Vignette

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

Vignette Corporation, the company that the world's leading brands rely on for innovative and dynamic Web experiences, announced plans to release Vignette Content Management 8.0 (VCM 8.0) in the second half of 2009. VCM 8.0, a cornerstone of the Vignette Web Experience foundation, empowers marketers and business users to manage media-rich, global Web properties through an intuitive user interface that can dramatically improve an organization's agility. With VCM 8.0, organizations can easily create and manage an engaging online experience while relieving IT of basic, day-to-day Web responsibilities. The new user interface makes the management of pages and content simple. A novice user will be able to build Web sites in minutes rather than hours while maintaining brand consistency using the proven scalability and power of Vignette architecture. VCM 8.0 also includes productivity enhancing capabilities such as personalized toolbars, favorite shortcuts and workspaces that recall user preferences.

On the heels of its acquisition by Open Text, Vignette plans an imminent introduction of VCM 8.0, a key component of the Vignette Web Experience foundation, which is designed to empower marketers and business users to manage media-rich, global Web properties.Vignette says VCM 8.0 allows organizations to easily create and manage an engaging online experience while relieving IT of basic, day-to-day Web responsibilities. Reportedly, a novice user will be able to build Web sites in minutes rather than hours while maintaining brand consistency. VCM 8.0 also includes productivity-enhancing capabilities such as personalized toolbars, favorite shortcuts and workspaces that recall user preferences.

So many things have gotten the "aaS" (as-a-service) suffix in the past year that it's hard to imagine anything new or noteworthy being added to the list at this point. But I'm starting to think that a new flavor of "aaS" (yes, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this...) may well be in the works. I'll spare you the mental anguish of a new acronym. We can just call it what it is: hosted beta testing, or beta-software-as-a-service. Hosted beta testing may not be new. But it's far from the norm. It's an underutilized (to say the least) alternative to the usual "Go fly our kite in a storm and report back to us" type of beta testing. I think it could catch on bigtime, though, for many of the same reasons SaaS has gotten so much traction lately.

Everyone said that the Interwoven/Autonomy deal would only be the first in a series of big announcements within the enterprise content management world. And that it is.Today, Canadian-based enterprise content management vendor Open Text (news, site) has reached a deal to buy Vignette Corporation for US$ 310 million.Vignette is expected to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Open Text. The deal will see Vignette stockholders get US$ 8 per share plus 0.1447 of Open Text stock.

Vignette proudly announced that Gartner has positioned the company in the Leaders Quadrant in its Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products 2008 report. Along with highlighting Vignette’s strengths as a Horizontal Portal vendor, the researchers at Gartner also give a few words of caution.According to the report, “general interest in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is driving several horizontal portal vendors to continue enhancing support for Ajax or alternative Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies to provide rich user interfaces, as well as social-networking features and enterprise mashup capabilities.”

There was a time when many thought Vignette, a maker of expensive content management software, could have been one of the next great software companies. In June 2000, the Austin, Texas company had a stock market capitalization topping $9 billion (and this was a few months after the market peaked), was the subject of a lengthy BusinessWeek feature, and had more than 1,300 employees. Then, of course, the bottom came out of the dot-com business, and Vignette all but disappeared from the spotlight.

The enterprise content integration (ECI) vendors never got very big, but the concepts they espoused had a major impact, and now just about all the independent ones are gone, as Oracle has reportedly acquired Context Media in an asset sale. Previously Documentum had purchased AskOnce, and IBM had acquired Venetica. Vignette and Day already have some native ECI toolsets. Poor FileNet and especially Interwoven. After partnering with Venetica for ECI, Interwoven had to turn to Context Media. Now both products reside in the hands of erstwhile competitors.

With its new "V7" Vignette tries to attack two areas where it had fallen behind some of the field: business-user functionality and content integration. But the more interesting changes are a reorganization of its product suites (the 3rd such shuffling in as many versions) and the introduction of a lite version scaled for (gasp!) departmental-sized installations. All the major players are going down-market -- where most of the buying is now. But only Vignette has given its salesforce an explicitly tiered product line, while Documentum and others have focused on broadening their enterprise-tier menus. We expect Vignette's approach to be mimicked quickly. Note that this is really a pre- announcement, because V7 won't ship until the end of the year...See what's new in V7

How to handle web content -- especially dynamic pages -- represents one of the thornier Records Management (RM) problems facing enterprises today. At least two "ECM" vendors are trying to attack the problem: Documentum, through a re-released "Compliance" edition, and Vignette, by dint of its TOWER Technology acquisition (TOWER touts a patent for capturing web visitor sessions). As always, your RM policies and how you implement them are going to have a greater impact on your success than the software you throw at it -- and don't dismiss the potentially monstrous storage implications here. But we may be seeing a trend. Previously only health care and insurance companies seemed to care about web records...now other industries and public agencies have begun to show more interest... Documentum "Compliance"   Vignette "WebCapture"

