Open Text completes Vignette acquisition

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 23 July 2009 07:28

IT Industry - Strategy

ECM vendor, Open Text has completed the acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette Corporation, with the purchase getting the approval of Vignette's stockholders.

Open Text president and CEO, John Shackleton, said that Open Text would continue to support Vignette's products and installed base, including users of previous versions of Vignette content management, as well as Open Text's existing Web Solutions products.

Shackleton said the combined product line would provide users with a full set of feature options, from an “easy-to-use, fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to a fully integrated, enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments.”

According to Shackleton, with the acquisition of Vignette now complete, Open Text was now laying the “strategic groundwork that will further its position as the independent leader in ECM, with a comprehensive portfolio of Web solutions to meet the broad range of market requirements.”

"The new demands of social and digital media, and fast-growing user expectations for more personalised Web interactions are placing enormous pressures on customers to keep up. This is an important area of innovation for us going forward as we expand our ECM portfolio Vignette will play a key role in this strategy.”

"We are making a strong commitment of support to our WCM customers and, at the same time, taking advantage of an opportunity to broaden our WCM capabilities to address a much wider range of needs in the market.”

Shackleton said the acquisition of Vignette had expanded Open Text’s capabilities to meet the “evolving needs of organisations to deliver compelling, interactive sites that drive e-business, customer loyalty and lead generation.”

According to Shackleton, Open Text also sees opportunities to leverage other key components of Vignette's product portfolio within the Open Text ECM Suite. He says Open Text will announce more details on product strategy in the weeks ahead, and will roll out a detailed product roadmap to include Vignette products at its annual Content World 2009 Conference, in October.

Under the merger agreement between Open Text and Vignette, each outstanding share of Vignette common stock was converted into the right to receive US$8.00 in cash, without interest and 0.1447 shares of Open Text common stock.
 
The acquisition is valued at around US$321 million.