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.