CMS Watch Vignette Feed

Is uPortal a good fit for self-service?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:04:00 -0400

In an interesting blog posting by Andrew Petro, Senior Software Engineer at Unicon, he mentions that uPortal is commonly successfully adopted as a self-service portal platform and also shares details about how Rutgers University and The University of Wisconsin are using the open source product for self-service initiatives.

It may come as little surprise that an employee of Unicon, the dominant uPortal systems integrator, has good things to say about the product. By contrast, our research for the The Enterprise Portals Report 2008 finds uPortal is an unlikely fit for e-business and self-service portals. Let's briefly explore why.

As prelude, I'll note that the products we cover are among the most widely-used products in the portal industry. Consequently, almost all vendors can claim references across all scenarios.

Despite that, I'd first point out that just because uPortal has a few universities that use the product for self-service doesn't mean that the product compared to other enterprise portals, such as Vignette, is a good fit for this scenario.

Second, we find that uPortal isn't particularly rich in out-of-the-box functionality for self-service portals (below, I mention some of the features you should look for and test for this scenario). Together with Vignette, which has strengths in this area, Oracle also provides you more to get you up and running with self-service. Among the open source projects, even JBoss Portal and Plone has more to offer than uPortal with regards to self-service.

Third, self-service portals come in many flavors. The way you define self-service may not be exactly the same as I define it, or Unicon does, but there are likely a few common requirements we would all have. Good reporting, for example, is typically a key requirement, as is integration to existing repositories, such as those used for customer data. In our research we found users struggling with uPortal integration, and citing very little beyond technical and basic reporting out-of-the-box. Neither integration nor reporting was among the major improvements in the recently released uPortal 3.

Always remember, when evaluating which product to use, be sure to rely on matching your key requirements and use case scenarios to what the different products have to offer, and be sure to test with your own content. That's always more important than impressive references, however relevant they may be to your case.

Interwoven prospers as Vignette continues to bleed

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:59:00 -0400

Vignette and Interwoven have released their second-quarter 2008 results, and it's a study in contrasts.

With Interwoven, the news is essentially all good. License revenue for the quarter was up 11 percent (to $23.4 million) over the same quarter a year ago, while service and support revenue grew 18 percent. Overall, gross profit jumped a solid 16 percent in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007. First-half gross profit was likewise up 16 percent year over year. Net profit soared 78 percent (Q2 2008 vs. Q2 2007), and on a six-month basis the year-over-year jump was 53 percent.

Certainly some of the top-line revenue growth came from recent acquisitions, but any way you slice it, those are some pretty impressive numbers.

Vignette, meanwhile, continues on its sad downward trajectory. The company saw license revenue fall to $9.9 million for Q2 of this year, from $14.6 million in the same period last year. Services actually grew slightly, however (to $35.8 million from $33.4 year-ago). Gross profit was similarly down. But more ominously, net income went negative. The company reported a loss of a little over $863,000 in Q2 of this year, compared to a net gain of $4 million in Q2 of 2007.

What makes the Vignette story so sad is that the firm does not lack for talented people (nor technological vision). What's lacking is an ability to land new deals at the kind of rate that will stop the financial bleeding. It's also a matter of battling ASP (average sales price) deterioration.

We've been seeing indications for some time that Vignette is under strong pricing pressure. In the recent earnings call (transcript available at SeekingAlpha.com), CFO Pat Kelly may have unwittingly provided a valuable data point on this. He notes that Vignette's ASP was $211K in Q2, versus $249K in Q1. (He ascribed the difference to "normal volatility in that metric.") The problem with averages, of course, is that a single abnormally high value can sway the overall average upward, giving a potentially misleading result. (This is why people often use median values rather than averages.) Tellingly, Kelly noted that Vignette scored three large deals in excess of $1 million during Q2. It doesn't take a math genius to see the implication of this. Quite simply put: It means the majority of Q2 deals came in at less than $211K. Maybe far less.

Headcount reduction is usually the first tactic a company resorts to when attempting to arrest a downtrend in profitability. But ironically, headcount-trimming costs money in the near term. (It's not unusual for personnel-related "restructuring" costs to come to $50K per employee.) In the course of the earnings call, Vignette's Somesh Singh, SVP of R&D and Technical Operations, verified that a charge of $2.5 to $3 million would probably be taken soon, due to severance costs.

Other Vignette executives hinted at re-allocating resources internally. As ECM Suites Report readers know, Vignette sells a broad line of different tools. Attention will surely shift internally, though it's too soon to know exactly how.

