Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

Personally, I cannot wait for October to arrive. Open Text Content World will be in the lovely Orlando, and we all should expect to be enlightened on OTEX’s product map and strategy for its two web content management arms: Web Solutions (aka RedDot) and the recently acquired Vignette.

Commenting on my previous post on the Open Text WCM saga, Markus Giesen et al. — representatives of an unofficial RedDot blog — raised several worthwhile questions. Not with publicity in mind, but in an effort to get some real, transparent answers I reached out for comments to Open Text.

Disappointingly, we did not succeed in squeezing a ton of clarity from Open Text’s Marci Maddox — their Director Global Product Marketing for Web Solutions.

The official party line is that no product migrations, discontinuations and code mergers will happen for Vignette and RedDot. RedDot is not dead, and Vignette will continue to get R&D money. A “singular solution” — whatever that means — is still on the roadmap for the next 2 years.

The response from the community is still “Yeah, we’ve heard that before…” as many are thinking of Gauss and Obtree.

Without more answers, the Vignette acquisition looks to be more of an impulse buy. And hey, most of us do impulsive things every now and then (more often than we’d like to admit), only to find ourselves stricken by a profound “Oh, my…” moment, then scrambling to put the puzzle back together again.

Granted, decisions of this magnitude are unlikely to have been made impulsively. They are also not easy to pin down in a relatively short period of time.

However, reflecting on the recent communications strategy, opinions like “The botched messaging around RedDot speaks unbelievably poorly of OTEX leadership, IMHO” are nothing but expected.

Open Text has finally revealed a bit more information about what the giant plans to do with its multiple WCM offsprings. More specifically, where the recently adopted Vignette child may be placed in Open Text’s Enterprise CMS and Web CMS families.

“Our plan is not to eliminate products, but to offer solutions that help our customers effectively fulfill their unique, organizational needs,” said John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text.

The product architectures and technologies are quite different. And it is still not clear yet how this WCM/ECM quilting exercise (Open Text should really patent this phrase) will go on. At this time, however, there are no planned migrations of customers from one platform to another. Open Text is “not going to force anyone in either customer base,” according to Scott Bowen, Sr. VP at Open Text.

Saying that Vignette adds the right technologies to the portfolio at the right time, Open Text plans to leverage Vignette Content Management (VCM) as the foundation of Open Text’s Web business solutions, aiming to cover all possible content management implementation use cases from basic to sophisticated deployments, while utilizing both RedDot’s and Vignette’s “historic strengths,” adds Bowen.

Within the next 24 months, Open Text is looking to launch a “singular WCM product offering” that will combine key strengths of Web Solutions and Vignette.

Other plans:

• The release of the long-anticipated Vignette Content Management version 8.0 (VCM v8) is still on track for H2 2009.
• The recently released Web Solutions 10.0 will be followed by Web Solutions 10.1 in H1 2010.
• Vignette Social Media Solutions (Community Applications and Community Services) will be the basis of a new Social Marketplace offering as part of Open Text Social Media.
• Vignette Collaboration will continue to be enhanced as part of the underlying Vignette Social Media technology stack.
• Vignette’s Transactional Content Management product line (think SAP and Oracle integrations, B2B and eCommerce) should see the light of day at some point.

More on CMWire.com

Enterprise CMS provider Open Text announced unaudited financial results for Q4 and FY2009.

Despite the current economic climate, OTEX reports achieving bottom line target, although net income for fiscal year 2009, and license revenue and operating cash flow in the fourth quarter have dipped.

Conversations on Vignette’s fate and product integration strategies are ongoing.

Acquisitions always seem to be part of any conversation around Open Text. During Q4, the company acquired digital media, 3D applications makers Vizible for an undisclosed sum to expand its portfolio of digital media applications. There are no details yet as to what Open Text plans to really do with the eye candy that Vizible is.

Finalized in July of this year, the acquisition of Web CMS vendor Vignette and its positioning in Open Text is starting to look less nebulous.

John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text, said, “We are pleased with how the acquisition is progressing and to date the integration is tracking to plan.” While also adding “I am disappointed that we were slightly off on our Q4 revenue targets, mainly due to the WCM delays where customers were waiting to see our new WCM strategy with the announcement of the Vignette acquisition.”

Vignette’s prior (not very promising) financial behavior and miscellaneous struggles are playing a role in Open Text’s balance sheet.

According to Open Text’s CFO Paul McFeeters, “As part of acquisition accounting, we will fair value the acquired deferred revenue for customer support contracts…  However, I expect the range of this adjustment to be between US$ 6 million and US $ 8 million for the first year of operations. While we will not break out the financial effect of the acquired Vignette business, I will remind you that they were operating at a breakeven margin. We expect this acquisition to be neutral to the operations in Q2, accretive in Q3, and on our operating model by the end of this fiscal year.”

In addition to that, Open Text plans to cut Vignette’s worldwide workforce (layoffs wouldn’t be for the first time) and “continue to rationalize facilities in both Open Text and Vignette. ” Open Text and Vignette restructuring charge will be approximately US$ 32 million to US$ 40 million. How many jobs is that?

It would be reasonable to expect that Vignette and former RedDot (now, Open Text Web Solutions) will be merging in some way or another. With  Vignette, most likely, taking the upper hand. The detailed roadmap and product integration strategies should be announced in October at the North American Content World Conference in Orlando, FL.

More on OTEX numbers on CMSWire

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.

While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

In the meantime, there’s still some Vignette cash to recognize on OTEX’s balance sheet.

