Macromedia And Allaire Union Takes Web Development To the Next Level

Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CTO of the content-management and Web-design software company that carried his name, made headlines in January when his company announced it was being acquired by Macromedia, the creator of dynamic authoring tools such as Flash and Dreamweaver.

The move caught many industry watchers by surprise, but Allaire's motivation for the merger was simple: In a competitive marketplace, smart vendors look to consolidate their strengths to build a stronger solution set. He says his company's application logic and Macromedia's creative authoring tools are a perfect match for today's Web developers.

Allaire, who will stay on as CTO of the new Macromedia, recently spoke with VARBusiness editorial director Robert DeMarzo and industry editor Rich Cirillo about the merger.

VARBusiness: What will this deal mean for developers using Allaire's products?
Allaire: Many of the things that brought the two companies together were symbolic of what is going to make the Web successful for companies going forward. Increasingly, sites and applications are being built by teams of Web professionals,the application developers and scripters, as well as the people building the user experience. Really effective Web sites and applications have required a set of products that brought those two universes together.

VB: How will the Allaire products fit in with Macromedia's offerings?
Allaire: I think we've got a good vision about how that plays out. There are several broad categories of products and technologies, including Dreamweaver; UltraDev, the application development add-on to Dreamweaver; Fireworks, the Web graphics product; HomeSite, our code-based HTML editing tool; JRun and ColdFusion Studio, the integrated development environments for ColdFusion and JRun; and Kawa, our Java IDE. When you look at it from a top level, it really covers every type of developer.

Dreamweaver is incredibly strong as an authoring environment for the creation of the visual portions of a Web site, but it's not a good coding environment. That's why Macromedia bundled it with HomeSite.

Clearly, going forward there is going to be some incentive for us to integrate the two products into a more native experience. Likewise, UltraDev is a visual-authoring environment for Web applications, but as we know with many Web applications, you really have to work in the code, build the logic, and so on. That's where our Studio products are strong.

VB: What about your channels?
Allaire: Macromedia recognized it was going to need a much stronger VAR model. With Allaire, it's in our blood. From day one, we started building a VAR channel, and I think Macromedia sees a huge amount of value in what we have done. Its channel was more of a classic reseller channel, whereas ours was more of a solution-provider channel.

VB: Will there be companies in the Macromedia reseller community that you will be able to bring upstream to more high-margin work?
Allaire: Yes. Macromedia has about 1.2 million Dreamweaver customers, with a lot of them in Web development companies. It found by surveying those Dreamweaver customers that 60 percent of them intended to get into doing dynamic applications during the next 12 to 18 months.

VB: With such a broad product line, might you be competing against Microsoft and some of the other big Internet software companies? What is the competitive landscape going to be?
Allaire: There is certainly some overlap with Microsoft. On the creative side, Adobe and Macromedia have some competition, but I don't think Adobe is that strong in the Web application space. In the server space, we have managed to carve out a pretty unique niche with the mass enterprise server customer--even if there is some competition, there is a lot of opportunity for cooperation as well.