Vignette, a company well known for its web content management systems is being acquired by Open Text for $310 million. It’s a news flash I saw late yesterday and it really got me to thinking about the state of CMS today.
Ten years ago, Vignette was the brand name for web content management in many respects, plenty of sites (including more than a few that I was associated with) were users and customers. Though Vignette with a valuation of some $310 million is hardly ‘dead’, I also suspect that at many levels of the CMS space, open source solutions, be it Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, Zope or higher up the stack with an Alfresco have displaced Vignette over the years.
Today I spend most of my time writing about technology as opposed to building it, but I’ve also seen more than my fair share of home grown (usually basic LAMP) solutions displace Vignette as well.
The Content management market has undergone a huge transformation at the entry to mid-tiers over the last decade. The ability to update web content easily (remember when you used to have to do it manually? I do) is a given, it’s a feature on free blogs and enterprise software as well.
Thanks to freely available open source solutions, users can literally be up and running with a content management solution easily and without up front costs – that was something that just wasn’t do-able ten years ago.
No Vignette is not dead, not by a long shot. They have customers and will continue to have them under their new Open Text ownership.To be fair Vignette started off its public life with an IPO in 1998 for $30 million and a decade later is now worth 10 times that, which isn’t too shabby.
But considering how dramatically the market has changed in the areas where Vignette once totally dominated, it’s likely a very good thing for Vignette that it is now being acquired by a bigger player.
