SaaS and DITA as Market Drivers
SDL’s acquisition of Idiom confirms and accelerates some core, strategic shifts within the content management ecosystem. More than anything, it appears to be another in a series of market validations that Component Content Management (CCM), driven by the widespread adoption of DITA/XML is becoming an increasingly viable strategy for both the SMB and Fortune 1000 markets. This is an area where Astoria Software has not only been a long-time advocate of both DITA and SaaS, but has been steadily pushing the market towards the concept of Component Content Management. SDL’s most recent acquisition is a welcome endorsement of these core content management concepts; not only is SDL’s focus on this area becoming much sharper, as evidenced by its recent string of acquisitions, the Idiom acquisition is another step towards SDL’s longer-term goal of being at the top of the food chain when it comes to CCM.
There is some thought among analysts who track this space that the next step for SDL would be the acquisition of an XML editor as part of a fully integrated solution. This seems like a low-probability event; part of SDL’s success comes from its agnostic approach to vendor authoring tools (similar to Astoria’s). Once you commit to one vendor, you’ve pretty much shut out the rest of them, and with XML capabilities becoming an integral part of most authoring offerings, there’s no reason to do this.
The other technology implication in this acquisition is SDL’s move toward SaaS as a delivery method; Idiom has a strong SaaS offering (better than SDL’s), so if their intention was to accelerate the ramp for a SaaS product, snapping up Idiom just saved SDL 18 to 24 months of development effort for a very reasonable price. As mentioned earlier, this is another in a series of acquisitions for SDL as they try to 1) reposition to become a serious contender in the global delivery of on-demand component content management and 2) position defensively against LionBridge, the only player in their immediate ecosystem that is bigger and potentially a threat. Tactically, Idiom will be a jagged little pill for SDL to swallow, but strategically they’re definitely well positioned for the future.
Most importantly, this is another in a long series of validations of the increasing acceptance of both DITA as an authoring standard, and on-demand as a delivery mechanism, both areas where Astoria has long been a driving force in the market. From our point of view we’ve had very good working relations with both SDL and Idiom, having the two entities combined into a global, SaaS-enabled partner who has deep DITA knowledge is not only a boon to Astoria’s SaaS offering, but to the entire documentation function across multiple, global industries as well.