Sword subsidiaries Cimage and CTSpace to merge

Just over 15 months ago, following the acquisition of CTSpace by the Sword Group, I briefly mentioned existing Sword subsidiary and UK-based EDMS vendor Cimage (see CTSpace put to the Sword). Last month, Sword announced that Cimage and CTSpace would become a merged entity, Sword CTSpace.

MD of Sword CTSpace and operations director for Sword UK, Gert-Jan de Kieviet says:

“We feel that the synergies across our two organisations give us a unique opportunity to better support our customers’ initiatives and projects by providing applications either on demand (Software as a Service) or on premise. Many clients have been using technology from both companies side by side for a number of years.”

The Cimage (later Cimage Novasoft) name has gradually been disappearing as Sword has focused on marketing its web-based enterprise content management application layer solution, Fusion, and its related SharePoint integration via C2share, rather than the Cimage content repository. In January, CTSPace appointed former Cimage and Documentum executive Tom Pietryga as Vice-President North American sales.

Perhaps this latest move indicates where Sword sees the future: SaaS. Combining the two businesses could well alert former Cimage customers to the software and hardware delivery efficiencies of subscription-based on-demand solutions provided by the CTSpace. With the global recession having a major impact on engineering, construction and other project-focused businesses, and on software businesses that have been reliant on traditional up-front license revenues and maintenance agreements, the chance to switch to more predictable expenditure on solutions where the risks of hosting are borne by somebody else may be increasingly attractive.

[Disclosure: I worked with Cimage in the mid-1990s when it was part of Tarmac Professional Services – now Carillion.]