OpenText issued a press release today saying it would buy Vignette for $12.70/share. Vignette has been struggling lately losing customers to complex and costly upgrades and laying off employees (CMSWire post) so I see this as a mercy killing of sorts. Naturally, OpenText views the acquisition more optimistically, saying it will “extend the breadth of our offerings and further Open Text’s positioning as the leading independent ECM vendor in the marketplace”.
I’ll be curious to see exactly what OpenText plans to do with the technology. I don’t follow them closely, so I’m not sure what they were after. Vignette’s Portal? Their collaboration stuff? I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll see some analysis today in the blogosphere.
I’ll bet we’ll see an increase in Vignette customer churn as is often the case in these acquisitions so this should be a good thing in Open Source ECM Land.
My thoughts exactly. Unless OpenText are interested in moving into professional services (> 50% of Vignette’s revenue comes from VPS), it only makes sense as a mercy killing.
The only products worth keeping are the collaboration and portal products, although after 5-odd years of “Vignettisation” I doubt they remain the quality products Vignette originally acquired.
I don’t think it’s entirely a mercy killing, although I love the headlone of your post. They are certainly partly going for the customers, but with so much overlap with the OTEX and VIGN product stacks, I can’t see a huge opportunity for cross selling new products. Existing Vignette customers probably won’t have much of an appetite for migration.
I think they’ll keep some of the technology, in particular the Portal They’ll keep the VCM too as it is, I think, more “Enterprise” that the other OpenText offerings. Not sure if they’ll keep Collab.
And they did get the whole thing on the cheap.
My thoughts on the tech overlap here:
OMG! Open Text buy Grandpa Vignette. Would love your comments.
Jon
Good article. Recent industry rumours do point to this potentially being a mercy killing, with revenues struggling, howerver it was inevitable that at some point the exit strategy for vignette was to sell to one of the big guys. This at least puts an end to the consolidation in the ECM marketplace.
Its interesting that it’s opentext, who have made several acquisitions these past few years, remember Gauss, Obtree, RedDot? Would be interesting to see how Opentext change their product stack now that all their web CMS is via RedDot.