BroadVision, Vignette Post LossesBroadVision, Vignette Post Losses

Content-management vendors are struggling to regain profitability. Two of the arena's key players, BroadVision Inc. and Vignette Corp., Wednesday reported quarterly losses that reversed their fortunes from a year ago.

For the second quarter ended June 30, Vignette reported a loss of $10.8 million, or 4 cents per share, on revenue of $83.6 million, compared with a profit of $1.4 million, 1 cent, on revenue of $77.1 million for the same period last year. Concurrently, BroadVision lost $53.1 million, or 19 cents per share, on revenue of $57.4 million, compared with a profit of $10.6 million, 4 cents, on revenue of $95.3 million last year.

Both companies are fighting an elongated sales cycle in the slowing economy. BroadVision execs say a 15% to 20% reduction in the company's 1,500-person staff as of June 30th will result in a restructuring charge in the third quarter. The company already has cut 15 percent of its staff earlier this year. Vignette also has not been able to dodge layoffs, having reduced its staff by about 500 this year.

This was the quarter of packaged applications in the content-management world, and both BroadVision and Vignette brought new offerings to the market. BroadVision in June launched its InfoExchange Portal 6.0, a portal-building application that lets Web-site managers consolidate static pages into small groups of personalized portals. A month later, Vignette released its Enterprise Application Portal, which pulls together apps into a single interface.