We'll keep you posted.

Adobe and Alfresco

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial.

First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership.

But let's think about what the Adobe offering is and why we do not currently evaluate it in our ECM Suites Report. Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a product set built upon the acquisition of Acellio in 2002 (better known as "Jetform"). Though the user interface and underlying codebase may have changed a bit, the principle of this product remains the same: automating simple, usually forms-based, processes. The product excels as a point solution particularly in Government, where a form needs to be issued to the public, and the capture and subsequent business process needs to be automated quickly.

In theory the Alfresco repository adds some true ECM capabilities at the back end of the Adobe product set. Also the Alfresco solution will add some "Web 2.0" capabilities to Adobe, as Alfresco supports Adobe Flex. So in theory, the LiveCycle solution could be extended to build more complex applications rather than basic forms routing.

On a corporate note the OEM deal is intriguing, since of course Alfresco is a minnow compared to Adobe, and there are close connections between the executive teams. For example the Senior Vice President of this particular Adobe Business unit is none other than Rob Tarkoff, a close friend and ex-Documentum colleague of Alfresco CTO John Newton. Could Adobe be planning to acquire Alfresco? Who knows? But if the OEM is successful, an acquisition might appeal to both firms, if less so to Alfresco's current customer base.

In short then, it's an intriguing announcement, and we will be looking at demonstrations of the technology in practice later today as well as testing it out more thoroughly over the coming months. Like us, you should treat this new product arrangement with real caution until it has been thoroughly tested by customers. That is not a a slight against either firm, but an announcement is just that and no more. Time is always the true test.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

Mortgage crisis: The least of Vignette's worries

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:53:00 -0400

Vignette announced its first-quarter numbers last week, and the results weren't pretty. For the first three months of 2008, the company lost $839,000 (down sharply from the $4.8 million earned in the same period a year before). The poor performance was due in part to a severe drop in license revenue, down 37 percent for the quarter (to a little under $10 million) compared to Q1 of 2007, continuing the trend we reported on last January.

Company president Mike Aviles, in the earnings call of April 23, confirmed what we've long suspected, which is that Vignette suffers from an agility problem: The company is slow to innovate, and has trouble taking its innovations to market on a timely basis. "We're late," Aviles said in response to a question about time-to-market. "As an innovator in the marketplace, [Web 2.0] is something we should have been on years ago . . . But over many years I think we lost an edge at Vignette that we are now starting to get back." Still, Aviles candidly admitted: "The bottom line is we did not execute. We are not making any excuses for it."

Aviles noted that the recent turmoil in the financial services industry has been disruptive to Vignette's business. (Financial services has historically constituted an important vertical for Vignette.) If indeed the sub-prime loan crisis is partly to blame for Vignette's woes, it could be a troubling portent for the likes of Day Software and Terminal Four, who also do significant amounts of business with customers in the financial services industry. It's certainly a trend worth watching.

In any event, we think Vignette's troubles are probably larger than any temporary tumult in the banking industry (or even in the U.S. economy). Vignette's product release cycles are long. Its sales force seems unfocused. The company is under pricing pressure (something CFO Pat Kelly admitted in the earnings call). And as CEO Mike Aviles himself suggested, Vignette is not the bastion of innovation it once was.

Vignette is hopeful that its (not yet completed) acquisition of online-video-technology company Vidavee will help get innovation jump-started again. Whether it will succeed remains to be determined. We're watching closely. Stay tuned.

HP expands archiving, e-discovery, and compliance portfolio with acquisition of Tower Software

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:17:00 -0400

So HP finally made a move into the world of ECM by acquiring Tower Software of Australia. On the surface it's an unusual match for HP, as many had expected them to buy one of the top tier players such as Interwoven, Vignette or even Open Text, but on closer consideration it's a move that makes sense. Revealingly, HP does not call this an "ECM" deal and focuses on the e-discovery and compliance benefits from Tower's addition, so it's possible HP has further moves to make if it wants to get serious about offering broader ECM services à la IBM.

Tower does have a long tradition in ECM (and has carved out a niche for themselves particularly in the Government sector globally), but primarily in Records Management-centric ECM. That's a focus that ties in nicely with HP's emphasis on archiving and storage-centric information management. Plus, Tower costs only a fraction of what other leading ECM firms would have set HP back. And of course HP has the footprint to manage an Australian-based division well. So those are the positives for HP. But what about Tower's existing customer base? Well in all likelihood there should be no major disruption, since HP does not have the ECM skills or competing technology in-house to disrupt this base, rather simply to continue to support it and help it to grow over time.

