Financials News & Articles

Asian tech companies are announcing their latest figures in force this week with Samsung bagging record sales for smartphones. Meanwhile, CES will see a raft of new innovations for mobile gadgets as Apple plans to bring Thunderbolt to future iOS devices.

Apple (news, site) blew investors away with higher-than-anyone-expected iPhone and iPad sales but gave only a few vague hints about future plans.

In Q1 2011 financial results for Open Text (news, site), we see license revenue hurting. Yet again, there’s an acquisition in place to offset organic declines and, perhaps, propel OTEX into the universe of Customer Experience Management (CEM).

Open Text's (news, site) Q3 2010 showed some turbulence. Their Q4 and fiscal year 2010 results are not much different.

The big Initial Public Offering (IPO) party we anticipated is not going to happen. EPiServer's (news, site) plans for going public fell through.

Ektron (news, site) closed 2009 with sales growth of over 38%. Q1 2009 showed 26% growth in year-over-year revenues. It doesn't come as a surprise this Web CMS vendor is reporting about the same financials for 1H 2010.

If you have ever done a content migration, or dabbled into a web data extraction project, Kapow Technologies (news, site) might be a familiar name.

If you're a Kapow customer, you probably have contributed a penny or two to their FY2010 results. If you're thinking of becoming a customer, read on to see how the company is doing financially.

In its audited preliminary results for the year ended 31 March 2010, Alterian (news, site) reports revenue increase, new licensees and partner network growth. And we look at what's coming in 2011.

Open Text (news, site) recently released its unaudited fiscal third quarter 2010 results that show negative effects of "greater seasonality" compared to previous years, resulting in a 5% drop in license revenue.

Even though OTEX says fiscal 2010 is "tracking to plan," several financial analysts are downgrading their recommendations from “neutral” to “sell” in regards to Open Text shares.

Building on the 65% license revenue growth in 2H 2009, Day Software (news, site) announced interim financial results for Q1 2010.

Day Sotware (news, site) released their 2H 2009 and end of year financial results. Major brags from the Basel-land include 27 new customers, increase in licensing revenue (yet again), regional markets expansion -- and most of that thanks to CQ5.

Open Text (news, site) released Q2/F10 (December 2009 quarter) unaudited financial results. Turns out, they are better than expected. Year-over-year (YoY) licensing revenue, for example, is up, in part, thanks to Vignette and the recently released VCM 8.

Crisis, what crisis? Almost every Web CMS vendor who has to or chooses to publicize their 2009 financials is reporting growth and bright future. Some are even going public. OmniUpdate (news, site) joins this joyous bunch and says 2009 was a success in its higher education focused web content management segment.

Last year was marked for OU as a year of record sales revenues. Other 2009 highlights include:

• 28 new clients
• Existing customers increasing/renewing their service levels/terms
• 12 product releases with 16 additional capabilities and feature enhancements (e.g. multi-language preview, global find and replace, garbage can, Serena Collage conversion tool, Live Delivery Platform and others)
• Onboarding of integration partners
• Ability to deploy OmniUpdate's CMS -- OU Campus -- either traditionally or as SaaS

As with all privately-held companies, the amount of financial information being released is limited. For buyers looking to evaluate Web CMS products for higher ed verticals, record sales is probably a little too ambiguous to indicate the overall viability and stability of the company.

While growing revenue is good news, we’ll continue to watch OmniUpdate and update you on where these folks are headed.

EPiServer (news, site) is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Being one of the few in its Web CMS market segment to be public, this move gives the company a certain advantage.

For buyers, it is going to be easier to evaluate a public company, since all the financials will be out in the open. One might say that no one cares about that, but the reality shows a different picture. No one wants to indulge in guesswork when investing in a Web CMS product and vendor. As we know, this deal is just like marriage.

And these are some of the numbers EPiServer is sharing today:

• Average growth 35% per year over the past 5 years
• License revenue growth for 2009 at 46%
• Revenues for 2009 were US$ 29.9M
• EPiServer has been profitable since its inception in 1994

And here are some of the contributing factors to the state of current affairs at EPiServer:

• Customer and partner growth with fastest growing markets being the U.S., U.K. and Scandinavia
• Market expansion with new offices in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the U.S., Australia and South Africa in addition to the existing ones in Sweden and Norway
• Open-source-like community -- EPiServer World -- with more than 8500 active members and marketplace called EPiMore
• Expansion of the product portfolio that includes web content management, social media, eCommerce, marketing and sales, event and meeting management and hosting capabilities
• 50% of the recent growth is attributed to the new products that have been released over the past two years (see our coverage here)

There’s not much more to say really, except to congratulate EPiServer. The numbers are fairly impressive; especially, given the recent economic slump -- and the competition in the likes of Ektron (news, site) and Sitecore (news, site) is most likely aware of that. We’ll just have to wait and see how EPiServer builds on this momentum and, most importantly, manages the growing pains.

Gotta admit, we are about to run out of the (semi-) witty headlines for Day Software (news, site) that continues to build on the momentum and report bright financial results quarter after quarter. That is, let's not forget, following the not-so-bright period a bit of time ago.

After reviewing and changing their accounting policies, doing a bit of a re-org in the upper echelons and shedding some extra weight, Day continues to deliver positive numbers in Q3 2009. The highlight of Q3 (interim results) is a considerable increase in license revenue -- a 37% growth over the same period in 2008 and a 26% increase over 1H 2009.

Day attributes these revenue numbers to “global demand for CQ5” and “major new customer wins.” We have reviewed different re-incarnations of CQ5 WCM (including CQ5.1 and CQ5.2) as they came out, and do tend to agree that the product is starting to look more and more compelling.

The shareholders might also be (cautiously) pleased with Day's aggressive product release schedule. As we mentioned before, CQ 5.3 -- the newest version of their Web CMS -- is scheduled to come to the masses some time in Q4 2009.

At the same time, while there aren't many details yet on the interim Q3 results out there, we suspect that R&D (and associated sales and marketing, etc.) spendings are sky-rocketing to get CQ 5.3 to the market. That's just something the shareholders may have to live with.

At this time, we don't know much about how the license revenue increase correlates to, for example, consulting, training and overall Professional Services (Does Day even have PS?) revenues. Someone's got to implement all those sales deals... 

Globally, Day says it saw a revenue surge in the U.K. operations, led by Trevor Salmon (part of the recent re-org, see above), VP of UK and Northern Europe. However, the U.S. market still remains the number one cash cow for the Q3 2009 balance sheet.