Expansion Beyond Content Management For VignetteExpansion Beyond Content Management For Vignette

IT managers are growing far more sophisticated when it comes to content-related apps, and they want vendors to join them in taking a holistic view of content. Vignette Corp. is among the vendors making a run at the need, which dictates a convergence of apps, including those for content management, portals, collaboration, search/categorization, and identity management.

Vignette, which to date has focused on the content-management niche, is readying a product strategy that would result in new document-management, E-learning, E-marketing, collaboration, and portal applications in the next 12 months, CEO Tom Hogan says. In fact, V7, Vignette's newly updated content-management platform, is designed to be the foundation for the new tools and a framework for building Web apps and delivering services to employees.

"All of the content software specialists are gearing up for the next round of competition, which will center on the deployment of Web-based collaborative business applications," Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says. The question is whether Vignette--or, for that matter, portal vendor Plumtree Software Inc., which earlier this month unveiled a similarly expanded strategy--will be able to pull it off. Among other factors, these medium-sized companies have to go up against diversified mammoths such as Microsoft and IBM in this market.

Vignette also is introducing an application framework that will let developers build compatible applications using either .Net or Java 2 Enterprise Edition. And it's providing more centralized management capabilities to make it easier for line managers to oversee a greater range of content. Leif Pederson, Vignette's VP of product marketing, admits that Vignette's and Plumtree's new strategies are geared toward similar goals: "We're moving toward the same target."

Vignette is starting by lowering V7's entry-level price to $125,000. Customers also now have the option of group, business, and enterprise suites of content applications to run on top of V7. The group suite is an out-of-the-box tool for publishing content on a single Web site, the business suite is for pulling content from multiple sources and publishing to multiple sites, and the enterprise suite has more wide-ranging abilities to define user roles. Prices for all of the suites depend on the number of users.