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| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1995, Sigma Partners |
| Headquarters | Austin, Texas (registered) |
| Key people | Mike Aviles, Chief Executive Officer |
| Industry | content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management |
| Employees | about 670 (2008) |
| Website | www.vignette.com |
Vignette is a suite of content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management software developed by the Vignette Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Overview
Vignette's Web Experience Platform consists of several suites of products allowing non-technical business users to create, edit and track content through workflows and publish this content through Web or portal sites.
Many large, content-rich sites on the World Wide Web run Vignette, including Disney, Marriott International, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox NewsDigital, MetLife and BSkyB. Vignette provided the technical platform for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Web site.
Recently, NASA credited Vignette Portal as a "key tool the team uses in-house to keep the content organized."[1] Vignette is widely recognized for its ability to handle large, highly customized Web sites. Vignette also provides integration solutions for ERP, CRM and legacy systems. The company holds more than 40 U.S. patents.[2]
The Vignette platforms provide support for Java EE and .NET. For the former, the JSR 168 specification is implemented. Sites running versions of Vignette software prior to V7 are generally easy to identify by the format of their story URLs, which are mostly numeric strings with several commas as separators.
History
In November 1995 Ross Garber and Neil Webber started Vignette with the goal of making web publishing easier and more personalized. The company's seed round investors were Austin Ventures and Sigma Partners. Garber and Webber had previously worked with John Thornton of Austin Ventures when they were employed at DAZEL Corporation, and also with Bob Davoli at Sigma Partners, when Davoli was CEO of Epoch Systems and Garber and Webber were early employees in the 1990s .
Vignette's first product development effort was focused on large-scale content management workflow processes. This product, which was announced but never shipped, was called StoryBuilder. During the initial StoryBuilder development cycle, Vignette partnered with CNET, which had developed an internal technology called PRISM that allowed for very large scale database-driven web site creation and delivery. CNET, which wanted a third-party to commercialize the product, decided to spin the technology off to Vignette, also invested $500,000, for a 33% stake in Vignette. Vignette rapidly commercialized the technology into a product called StoryServer, which shipped in January 1997. The StoryBuilder technology was later merged into the StoryServer product, and shipped in September 1997.
In the 1990s Vignette's IDE and API were superior to traditional CGI/vi/Perl web development and gained much popularity and customer base because of its convenience and usability. In 1998, after barely three years of being in business, Vignette had already signed up 130 customers.
In June 1998, Garber hired Greg Peters to succeed him as Chief Executive Officer, and Garber became Chairman of the Board. Vignette's IPO took place on February 19,1999, and became one of the ten most successful "dot-com" IPOs of the year. Garber left the company later in 1999, and Webber retired in early 2000.
The company made several key acquisitions over the years including the acquisition of e-business application vendor OnDisplay for $1.4B in 2000[3], enterprise portal software vendor Epicentric for $32M in 2003[4], CMS vendor Instraspect for $20M in 2003[5], Tower Technology, an Australian-based provider of enterprise document and records management solutions, in 2004 for $125M[6] and Vidavee, a SaaS-based Web video publishing company in 2008.[7]
In the News
- Vignette Named One of America's Most Trustworthy Companies in 2007[8]
- Vignette Named One of the 40 Fastest-Growing Software Companies [9]
Products
Vignette Content Management
Vignette Content Management helps organizations create and manage content for enterprise Internet, extranet or intranet applications. It is designed for Web content creators, contributors and administrators in IT and marketing departments. Vignette Content Management's predecessor, StoryServer is widely considered the very first Web content management system. Architecturally, the Vignette Content Management system is known for its separation of content management and content delivery which allows companies to develop complex workflows and makes it a good solution for multi-site publishing and multi-channel delivery. Vignette Media is a specialized content management system for telco, media an entertainment companies who need a digital publishing platform. It provides industry-specific workflows, content types and tools.
Vignette Portal
Vignette Portal enables organizations to quickly build and deliver highly customizable Web applications that support customers, employees and partners. Vignette Portal is integrated tightly with Vignette Content Management. The Portal is built primarily upon the Epicentric Foundation Server, which Vignette acquired in 2003. Vignette has been a participant of JSR 286 and WSRP 2.0 standards bodies. Current versions of Vignette Portal support these standards for portlet standards that include inter-portlet communication. Vignette Portal is in the leader quadrant for Gartner's enterprise portals and ins highly regarded int he industry.
