Adobe acquired Basel-based Day Software in 2010. The Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which emerged from its predecessor ECMS (Enterprise Content Management System) – Communiqué – has now become a core component of the US company’s global offering and a significant source of revenue. All staff remained with the company following the takeover, and AEM continues to be developed primarily in Basel to this day, meaning it is still a Swiss-made product – a product undergoing development against a backdrop of tensions between the simultaneous desires for new technologies and continuity.
The elements that will play a key part in Adobe’s future strategy will certainly include cloud services, its serverless platform, the React framework, microservices, Node.js, and JavaScript. These are state-of-the-art technologies and provide exciting work for the development team. However, these new components need to fit into the company’s overall plan. “As much as we love technology, we have to remind ourselves not to alienate less agile enterprise customers and need to be able to guarantee a certain degree of continuity,” says Raphael Wegmüller, Director of Engineering at Adobe. “This is also in our own interest, as our strategic technology decisions will have ramifications for the next ten to fifteen years.”