Bowne/Fujitsu Strategic Alliance: Building A Better XBRL Bike

Today we announced a strategic alliance with Fujitsu to use their XBRL development platform as the key technology basis for our existing and future XBRL solutions.  The full press release can be read here, and as I'm quoted in the press release...the news is really all about focus.  With the continued expansion of XBRL-based regulatory reporting initiatives across the world, this alliance allows us to focus on continuing to build out full-service and review-and-approval solutions while relying on the globally-recognized Fujitsu XBRL development platform to take care of the basics of handling XBRL documents.  This includes such mundane-but-oh-so-important tasks as reading XBRL taxonomies (be it US GAAP or IFRS), writing out instance documents for submission to a regulator, and supporting new XBRL technologies such as Inline XBRL.  

Were we doing this before/are we doing this now, and without issue?  Absolutely!  Much like a mountain bike manufacturer decides to use someone else's disc brakes (these, for example...=) to focus on other aspects of the bike, we made a similar decision around back-end XBRL processing.  Scary big change?  No, quite the contrary...a good change that allows us to focus on application and functional development vs. back-end technology maintenance.  With all that's going on around SEC Year 2 tagging, trust me, this kind of focus is good.

Given how competitive the XBRL space continues to be, I can't help but close out with a quick editorial:  Don't get caught up in noise being made around this news.  It continues to amaze (but not surprise) me in terms of how quickly simple news like this is used to drum up concern or inadequacies around our XBRL offerings.  Entirely no truth to the noise here.  It's not like we're imitating certain XBRL vendors who are trying to staff up by hiring a bunch of XBRL newbies and entrusting them to do detail Year 2 tagging for companies, essentially building a new bike "on the fly" with a new team of people (now that would be scary!).  Instead, our alliance with Fujitsu is as simple as us swapping out disc brakes on an already-existing market-leading XBRL bike.  That's it.

Moral of this story:  Avoid the noise and stay tuned for exciting results of this alliance showing up in XBRL applications near you shortly...=).

- Rob