Vignette Stockholders Approve Open Text Acquisition

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

Open Source ECM Vendor Jahia Re-inforces U.S. Presence

The next wave of European content management vendors hitting the U.S. market is yet again upon us. This time, the ripples are coming from the open source Enterprise CMS vendor Jahia.

The vendor launched its U.S. mission two years ago, continuing it with further formalization of efforts by opening its North American HQ office in Washington, DC. Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia’s VP, will continue to serve as the GM for North America.

A little before that, a new R&D and Support office was opened in Montreal, Canada.

With local as well as other European open source vendors (like Hippo and Nuxeo), it may get pretty crowded in the enterprise CMS U.S. market. Closed-source ECM vendors like IBM, EMC and Open Text are surely paying attention.

More on CMSWire:  Jahia Goes Beyond Canada, Opens U.S. Headquarters

Open Text’s FirstClass is Finally iPhone-Friendly

Remember Open Text Social Media? FirstClass is a communication and collaboration platform that was used as the underlying engine in that product. If you use FirstClass for your e-mail, calendaring, etc., we have good news for you.

FirstClass (brought to Open Text via the Centrinity acquisition) went mobile.

Available from the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the long-awaited app promises “a broad range of rich features” when accessing messaging and collaboration services. Secure login can be accomplished from the above devices to any FirstClass server.

More on CMSWire: Open Text’s FirstClass is Finally iPhone-Friendly

Surreal CMS Wants to Lure Away CushyCMS Customers

Looking at Surreal CMS one wonders whether this web content management provider is coming from a James Bond-like background, or is under some sort of a perpetual NDA. The absolute lack of product version numbers or release notes makes it all quite umm… surreal.

Our intelligence forces have intercepted a message via a little-known transmission channel called Twitter that there was a new (unnamed, unnumbered) version of Surreal CMS released. And now we can share some super minimal (rest must’ve gotten scrambled), almost top secret details with you.

CushyCMS is very similar to Surreal CMS. There are pros and cons in both systems, but, architecturally, both try to deliver SaaS-like content management systems for SMBs and designers, web developers.

Given the similarities, Surreal CMS decided (just like others in the space) to include a migration “path” from CushyCMS in its latest release. Customers can transfer existing CushyCMS sites “without having to change anything on your website.” One step that’s needed is to add your websites (S)FTP credentials to the CMS and enable your web pages as you normally would.

More on CMSWire: Surreal CMS Wants to Migrate Away CushyCMS Customers

Licensing Debate Between Bluenog and Hippo Goes On

The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps.

Well, there’s been a change in the script and we’ve got a small civil war on our hands. Tempers and tensions have risen between US-based Bluenog and Netherlands-based Hippo — both companies deal in the content management space, both are tinkering with open source.

Now it’s not the fight we’re interested in — though it’s been a fun interlude of Days of Our [Software] Lives. Rather, it’s the principles behind the issue that are worth paying attention to.

In short, Bluenog has been accused of violating Hippo’s and Apache’s software licenses by using Hippo’s code and not properly giving attribution. We had a chat with both parties. Here’s what they had to say.

More on CMSWire: Oversights by Bluenog Spark Open Source Community Anger

Repackaging someone else’s code, sticking a new logo to it and selling it under a new name is one way to do it. But it is not the only way.

Perhaps, if there was a proper disclosure of origin from the very beginning, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It seems, Bluenog (intentionally or not) have chosen a different path.

Another question here is whether open source is too liberal to be controlled: in code changes or licensing violations. One can hope for others’ good manners and sticking to legalities, yet the reality shows this is not the first (and not the last) debate on OSS licensing.

Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use

Autonomy has partnered with VMS, a provider of media intelligence solutions. VMS will use Autonomy’s meaning-based computing software to build tools for media analysis and competitive intelligence.

VMS is planning to enhance its own PR and advertising solutions for media monitoring, measurement, analysis, competitive advertising and marketing intelligence, workflow management, analytics and PR measurement across all types of media.

Autonomy Interwoven web content management system — powered by Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer — will be used by VMS as an integration point for developing tools that can analyze different types of content and act accordingly.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) will also be part of the offering with Virage MediaBin, where meaning will be extracted from video and digital media.

More on CMSWire: Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use