Vignette Repositions Portal Software

Vignette BEA IBM Sun

"When the market gets it, this is a huge announcement for us," said Santi Pierini, vice president of product strategy for Vignette.

He said Vignette in coming months would be making a series of announcements around its portal strategy, including technology agreements with various portal vendors and, farther down the road, packaged portal solutions for specific markets.

The Vignette V6 Multisite Content Manager, made available Tuesday, includes portlets that provide out-of-the-box integration with each of the portal infrastructure vendors, the company said.

Vignette V6 Multisite Content Manager is actually a repackaging of the Vignette Enterprise Application Portal, a portal management tool first introduced in July.

Pierini said the market was confused by the previous name of the product and assumed it was competitive with portal platforms from application server vendors. But he said it only had about a 5 percent overlap with portal platforms.

He said the real value proposition for the software is that it enables companies to leverage their existing portal investments, while allowing the centralized administration and management of multiple portals and Web sites. The release also allows users to deploy Vignette-managed content to their portals, Pierini said.

"It looks like a great product, it really does," said Jim Murphy, an analyst with AMR Research. "It has multisite capabilities. It has delegated administration. They've done a lot in terms of interface."

Murphy, however, said the Vignette product also does most of the things you would expect a portal platform to provide. "They're trying to look complementary, when they're not," he said. "BEA has a pretty competitive portal on its own, but you wouldn't want both."

Vignette does offer content management capabilities that go beyond what most portal vendors are offering and, with the exception of Epicentric, no other vendor offers the multisite management features, Murphy said.