and whether Adobe will support Day’s commitment to open source. The spark was caused by Adobe’s press release that didn’t specifically point out this very important side of Day’s culture, causing concern in the open source and standards army of devotees.

Industry insider Seth Gottlieb expressed his initial disappointment about the acquisition:

While Adobe has contributed several technologies that lowered barriers to entry, I think the overall net impact has been negative. Yes we have more content on the web thanks to Adobe, but much of that content is locked in Adobe’s PDF and Flash formats where it is less accessible…

Day’s Jukka Zitting reacted to the acquisition and its impact on Day’s involvement in open source as a direct correlation to the ability to innovate (something that has attracted Adobe to Day in the first place) in his blog post, saying:

First and foremost I’m looking forward to continuing the open and standards-based development of our key technologies like Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling. There’s no way we’d be able to maintain the current level of innovation and productivity in these key parts of our product infrastructure without our symbiotic relationship with the open source community.

There’s also hope of working together with Adobe on standards like XMP coming from them.

Adobe was quick to clarify and re-iterate their intent to continue supporting Day in its open source and standards endeavors. When we spoke earlier today to Erik Larson, senior director of product management for Adobe, he said Adobe plans to continue investing in platforms to support any open source/standards principles that Day has pioneered.

The DAM Side of Things

The timing actually couldn’t be better, as I was very recently discussing some of the issues around DAM and WEM, putting a stake in the ground and saying that most organizations and DAM vendors are missing out on the potential DAM+WEM love.

And here we have heavy digital asset management needs coming from llustrator, Photoshop, Flash, PDF on Adobe’s side, and DAM on Day’s side. Day likes Adobe’s AIR, Flash, Flex and has been promoting not just mere storage of static Flash files in a CMS, but full direct access to a Content Repository.

DAM is critical to Web Engagement Management, and Day is fully aware of that. And is pro-active about it.

Omniture Web Analytics, CQ5 Web CMS and Web Engagement

Day is coming right after Omniture to join the big Adobe family.

While there’re no details being disclosed at this time in regards to integration plans, it’s quite obvious there will be one. And that’s not an entirely new ground for Day, given that several of their customers have been already using CQ5 in combination with Omniture as the web analytics engine. We’d imagine that this is a low-hanging fruit for the two to churn out.

What we know from Adobe is that strategically they’re looking at Day as a new software category for web experience management as a single platform to manage all interactions, across a variety of apps and business systems like CRM, ERP, etc. Day’s Web CMS CQ5 and their content repository CRX will be instrumental here.

Adobe’s business vision, said Erik Larson, is to utilize the benefits of Day being a leader in the WEM market and a pioneer in developing the concept of next generation content management with focus on web experience.

Day’s Social Collaboration and CQ 5.3 Personalization, Segmentation and Targeting capabilities is a perfect bridge into the bright world of web engagement and customer engagement management.

That certain excitement in the CMS industry ever since Day’s CQ5 came out has paid off. Adobe’s Larson validated that, saying if Adobe was to build something [in the same software segment of WCM+WEM+DAM], it would look like Day’s product.

Gilbane analyst and web engagement expert Ian Truscott likens this deal to a wedding of Day and Omniture, where Adobe picks up the tab for the cake and fancy flower arrangements:

…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.

And then JCR Vendors and Competition Chimes In

Magnolia’s CTO Boris Kraft, as we gather, is ready to hire Nüscheler should the Adobe thing or the thoughts of a private island not work out. But hey, who wouldn’t want to have Nüscheler on the team?

Kraft’s reaction was mainly around how the acquisition affects his own company Magnolia whose Web CMS is also JCR-based:

Adobe buying Day further validates the JSR-170 standard, makes Magnolia's technology stack better known and more attractive for potential buyers. Interest in Magnolia will rise along.

Meanwhile, not failing to point out that should JCR go down in Adobe ashes, Magnolia customers won’t suffer much:

Good thing Magnolia is independent of the underlying repository implementation.

This approach we have seen before in some of the “rescue” missions initiated by WCM vendors. So, let’s move along.

Tristan Renaud, Vice President at Jahia, posted a reserved reaction to the acquisition:

… I am not the kind to say “congrats” during an acquisition but to the team in charge of the acquisition, of course. They have “accomplished the mission”… So yes, congrats to the management team of Day software, they have sold the company very much successfully.

One of the “challenges” Renaud sees is cultural differences and how a very much Swiss company can fit well into a rather different, U.S. culture.

Bad day for Alfresco? Alfresco at the moment seems to be in a position of a rejected lover, given the OEMed deal between them and Adobe’s LiveCycle and Content Services. Adobe hasn’t provide any useful commentary on Alfresco's fate at this point.

Alfresco's CEO John Powell reached out to us saying:

Day's focus on marketing applications/solutions and high-end enterprise sales complements Adobe's approach. This is probably the end of the road for JCR/JSR-170 with CMIS ascendant. Alfresco's strategy of CMIS, content services platform and ecosystem of content-rich applications is complementary to the consolidation of standalone WCM to marketing and customer engagement applications.

On his blog, Powell also added:

Adobe has used this platform as an important part of LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services and we are committed to providing Adobe with the best possible support and content services. This use case of Alfresco is very different from the use cases for marketing solutions in which Day is engaged and we rarely see each other in competitive sales engagements.

Jeff Potts, a member of the Alfresco community, seems to be rather disappointed that it’s not Alfresco who gets to fry the big fish with Adobe, but “a hottie from Switzerland.”

Any Cold (ColdFusion) Casualties?

Best tweet of the day? This one:

ColdFusion and CRX, together at last

Every joke, they say, has some truth to it. Some in the industry would like to see Adobe ColdFusion go away. A politically correct move for Day would be to at least try and implement something with ColdFusion and Sling as the delivery layer on top of CRX. We've already seen other languages like PHP implemented on top of CRX.

When I asked Nüscheler about this, he did mention (Ok, Ok, after a quick giggle) that, to his knowledge, nobody has tried ColdFusion on top of CRX yet and that it wouldn’t be excluded from the tech point.