Vignette on sale and OpenText may be buying
A person close to Vignette and OpenText management told me two interesting tidbits today:
- Vignette has been going through a round of layoffs recently, packaging itself up for sale, and
- OpenText just retained Goldman Sachs to help it with some M&A work.
Will we be seeing "OpenVignette" soon? I suspect the answer is "Yes." OpenText needs strength outside its core records management business, and Vignette needs someone to shepherd it back to health (Its last quarter was less-than-stellar). With a roughly $300 million market capitalization, Vignette is dirt cheap.
The problem isn't the market: Interwoven continues to deliver impressive results. It's also not the people. My own experience with Vignette people is that they are high integrity and super well-qualified. (At Alfresco we've hired quite a few.)
No, the problem seems to be in execution. Perhaps OpenText can remedy this.
In the meantime, for all you open-source applications vendors, Vignette is still full of high-quality people. If you need some Java-savvy developers, sales engineers, etc., now would be the time to go calling.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
