Open Text to acquire Vignette
Jinfo Blog

6th May 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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One of the few remaining independent large Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers, Open Text (http://www.opentext.com), is about to get even bigger. On May 6 it announced plans to acquire fellow content management system vendor Vignette (http://www. vignettte.com) for about $310 million in cash and stock. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of calendar 2009 and is subject to customary closing conditions. The Vignette acquisition is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. One, it follows Open Text's acquisition in April 2009 of Toronto-based Vizible Corporation, a privately held maker of digital media interface solutions - a purchase that should bolster the ability of OpenText to incorporate corporate collaboration into its ECM solutions. Adding Vignette to the fold means extending the potential customer base of any new solutions (and neutralizing a former rival). It's also further evidence of the contraction of the ECM market, as exemplified by the purchase by Autonomy (http://www.autonomy.com/) of rival Interwoven (http://www.interwoven.com/) in January 2009 (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16087 for background). In order to compete more effectively with heavy hitters in the ECM market like EMC, IBM and Microsoft, the mid-market players are beefing up their collaborative solutions and extending their reach. ECM as a whole is undergoing a transformation, from being an archive-focused IT problem to becoming a people-focused workflow solution. Continued growth in regulation, tight corporate budgets forcing employees to do more with less, and the onward march of social media into the workplace is going to influence the way ECM works in the future. The OpenText/Vignette deal seems a sign of things to come.

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