What is likely to change in the Tower offering is deeper integration with HP's Information Management archiving and storage offerings - and consolidation of the sales efforts in joint accounts. Tower will be absorbed into the Information Management division and the transaction should close in Q2. One slight change will be HP's focus on the Records Management (read Legal and Compliance) elements of Tower (where they are strongest) rather than the broader Tower ECM portfolio. Tower's deep integration with and architecture based upon Microsoft technologies -- and in particular their Gold Partner level status for SharePoint -- makes Tower a particularly appealing acquisition. But it does mean that areas Tower was hoping to grow may well get neglected in the short term, areas such as imaging, collaboration and traditional document management services.

HP has made it clear that they want to build a full Compliance and E-discovery solution, and that Tower will be integrated in with the HP Integrated Archive Platform along side e-mail archiving, ultimately as a single offering. But HP is still missing some elements, most notably a top notch search/discovery offering -- something that Tower cannot bring to the table -- so it's reasonable to expect more acquisitions in this area to come.

We cover Tower technology in-depth in our ECM Suites Report. We'll expand our coverage further as the the deal closes and HP begins the work of integrating both Tower's technology and their remaining staff into the HP machine. As acquisitions go this one is not particularly brutal or surprising; Tower was likely to get acquired by somebody, and HP was likely to acquire somebody.

But acquisitions of small firms by behemoths like HP cannot occur without some upheaval. Most likely for Tower's existing customers that upheaval will come in the form of dealing with HP sales and support staff who will in time want to be involved in the deals, whether they know anything about ECM or not. Things will settle but it will take time, and for now new buyers are urged to tread with caution.

Vignette announces numbers, resignations

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:42:00 -0500

Let's peek back into ECM/WCM vendor Vignette following last week's speculation about the company's financials. Today I'll offer just the facts, without interpretation.

Vignette Corporation filed its 2007 financial statements yesterday with the SEC. Not unexpectedly, the company's official press release puts as positive a spin on the numbers as possible, but the data speaks for itself:

Total revenue for fiscal year 2007 was $191.8 million, down 3% from fiscal year 2006.
Year-over-year license revenue: down 15.5%.
Year-over-year services revenue: up 3.5%.
R&D spending: down 8.9%.

Release of Vignette's latest financial statements coincides with the resignation of two top executives. According to a report on CRN.com's Australian site, Graham Pullen, Vignette's Asia Pacific VP and General Manager, is leaving to pursue other opportunities. In addition, Leo Brunnick (Vignette Senior VP, Products and Marketing) is resigning as of today. (His intention to resign had been announced in an SEC filing on January 10.)

Coincidentally, Vignette's Compensation Committee approved severance agreement changes for its senior executives on January 18. The relevant SEC filing notes: "These changes were not made in anticipation of any event, but, instead, were made in order to bring conformity among the severance protection agreements within the senior vice presidents and vice presidents."

What's up with Vignette's financial performance?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:04:00 -0500

Against the backdrop of the Sun and Oracle acquisition announcements of last week, it's easy to miss the fact that Vignette stock enjoyed a surprising spike, finishing the week 23 percent higher. Not bad, considering the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 4 percent in the same period. (See key stock statistics here.)

Vignette's stock-price pop was broadly attributed to new earnings guidance from the company concerning its fourth fiscal quarter results. The actual results won't be announced officially until this Thursday. The company said in an SEC filing that for the quarter ended December 31, 2007, "revenue is expected to exceed the high end of guidance and be in the range of $52 to $54 million."

One data point doesn't constitute a trend, however, and recent financial trends for Vignette have been ugly. At $15.00 (Friday's closing price), VIGN stock is down 30 percent from its 52-week high. The five-year trend is even worse: $100 spent on Vignette stock on January 18, 2002 would have resulted in $32.53 remaining in your pocket today.

Vignette's third-quarter numbers for 2007 show license revenues down 50 percent (yes, 50 percent) from the same quarter a year earlier, at a little over $8 million versus $16.3 million for Q3 of 2006. Revenue from services was, however, up by 8 percent.

Vignette's operating margins have been in the low single digits (percentage-wise) for several years. Compare this to Open Text or EMC, with margins in the 10 to 13 percent range (or Oracle, at 33 percent).

It would be premature to suggest that Vignette is in an unrecoverable death-spiral. With assets exceeding liabilities by $300 million, the company clearly has a decent cushion, even as it struggles to reverse a long, painful down trend in profitability.

