Sitecore Buys a Service Firm

Sitecore purchased one of their partner integration firms last week – Hedgehog – and this headline from a CMSWire article by my friend Ian Trustcott sums up the reaction.

Sitecore Acquires an 80-Person Services Company and the WCM World Loses Its Mind

And some did lose their minds. A friend who is a large Sitecore partner told me:

The Sitecore slack channel is fun today

Ian is less concerned:

[…] based on my 20 years of experience in this industry, working for Sitecore’s competitors, working as an analyst and taking competing products to market as a consultant, I think we need to take this news at face value: Sitecore is buying skills, not revenue.

Lots of people are bringing up Ektron’s foray into services, back in 2009. In some cases, we watched Ektron compete with their own partners for business. After that expansion was announced, the comments of this CMSWire article exploded and are worth reading.

Partners that have invested time into a vendor don’t like it when that vendor dips into services work. Time will tell what happens with the Hedgehog acquisition.