A few other considerations on the Kintera Acquisition by Blackbaud:

 

1. Reflects the "commoditization" of prospect screening. Most of the data sources these services use are similar. The value added will continue to be in the analytics to do database segmentation, and with some of the vendors, the ability to do direct appends of wealth/asset information directly to your database. We'll probably see more screening consulting services offered as value added by other vendors.

 

2. Consolidation in the industry, economies of scale and scope in the online services area. It's a good competitive strategy

re: GetActive-Convio and other vendors in the space.

 

3. Allows Blackbaud make additional inroads into providing software as a service, as they did a number of months ago with the e-tapestry acquisition. Many organizations are choosing hosted services which require less internal resources and expertise to manage.

 

4. Adds more robust email delivery capability to Blackbaud's portfolio of product offerings.

 

As with any acquisition, it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next year or two. Blackbaud and Kintera are built on very similar technology, eTapestry is not. Kintera has FundWare and Blackbaud has Financial Edge.

 

The overall customer base, management of it and product consolidation looks very complicated. It will probably take a while to see major changes.

 

In the competitive arena, it will be interesting to see how other vendors choose to compete and differentiate their products. Who will be the next candidate for acquisition?

 

Many of our traditional back end database vendors have not made great strides in their strategies for online engagement.

 

Data integration to our back end databases can be very challenging with our online community vendors.

 

Most of us don't have all the resources we need to support multiple systems.

 

Whoever solves all of this first and sells it to us at a competitive price ....