We suspect Business Catalyst, the company behind e-commerce software suite GoodBarry, went a little early with the news on its own website, but that’s a boon for tech business reporters awake at this time of day. Turns out Adobe Systems has agreed to acquire the part American, part Australian company for an undisclosed amount.
Details are scarce since there’s no press release or official word from Adobe yet, but Business Catalyst has published a couple of Q&A on its website that shed a minimal amount of light on the agreement. From what we can gather at this point despite the vague wording used for the announcement, there won’t be too many changes at Business Catalyst as the products, partner agreements, team, pricing, etc. should remain largely unchanged. GoodBarry, on the other hand, being merely a Business Catalyst brand set up for their retail operations, will be gradually phased out and morphed into the Business Catalyst offering:
Most importantly, we’ll be refocusing our marketing and sales efforts on the web professional market (via businesscatalyst.com), as opposed to web-savvy DIYers such as you. In other words, this means that eventually we will cease “retail” operations and focus on our wholesale operations, and we will only be selling subscriptions to our software via our partner and reseller network.
As a result, the GoodBarry brand as such will cease to exist as of the 1st of October 2009, although the company says changes for customer will be mostly cosmetical (the billing and branding will be all Business Catalyst as of the aforementioned date).
The most important question however is why Adobe bought Business Catalyst in the first place and what its intentions are with the company in the near future. We’ve contacted the company for more clarity on that but in the meantime here’s what we know.
Business Catalyst / GoodBarry provides tools that help web designers set up online businesses for their clients with minimal cost and effort and no programming skills required, combining website content management, e-commerce features, e-mail marketing, business analytics and basic CRM tools into one system.
Adobe evidently offers a wide range of tools for web professionals, but in the near future does not plan to integrate Business Catalyst’s products into its own offering, although they are clearly looking to hosted services to deliver websites and online businesses more and more. There will be an initial transit period, but with regards to what will happen after that both companies remain mum and mention only that they are currently in ‘planning stages’ and will provide more information in the following weeks.
We’ll update if and when we hear more.
On a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Business Catalyst CEO and Founder Bardia Housman sold a company. In 1997, he co-founded Start (start.com.au), Australia’s first free e-mail service provider, which in two years became the largest trafficked website in Australia as measured by Hitwise. In December 1999, Looksmart was acquired Start.
I’ve always found BC’s offerings interesting, but their servers are snail slow.
the only problem with them ..very true …
Best,
Daina
“went a little early with the news on its own website” – it was a fine time to announce if you live in Australia (where this company is [mainly] based).
@anon when was the last time you tried the servers? In the last half-year they have opened in data centre’s in the US and UK which has sped things up (but they could always be faster)
I realize that, but you usually coordinate with the acquiring party about the time of release :)
In that case, they’re a perfect match for Adobe – has anybody ever tried downloading the CS4 demo from them? That crawled along at about 3 hours per GB.
I agree that BC’s sites were slow this week, I have a hunch that doe to the announcement that adobe took over BC that their servers have have gotten flooded.
is it just a name coincidence with the new Adobe Flash Catalyst?
for sure they will rebrand it, but that won’t be the only reason for acquiring it… I hope :-s
As long as the focus remains on ecommerce, i’ll be happy.
Fraser
eCommerce was never their focus – it was only one of many features like: CRM, Blog, Web CMS, eCommerce and a lot of other stuff.
Hopefully they can get the the Adobe team to fix up the “Triangle” Dreamweaver Plugin to work little better (like remembering logins). I just hope they don’t start forcing things like Flash or Spry on to the output sites.
Yikes! We were looking at using them or other alternative … Any suggestions on an alternative? (Need: Auth Membership + Recurring payments + Hosted)
Bob,
SubHub offers a fully hosted and managed membership website solution. I’m the CEO. Please check us out at http://www.subhub.com.
Kind regards,
Evan
tried BC, found servers to be “snail slow” too. responsive tech support, but the server speed killed any projects with them. alas, that should be easy for Adobe to fix
Congratulations Bardia and Beatriz!
We deployed a couple of projects on Business Catalyst. Had high hopes. Mostly dashed now. Performance is poor, email is woefully inadequate, blog tools very subpar, and my customers are unhappy with the service so we’re moving them off by year end. The claim “no programming required” is quite a misnomer. I have to wonder how Adobe will handle the partner white labeling of BC.
Many of their partners are “re-branding” partners who have spent time and money building their own brands around BC – they’ve gotta be furious right now (and calling their lawyers).
Wow, well Adobe really missed the boat here, they could have picked up a startup like Lemonstand for pennies on the dollar in comparison.
I understand purchasing a user base, however GB will need a substantial makeover to remain competitive in an ever changing market.
Would it not have made more sense to purchase a smaller innovative startup and streamline a migration route for other users to come to your new app?
Maybe I’m missing the point here, but it seems foolish to spend massive amounts of money to acquire an already transient user base.
-Lee
I’m nervous about the whole thing. I just hope that they get better at their support, because the Business Catalyst System has a LOT of limitations and can be a very frustrating and painful framework to do the simplest things.
We have been BC partners for close to a year and have deployed some sites, including a large ecommerce site. However, the ecommerce portion of their offering is woefully inadequate. Very important things like shipping and sales tax are just not able to do what they need to do and BCs response to this is non existent. I will never develop another ecomm site using BC.
For anyone interested in discussing BC / GB more, there is a great linkedin group called BC Cafe: http://www.link...=anet_ug_grppro
I agree with BC partner, i am using GB with a company who already had it.
they have been getting bombed buy fraud transactions and GB has sercurity built in. we connected using a the eWay gateway which has multiple gateways and one for high fraud protection. but GB can not send the gateway the info it needs to work.
im over it looking for a new solution now. any recommendations?
I use BC all the time at work as a partner and surprised a little by some of the comments.
I see a number of comments on the forums often about people moaning about lack of features or abilities like here when actually the exist. People often treat the CRM/CMS from face value and do not dive into the full controls, output, wiki, api as they should.
Most of the comments about lack of ability on here actually do exist.
Not have the gateway support? BC has very tight certification, A number of gateway options, secure offline (just getting credit card details) etc.
Multi currency is there through sub domain pricing pages.
BC gateway offerings are listed because they do have the full support. They communicate with the gateways to get them set up and interact.
When a client correctly signs up to a gateway, bank, merchant account, as long as you build the site properly it works properly.
it is not perfect, I hound them every week about bugs and features, but they listen and actually quite quick on a number of things I ask them to change or add.
I am just saying that often people thinking that this offering cant do something when actually it can. Just lack of knowledge I find. See it often on the forums some ranting when actually if they looked or read the wiki it is there.
People adding modules to a page through the admin get the basics to insert it into the page and think that is all you get. Read the wiki on a module and you can do a lot more manually updating the module tags.
I have been planning on partnering with BC for over a year now for a small start-up web shop. This news is a big surprise and does cement the future of BC.
I am worried though now, with the acquisition that Adobe will change the one-off $2000 white-label partner fee and introduce some more flexible pricing.
Only time will tell.
i saw this site also — whose service is about business catalyst http://www.busi...ystsupport.net/ — i think they are good in their craft.
Anybody know of a Business Catalyst partner located in Silicon Valley?
anyone have any sense of the compensation on this deal?
Anybody know of a Business Catalyst partner located in Silicon Valley