IBM nabs PureEdge to weaken Adobe and Microsoft
IBM today announced its intention to acquire 70-person PureEdge, a 12 year old privately-held company based in Canada. This is yet another small technology-focussed acquisition, along the lines of
AlphaBlox, SRD and Venetica. PureEdge’s eponymous
8X solution supports the development, delivery and utilisation of electronic forms, based on the W3C’s
XForms standard developed by the likes of Adobe, IBM, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sun as well as both IBM and PureEdge. IBM has already been working with PureEdge in 10 of its 37 target industry solutions segments, with a particular emphasis on public sector, financial services and insurance, and believes that electronic forms are relevant to at least a further 19. As well as these go-to-market synergies, PureEdge has already been integrated with IBM’s WebSphere Portal and some work has been done around Workplace, based on the Eclipse Rich Client platform. It is no surprise that the initial focus of the integration with the IBM software group portfolio will be around Workplace.
This is a smart move by IBM. There can be little doubt that electronic forms play an important role at the front-end of many vertical industry-specific and horizontal business processes, in areas such as claims processing and human resources. Although IBM has tapped into these opportunities with Notes/Domino in the past, there is the obvious downside that this requires that the customer has bought into Notes/Domino in the first place which is clearly not always the case. IBM is focussing significant R&D and marketing dollars on Workplace and electronic forms processing is an important capability if IBM is to realise its Workplace vision. IBM plans to have an integrated solution available in the first half of 2006 and plans to extend the integration to Content Manager and the WebSphere Portal after that. During the conference call announcing the acquisition, Dr. Ambuj Goyal, General Manager of Workplace, Portal & Collaboration Software was keen to point out that the PureEdge technology has broad applicability to other IBM software assets. He’s not wrong. The WebSphere portfolio, and more specifically, WebSphere Business Integration, provides business process management capabilities and electronic forms as a front-end are equally applicable there. The challenge of course – not uncommon across the IBM software portfolio – will be to deliver those capabilities equally across the different brands. Whilst Dr. Goyal was very clear in emphasising synergies across the software group, he was less clear when it came to the timescales, particularly for WebSphere.
The electronic forms opportunity is one which has not been lost on other significant players. Adobe, with its
Intelligent Document Platform and Microsoft with the Office System,
InfoPath and
Information Bridge, are attempting to exploit the ubiquity of their document-centric platforms to deliver similar capabilities. During the conference call, Dr. Goyal mentioned “forms as the currency of exchange” on numerous occasions and the role of XForms as a means of breaking the control delivered through proprietary formats. IBM’s vision is to “drive ubiquity in (the) market place around IBM’s XForms industry direction and integrated products” by the end of 2006. Whilst this serves to promote IBM’s open standards message, this is as much about driving the rest of industry in a direction designed to weaken the position of Adobe and, particularly, Microsoft (the most noticeable absentee in the list of XForms supporters)