According to the “big brother,” support will continue for Vignette’s products and (the relatively quickly decreasing) installed base (bringing in the licensing revenue). The same applies to existing Web Solutions products and customers. No comment has been made in regards to new(er) Vignette products.

There is a talk about a “combined product,” but no details on what it will be, except for providing a supersized meal of a “full set of feature options, from… fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to… enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments.”

Vignette’s social media, DAM and personalized content seem to be some of the most palatable notes in this content management connoisseur combo. Open Text also expressed intent to potentially leverage some of Vignette’s components in its ECM Suite.

More details on the product strategy and the product roadmap are not likely to be announced earlier than October, when Open Text’s annual conference — Content World 2009 – will take place.

Restructuring is expected. We should know more about the range of that initiative around the end of August.

Originally posted on CMSWire: Vignette Stockholders Said Yes to Open Text Acquisition

We all remember when FatWire announced its kinda Chip&Dale-comes-to-rescue attempt to save Vignette and Interwoven customers “plagued” by recent acquisitions. And some of us had mixed feelings about it.

Clickability took it up a notch in their whitepaper entitled “What Vignette is Not Telling You” and went like this:

Are you a Vignette V5 or V6 User? Did you answer “yes” to this question? If so, be afraid. Be
very afraid.

I’d be the last one to go to bat for Vignette, but this move from Clickability is not what I would consider good marketing and/or business in general. (It’s not rugby, guys — waving to the “founding fathers”.)

My questions:

• Since when do we use whitepapers as nuclear weapons? Rather spend your time on collecting useful information for prospects, while marketing-fluffing and fooling them as little as possible.
• What happened to being competent when quoting sources and putting “facts” on paper?

Facts, Quotes and Sources

According to analysts, over 35% of Vignette users are currently marooned on the EOL (end of life) island of Vignette V5 or V6 technology.

Speaking of quoting your sources and proper attribution (or lack thereof), which analysts exactly said that? VIGN can correct me, but I would imagine the number of customers on V5 is more like 15%. Just a guess.

If current Vignette customers are looking to upgrade, it would be more in the realm of from V7.x to V7.6, or even to the upcoming V8, that (speaking of “slow innovation”) shows much promise, as have some of the recently released Vignette products.

But don’t just rely on this paper. Check the facts. Talk to your Vignette sales reps (or whomever is responsible for your account following the recent Open Text acquisition)…

Clearly, there is a lack of facts in this whitepaper. And the last bit is just mean and not true. The market is tough, VIGN is an easy target — I understand all that. But I also believe (call me naive) in playing nicely with your competition and doing good business. Vile whitepapers like this one wouldn’t exactly look appealing if I were a prospect.

…According to CMS Wire, “And while we’re at it, we have to mention something about long
product development cycles, and Vignette’s slowness in adopting its own new releases. Would
that be out of fear of complex content migrations and painful upgrades?”

Hello, I don’t mind being quoted, but don’t take it out of context. That is Journalism 101, which may not necessarily apply to some snide marketing tactics — I am aware of that.

Anything Vignette do to the VCM at this point is little more than lipstick on a pig. The product’s fundamental architecture is so broken that no amount of make up will hide the cracks. V7 user on CMS Watch

The above was posted by anonymous here on CMSWire and *not* on CMS Watch. Is it that hard to get the two sources straight? Additionally, there’s nothing in the comment indicating it was posted by a Vignette user. Could’ve been posted by a horse wearing just enough make-up.

Vignette is losing long-term customers to Clickability because we off er an end-to-end solution at 1/3 of the price you’d pay for a Vignette upgrade.

Really? Vignette can be very expensive yes, but let’s not fool everyone into thinking that the two vendors play in the same sandbox. They are not. The cloud shows a lot of potential, but many enterprises are quite vocal in saying “No!” to hosted options at this time. It’s not a one-size-fits-all option. “It all happens seamlessly in the cloud” is a fairytale at best, not panacea.

And since Clickability only mentions analysts, when it’s favorable, how about this one — Gartner: Cloud technology needs seven years to mature.

Using Twitter as Campaign Launcher

Feature sets and capabilities I am not even getting into. If you look at Clickability’s enterprise options pricing, it is coming close to what one would expect to pay to any of the hosted CMS vendors.

Vignette is indeed losing customers, but Clickability is hardly the first alternative as a CMS replacement.

The funny thing is this new “campaign” from Clickability was “launched” in a tweet. As of publish time, there are no official announcements or press releases on the corporate site. That’s one heck of an effective marketing tactic. To all of the 130 followers that Clickability boasts.

If you want to see the entire whitepaper, you’d have to register and, probably,  endure sales calls. Mine should be coming in the next 6 hours, according to the follow-up e-mail. Except, it won’t be. If there were validation rules built in webforms that Clickability produces, they’d know that the textual “you don’t want to know” is not a valid entry for a numerical phone# field.

It’s one thing to criticize Vignette failrly and use quotes/facts properly. This is not what I see in the whitepaper. Is there really a need to get ugly? Will that buy you more customers? To other CMS vendors devising their own “rescue plans,” would you please be professional and play nice?

Hot on the heels of last week’s move to “rescue” its competitors’ customers, FatWire is back in the news. Fortifying their competitive edge, folks at FatWire launched a new partner program aiming to extend reach and consulting capabilities globally.

Once Autonomy Interwoven and Vignette customers start jumping the ship (if they, in fact, do so), a stronger partner network will clearly come in handy. Sapient, Satyam and EMC Conchango are among FatWire’s “leading partners,” if that tells you anything.

More on CMSWire: FatWire Aims to Strengthen Its Partner Program