Blackbaud buys Kintera
May 29th, 2008 | Published in CRM, Nonprofit Tech | 2 Comments
In retrospect, this probably was inevitable. And I’m sure that the very low stock price of Kintera’s certainly made a buyout of it by Blackbaud easier. Today, Blackbaud announced the acquisition of Kintera. So, there is now one less nonprofit CRM vendor to choose from, and Blackbaud keeps getting bigger.
But will it get better as a result? Hard to know. In Kintera, Blackbaud certainly got it’s hands on a platform with pretty good open APIs (Allan Benamer argues they are better than Convio’s.) Will they continue in that direction? Blackbaud’s other recent acquisition, eTapestry, did open up their APIs recently, although they leave much to be desired.
It will be interesting to watch what happens with Kintera, and especially, what happens with their APIs. And how will Convio react? And, of course there is still Salesforce.com, as well as the developing realm of free and open source options, like CiviCRM. It’s going to get interesting, for sure. But, in all honesty, if I were part of the teams of any of those options, there would be no shaking of boots because of this merge.
Update: Allan Benamer has some more information that’s worth reading.
Tags:blackbaud kintera nptech openAPI
May 30th, 2008 at 7:56 am (#)
I have no idea if there is a Kintera User Society, but we at the Blackbaud User Society would be thrilled to have Kintera clients join us to get unofficial support for their products and join our growing community of Blackbaud clients and users.
June 13th, 2008 at 9:33 am (#)
The funny thing is that non of these database companies are even social networking communities