SDL Buys Xopus, Acquires Simple DITA Authoring Tool

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jul 1, 2010

In what SDL (news, site) is describing as a “significant” deal, the information management vendor has bought Dutch XML editor developer Xopus in a deal that will initially cost €1.6 million (US$ 1.97 million), but could cost in the region of € 2 million (US$ 2.46 million) when it is finally closed.

In a podcast about the deal, Kevin Duffy, CEO of SDL said that they had bought Xopus in order to provide easier authoring and review capabilities to its clients by integrating Xopus with its suite of structured content technologies as well as the wider SDL Global Information Management product management suite.

SDL also said that the deal would be financed from internal sources and said that the acquisition was unlikely to impact on its financial performance for the current financial year.

SDL, Xopus and DITA

While it has been clear for some time that DITA adoption is growing, Duffy says that the speed and scope of that adoption has seen structured authoring move beyond the realm of technical writers and into the broader enterprise.

As a result, he said, SDL went after Xopus for two specific reasons:

DITA Adoption

With the speed of DITA adoption across enterprises there has been for some time a growing need for employees other than technical writers to contribute and review content in XML.

One of the barriers to the adoption of DITA and XML across the organization, Duffy says, has been the complexity of the XML editing experience.

While the need for advanced XML editing tools required by technical writers has been addressed by JustSystems (news, site) or Adobe (news, site) FrameMaker tools, increasingly there will be a number of specialists contributing to content creation and review processes that might not have familiarity with those tools.

To bring those specialists into the authoring process a much simpler authoring tool is required. Xopus fits the bill perfectly in this respect, Duffy said.

DITA Collaboration

Companies that are adopting structured authoring processes are beginning to look for ways to deliver content more dynamically and engage their community of customers and partners outside the organization when developing that content.

Some have adopted wikis for this process and while there are some collaborative capabilities with some wikis, they don’t really provide the kind of collaboration needed to work collectively on structured content.

With Xopus SDL says it is now in a position to offer a review platform and review process that supports XML and supports wiki collaboration and can, as a result include the crowd in content collaboration and content creation process.

Xopus and DITA Authoring

We haven’t come across Xopus before, so let’s have a quick look. Established in the Netherlands in 2001, Xopus’ principal product is its easy-to-use XML editor.

Essentially a WYSIWYG editor, it extends the creation and review of structured content beyond the confines of technical writing organizations to users that do not have technical knowledge of more complex XML or DITA authoring tools through a user-friendly interface.