Charles J. Beech, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Trivantis, announced today the acquisition of Flypaper Studio, Inc. Trivantis is perhaps best known for its rapid e-learning development tool Lectora. While Lectora and Flypaper are not dissimilar products, it’s unlikely that the acquisition was simply a matter of eliminating competition. It is more likely that the two companies have teamed up to help one another climb to higher reaches. Flypaper has nowhere near the presence and reputation that Trivantis has. Trivantis however seems to have stagnated some in their technology, and Flypaper has a lot of promise and product already on offer.
Consider how powerful it will be to leverage Flypaper’s ability to convert between Flash CS5 and Flypaper platform. All it takes is a little code sharing and some redevelopment of the UI and now Lectora can do the same. This is good news for Instructional Designers and content editors who would be able to get a fully functioning, custom Flash course from developers and make edits and updates themselves in a more comfortable dev environment (i.e. Lectora).
Similarly, Flypaper has been moving toward a multi-touch interface which is quite progressive. Certainly Trivantis will want to employ that technology in their existing suite of tools.
Of course some of this is still speculative, but I think that time is going to bear me out on this one, and we’ll see both of those (and probably more) integrations come quickly to Trivantis’ platform.
