This Spring, Blackbaud announced that it planned to acquire Kintera. Since then, the "i's" have been dotted, the "t's" have been crossed, and the real work of integrating the two products has begun in earnest.

Lots of Kintera Sphere users have questions about what the acquisition will mean in terms of functionality. Blackbaud's CTO, Shaun Sullivan put together a screencast that demos some of the integrations they're working towards, leveraging the APIs in both systems. You can see a demo of Kintera Sphere and Raiser's Edge sharing data, as well as a Sphere/Infinity integration.

WARNING: It's not for the faint of heart. Words like API, Metadata, and parameter are thrown around with abandon! But if you're the geek DBA at your org in charge of Kintera Sphere, you should check it out.

More details about the Blackbaud/Kintera inegration are spelled out in plain English on Steve McLaughlin's blog.