After Autonomy/Interwoven and Oracle/Sun news, here comes the third big news of the year.
If Unilever can have multiple soaps and GM can have multiple car models, why can’t a Content Management vendor have multiple products? OT’s acquisition of Vignette points to this increasing “commoditization” of Content Management marketplace.
There may be a lot of overlaps in products across OT and Vignette but we all know that one size does not fit all and so why not have different products for different scenarios, different price points, different technology stacks and different requirements? OT now has multiple options for Document Management, DAM, WCM etc plus a bonus portal server that they lacked before. They had a portal integration kit (PIK) that exposed LiveLink’s functionality as portlets that could be deployed on some of the portal servers (but not VAP and Sun as far as I know).
There’s some good analysis here and here.
On a side note, I think people who worked closely with Vignette knew it coming. A colleague of mine told me this:
One Singapore based vignette customer we were talking to suddenly went quiet and our sales guy spotted him meeting OpenText. Another one who we were talking to, suddenly decided not to continue with Vignette and decided to migrate to Day communiqué. A senior person in Vignette Singapore joined OpenText about 2-3 months back – and was not replaced. There were many other signs in the way Vignette was handling people and partnerships that showed something is on.
I always considered Interwoven, Vignette and Fatwire (Open Market, Divine and FutureTense before that) as the leaders and pioneers in pure play Web Content space. With Interwoven and Vignette gone, what does this mean for the WCM marketplace? An end of the era?
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