Two Goliaths in the software-as-a-service industry have announced they'll become one Goliath: Convio is buying GetActive.

Convio, which is more focused on fundraising, has acquired GetActive, which is more geared toward online advocacy. While this obviously means they'll be able to combine strengths and should be able to reach out to even more clients, we'll have to wait until the dust settles to see what this means for the industry at large. So far, a few players have weighed in with their comments.

Over at EchoDitto, Michael Silberman noted two outcomes of the deal:

1. Twenty-five percent of the fully integrated eCRM/CMS market just disappeared, reducing options to three very different providers: Convio, Blue State Digital, and Kintera (not counting open-source solutions and a myriad of other tools of course)

2. This is likely to have a pretty dramatic impact on the nonprofit and social change technology space. Will this encourage more healthy competition from the other vendors and providers? (I hope so.) Or will Convio innovate less due to their massive new market share and potential perceived lack of competition? (I hope not.)

If what Silberman says is true, the political technology industry is looking a lot like other industries; it's consolidated into only three or four large companies and a smattering of smaller companies. That's usually not good for choice, and it may not bode well for data integration either.

Jason Zanon of Democracy in Action told me that, while it might not be good for integration from the vendors' standpoint, the deal might "enhance nonprofits' interest in things like open APIs and data standards (that is, to be readily portable if your vendor tells you they're migrating to a system you didn't buy)." Those clients might be ideal signees of the Integration Proclamation.

Silberman also posts a press release of sorts from Sheeraz Haji, CEO of GetActive.

The comment thread in Silberman's post is worth checking out; folks from Blue State Digital and Democracy in Action have piped in, as well as Harish Rao from EchoDitto, who has interesting things to say about what this means for data integration:

In my experience, I've found that the GetActive folks are usually more open to integration matters, even if they do not have an explicit module or programmatic "hook" to interface with other web-enabled apps. Convio, at last count, has some APIs, but I find them to be not nearly as open a platform as GetActive.

Quite frankly, neither product is really an “open” platform, and I can understand why they might not want to open things up--it certainly makes more difficult to administer, for one. But the world does seem to be headed in the direction of inter-operability. A Convio acquisition of GetActive seems, at first blush, to undo that.

Meanwhile, hot to catch any client fallout, Kintera has sent an email to clients offering a "Comprehensive Replacement Program for Convio and GetActive Clients."

[Update]

Beth Kanter also asks what this means for the little guys, and for integration.

The trend now is merger after merger into domination by one software company in the sector versus the integration and specialization of software. Would it be best to have many smaller software vendors that do their piece really well and can integrate or to have one big software company that does all and is the only one in the market?

Again, these worries reflect peoples' concerns when larger mergers occur in any industry; one of the arguments against Microsoft all these years hasn't only been about abusive business practices, but about the quality of their software. If a company is allowed to dominate a market so thoroughly, it's products are likely to become too massive and bloated to handle niche concerns.

John Stahl sees this as a potent argument for integration:

I believe that the tide is running against big, monolithic applications that do everything for everyone, and that in the future we’ll see a larger ecosystem of lighter-weight applications that do a couple of things well, are easy to extend and, most importantly, assume they need to talk to each other.

Tags: convio, ecrm, GetActive, software as a service

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