It's tempting for CMS vendors to develop or resell portals, too, since many of their customers lack a robust content delivery environment. Vignette and Interwoven have done so, and now Percussion has jumped into the race -- helpfully noting that its offering is directed more at workgroups than enterprise integration. Think of it as MS Sharepoint running on Java. Percussion's portal offers several nice widgets for workgroups, but we should point out the significant difference between managing collaborative projects vs. the collaborative development of web content. For the former, a collaboration portal is useful, but for the latter, you really want to focus on the native collaborative workflow capabilities of your CMS (and most of them aren't very good at it)...Find out more about Rhythmyx Express Portal

After officially finalizing its acquisition of Epicentric, Vignette is now pushing an entry-level CMS-Portal combo for 125,000 dollars US. Note that this is only the basic configuration of both products (e.g. no autocategorization, connectors to remote datasources, etc.), but suggests that Vignette -- like many of its competitors -- sees more action in departmental price ranges. We doubt that most companies want to buy a portal and CMS together from the same vendor, but this price might make those with neither package think twice...Read the Vignette Release

With its just-announced purchase of mid-sized collaboration vendor Intraspect, Vignette pushes back into the enterprise -- and mimics several competitors -- after a couple of years of emphasizing external portals and customer-focused interaction modules. Vignette and Intraspect appear to be a decent match technically (the latter actually brings better Java credentials to Vignette), but perhaps more importantly, they target some of the same verticals, like finance and technology...Read about the acquisition

The stratospheric rise in the proportion of revenues from professional services was an insider secret among enterprise CM vendors over the past 18 months. Now that nearly everyone knows that services make up 70-80% of the cost of a typical enterprise installation, CM vendors are feeling freer to promote their own integration teams. But to be fair, the implementation issues are increasingly complex, especially when it comes to globalization and developing broader content strategies. A question for you: do you want your software vendor as your strategic consultant...?Read Vignette's Coming-Out Announcement

CMS Watch is frequently -- and I think justifiably -- critical of Vignette's "VCM" web content management platform (c.f., my review of their new management interface). But in fairness, there is one thing that the product does fairly well, though it's not always easy to get a handle on it. Here's what it is. After a history of poor metadata and taxonomy support, Vignette implemented a real classification system on top of its traditional "channels" motif of binding content items to your site hierarchy. Also, editorial teams can organize content items into arbitrarily-structured "projects" on the back end. Combined, these three ways of organizing content can be quite useful.

Major CMS vendors are declaring revenue growth and modest profits. That's good for the industry as a whole, but rising sales in many cases reflects cumulative income from newly-acquired products. Interwoven eked out a rare profit as did Stellent, who continues to hire more staff. Vignette generated earnings too -- as long as you don't apply generally-accepted accounting practices. We think all these vendors could come under increased pressure in 2005 to realize greater economies from their acquisitions, which means possible staff or service reductions. Customers should stay on top of product road-maps and measure how well their vendor(s) hit release milestones...

Aberdeen reports that Interwoven leads all vendors in CM marketshare with 25%. What's going on here? Aberdeen's numbers only tally CM sales at competitors like Vignette and Broadvision, but Interwoven's story is one of specialization: all it does is Web Content Management. And CMS Report readers also know that Interwoven's products focus further on the crucial Production phase of the Web CM lifecyle, while partnering for everything else...

We need all the fingers on one hand to count the number of press releases Interwoven issued today. Interwoven, like Vignette, is furiously trying to expand beyond Web Content Management to incorporate other related feature sets (like code management, document management, portal connectivity) that are frequently lumped together under the moniker of "Enterprise Content Management." Some of the new Interwoven modules announced within the five releases have cool names, but we'll refrain from further comment until we actually see them in production (the code collaboration module doesn't release until Q3)...Save yourself some time and just read this "umbrella" release

The late U.S. congressperson Tip O'Neill famously observed that "all politics are local." Is the same true for eGovernment CMS initiatives right now? We tend to think so, at least if deal flow is any measure. While national governments are haltingly investing in CMS and (more commonly) portal technologies, we see more activity at local and regional levels in both the USA and Europe. Vendors who can shape their offerings to the practical, citizens-service needs of these jurisdictions will win marketshare. Today Stellent joins a line of CMS vendors (including Documentum and Vignette) offering an eGov-oriented suite of tools...Read the Stellent Release about its new "eGov" suite

Still more CMS-related patents filed several years ago are getting approved. The U.S. PTO has recently granted Vignette two patents: "The Method and System for Optimizing Resources for Cache Management" and "The Method and System for Managing Message Pacing." Both patents are products of their era: Vignette's CMS package was once employed heavily as a portal and caching engine, and the company focused for a time on e-commerce and campaign management. To the extent Vignette has evolved in other directions -- and considering the large body of pre-existing work in both the caching and customer-contact domains -- these patents may not become terribly significant. They do, however, make the company look nominally stronger to Wall Street -- and prospective acquirors... Message Pacing Patent   Caching Patent