At the same time, some large Vignette customers have told us that they are monitoring the company's financial performance and dearth of new license income with some trepidation. Customers -- understandably -- never like change. Of course, acquisition rumors around Vignette have been circulating for the last 6 years. We tend to think that Vignette (like Interwoven) would not be a easy company for another vendor to digest. We'll keep watching.

What's up with Vignette's financial performance?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:04:00 -0500

What's up with Vignette's financial performance?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:04:00 -0500

Enterprise Portal Marketplace: 2008 Vendor Risk Profile

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0500

It is all too easy to identify vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market. But CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye argues that CIOs, procurement officers, and other technology leaders considering investments in enterprise portals should carefully examine the risk profile of prospective vendors to help identify the right "fit" for their needs.

Should you care about Vignette's three new patents?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:55:00 -0500

In a press release from last week, Vignette announced three new US patents for what the company calls "Web Experience Innovation."

We first commented on Vignette joining the patent race back in 2004, and each year we see a couple of vendors proudly announcing new, and frequently absurd, patents in our field. Most recently it was search vendor Endeca, with a patent on (the now ubiquitous) guided navigation. Such is the lag time with these things that Vignette's new patents all date back to applications made between 2000 and 2002.

A closer look at the three new patents reveal that they cover functionality and requirements that are common in Web projects anno 2007. The first one sounds a bit like standard Web analytics, the 2nd like portlets (which are a vendor-neutral standard today), and finally the third sounds like being able to snapshot a site, something that quite a few vendors do today.

As a personal anecdote, I used to work at a Web CMS vendor which claimed a patent on...the shopping cart. Quite a common concept today, the claim was staked back in 1994 and surely quite innovative and relevant at the time, when the vendor was focused on e-commerce. Ten years later it resulted in a $40m payment from Amazon.com, to settle a patent-related lawsuit, but by then the e-commerce patents had been spun out into a separate company.

Patents don't always result in settlement payments or licensing fees, but as Vignette is persistently rumored as a take-over target, perhaps this will increase the the company's value (at least inasmuch as the patents could be spun out as a separate cash cow).

Nevertheless, I remain unconvinced the new patents really help customers in any way. They are really more of a distraction. Getting a US patent is perhaps a nice acknowledgment of some bygone R&D investment, but in a young and fast moving field as ours, buyers should rather focus more intently on how the strengths and weaknesses of current product releases match their needs today.

Placed and placeless content in Vignette

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:26:00 -0500

CMS Watch is frequently -- and I think justifiably -- critical of Vignette's "VCM" web content management platform (c.f., my review of their new management interface).

But in fairness, there is one thing that the product does fairly well, though it's not always easy to get a handle on it.

Here's what it is. After a history of poor metadata and taxonomy support, Vignette implemented a real classification system on top of its traditional "channels" motif of binding content items to your site hierarchy. Also, editorial teams can organize content items into arbitrarily-structured "projects" on the back end. Combined, these three ways of organizing content can be quite useful.

First, it allows you to have "placed" and "placeless" content on the same site, or even the same page. That is, sometimes contributors need to actively place content in a particular spot or spots and know it will appear there. In other cases, you want content to appear according to its classification (you tagged a content item "Manitoba", so it will appear in the "Canada" section of your site). With most Web CMS tools, you have to have to choose between placed or placeless approaches, and many customers are quite rightly reluctant to turn their entire site over to a placeless, metadata-driven model where authors and managers alike can never be quite certain where a new page will appear. With Vignette, you can tag content against a hierarchical taxonomy, as well as assign items to particular "channels" which are representations of website locales. In a well thought-through publishing regime, this combination can offer a lot of power.

On the back-end, being able to organize content items against an arbitrary scheme that doesn't actually reflect the published site is also handy. It makes it easier for individuals and teams to work on ad-hoc projects, sorting and storing information in a way that makes sense to them, before it gets published.

Note that Vignette salespeople don't always describe these features very well. "We have three taxonomies," one rep explained rather unhelpfully at a customer pitch I saw recently. To be sure, for a simple site, three organizational models is more of a liability than an asset. But for complex publishing operations, I think this kind of flexibility is quite handy.

Vignette, Ajax, and Usability

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 2 Nov 2007 10:44:00 -0400

Web CMS vendor Vignette recently released a new, dashboard-type interface featuring several Ajax controls. CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne demonstrates some of the ups and downs of this new approach, and poses some larger questions about usable interfaces...