Vignette Collaboration
Vignette Collaboration provides organizations the ability to improve productivity and more efficiently direct business processes that require interaction across disparate geographic and organizational boundaries.
Vignette Community
Released in 2008, Vignette's Social Media products include Vignette Community Applications and Vignette Community Services. These products help organizations add social computing applications such as blogs, wikis, ratings and forums to their Web sites. In October the company demonstrated a solution template with additional functionality that includes photo and video sharing, idea management, member profiles and social recommendations.
Vignette Video
Released in 2008 following the acquisition and integration of Vidavee, Vignette Video is a hosted video management solution that provides capabilities to upload, transcode, manage and deliver video. The new product also includes a customizable Flash-based media player that allows users to tag and share any segment of a video. Vignette's Video technology includes a dozen patents for advanced functionality like video tags and heat maps. Vignette Video Services can be integrated into any website (does not require Vignette Content Management) and is sold as a service.
Vignette Recommendations
Vignette Recommendations was announced in January 2008 as part of an OEM agreement with Baynote. Recommendations uses the wisdom of the crowd to help organizations recommend new products or content. Vignette Recommendations was named Best Web 2.0 Technology by UK-based Incisive Media at its inaugural Web 2.0 Innovation Awards presentation in London.[10]
The latest release of Vignette Recommendations (7.1) includes several enhancements to the Baynote engine including skins, a recommendations console for online marketers and gatget/widget publishing functionality.
Vignete Records Manager and Case Manager
Resulting from the acquisition of Tower, Vignette offers IDM and VRD document management and record storage software. A few banks use Vignette's software to store over a billion records. Case Manager is a new product aimed at human-centric processes where a full BPM deployment would be overkill, such as loan origination or insurance claim management.
Criticisms
- Financial difficulty. Vignette is experiencing a slowdown in license revenues. Net profit soared 78 percent (Q2 2008 vs. Q2 2007)[11][12]. TradingMarkets.com recommends AVOID BUYING Vignette's share (Symbol VIGN)[13]. However, the company has no debt and about $150 million in cash. Vignette launched a dozen products in 2008 and needs to prove the value of these products by producing license revenue.
- Criticisms by Vignette clients at cmsmatrix.org[14] must be balanced by positive stances by customers and analysts at [1] [15]
- Very expensive: Traditionally Vignette has been aiming at the high-end of the market with the typical deployment costing over $250,000[16][17][18]. Newer offerings (i.e. Video, Recommendations and Social) are priced well under $100,000.
- Complicated interface. Counter-productive tool for employees. Awful workflow. Steep learning curve[19][20]. Latest versions of the product aim at fixing most of these problems, especially the new RIA user interface available in Vignette Media [2].
Acquisitions
- Random Noise (1998)
- Diffusion (1998)
- OnDisplay (2000)
- Intraspect (2002)
- Epicentric (2003)
- Tower Technology (2004)
- Vidavee (2008)
See also
References
- ^ CIO Magazine article
- ^ U.S. Patent Office
- ^ Infoworld Article
- ^ Internet News Article
- ^ ZDNet Article
- ^ CRMToday Article
- ^ CMSWire article
- ^ BNET Business Network
- ^ BNET Business Network
- ^ CMSWire article
- ^ "Interwoven prospers as Vignette continues to bleed" (2008-07-25).
- ^ "Vignette's Year on Year Income Falls 73.5%" (2008-07-28).
- ^ "Sad downward trajectory" (2008-08-11).
- ^ "Review by customers at cmsmatrix.org" (2008-07-31).
- ^ {{cite web | date=2008-05-17 | title=Forrester Analyst comments on Vignette|url=http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2008/05/wcm-the-real-di.html}
- ^ "Expensive: over $250,000" (2002-09-17).
- ^ "Too expensive." (2008-07-31).
- ^ "Too expensive." (2005-09-15).
- ^ "cmswatch.com - Vignette, Ajax, and Usability" (2007-11-02).
- ^ "Complicated interface." (2008-07-31).
