Wails of lamentation spread across the local tech community every time an entity like Zendesk or Greylock or Y Combinator departs Boston for parts west. But today we have a different tale to report. Day Software (SIX: [[ticker:DAYN]]) a Zurich, Switzerland-based content management software specialist that builds interactive websites for Fortune-1000 giants like Adobe and General Motors, is about to move its U.S. headquarters from Newport Beach, CA, to Boston.
When it comes to the software platforms and interactive content that define the world of Web 2.0 commerce, the Hub is the emerging capital, says Kevin Cochrane, Day’s chief marketing officer. “It’s inefficient for us to be anywhere other than Boston,” Cochrane says. “The majority of the partners we need to work with today in the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 universe are in the Boston area, and Boston is ideally located for all of the major customers we’re securing up and down the Northeast corridor.”
Day’s new office, at 320 Congress Street in the booming Fort Point Channel area of South Boston, will open December 1, according to Kellie Snyder, a native Bostonian who is Day’s vice president of professional services. The office will initially employ 12 to 15 people and has room for up to 30. The company is “aggressively hiring” in all areas, including consulting and tech support, Snyder says.
Day Software was founded in 1994 as an interactive marketing agency but quickly evolved into a maker of software platforms for companies managing large websites. It’s been a public company on the Swiss Exchange since 2000. But last year, it brought in a new CEO, Erik Hansen, and rewrote its software from scratch to make it easier for clients to design, develop, and host customer-centric websites with interactive features such as blogs and wikis. The company counts GM, Adobe, Newsweek, the United States Army, Boston College, Ingersoll Rand, Rosetta Stone, Virgin Media, and the governments of Singapore and New Brunswick, Canada, among its big clients.
It will be much easier for Hansen, who is based in Zurich, to reach the new Boston headquarters than the company’s current Newport Beach digs. But that was “by no means the driving factor” behind the move, Cochrane says. “First and foremost, Boston is the hotbed for technology partners and interactive agencies, all of the companies that are critical to us as we look to build up our ecosystem,” he says. Boston offers the nation’s best pool of job talent for all departments of enterprise software companies, Cochrane adds. It’s also home to plenty of potential customers in higher education, a market Day has begun to penetrate, and it’s closer to the press and industry analysts who follow the content management sector, he says.
Another incidental benefit to the move, which has been in the planning stages for about 9 months: Day’s board chairman Barry Bycoff, a former Pequot Ventures partner who is also executive chairman at Progress Software (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PRGS]]), is based in Boston. Day’s planned grand-opening party at its new Boston headquarters on December 1 will coincide with a board meeting, according to Cochrane.
