Vignette Corporation

» see vignette.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ross Garber and Neil Webber founded Vignette in Austin in November 1995 with a goal that sounds trivial now and was not then: make publishing to the web easier, and make what gets published different depending on who is reading it. In 1996 CNET handed them the technology it had built for its own site, plus 500,000 dollars in cash, in exchange for a third of the company. In January 1997 that became StoryServer.

StoryServer is the reason this company matters. Before it, a large news website was a pile of hand-edited files and a human bottleneck. StoryServer let people who could not write code edit a story and push it through a workflow with approvals in it, then publish without touching a file. The customer list reads like a tour of the web as it was: CNET, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, National Geographic Channel, Disney, MetLife, Wachovia, UnitedHealth, Martha Stewart, NASA, the 2004 Summer Olympics. The 2004 Olympics ran on this. BSkyB ran on this.

I have never seen a copy of it and almost certainly never will. By 2007 the V6 suite was selling for between 200,000 and 400,000 dollars, which puts it in the category of software you experience only as a reader. Everybody on the web in the early 2000s was looking at pages Vignette had published, which is a strange kind of ubiquity: enormous reach, zero recognition, and a brand that lived entirely inside procurement departments.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the number ~

Vignette went public on 19 February 1999, in the middle of the bubble. The stock went out at 19 dollars and rose 152 percent on the first day of trading, closing at 47. That was the beginning rather than the peak.

By June 2000 the company had 1,300 employees, 700 customers against 130 two years earlier, and a share price of 297 dollars. That is a rise of more than 1,500 percent from the IPO, and a market capitalization of nearly nine billion dollars for a business selling content management software to corporate web teams. The customers were real and the software worked. The nine billion was the market pricing in a future where every company on earth would be buying this at once, forever.

~ suing the customers ~

In April 2001, as the bubble came apart, Vignette sued thirteen of its own customers for not paying for software they had already received. That detail deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it marks the exact moment the dot-com economy stopped being a story about growth and became a story about collections.

Those thirteen companies had signed for six-figure software during a boom and could not pay for it during a bust. Vignette had booked them as revenue. The suits are what the end of an era looks like from the vendor's side of the invoice.

~ the legacy brands page ~

Open Text announced the purchase on 6 May 2009: eight dollars in cash plus 0.1447 of an Open Text share for every Vignette share, about 12.70 a share, roughly 310 million dollars for a company that had been worth nearly nine billion nine years earlier. The deal closed on 21 July 2009 at a final 321 million, and Vignette's roughly 700 remaining employees went with it.

Open Text said at the time that it would keep supporting Vignette's products and installed base, and it did. The brand is another matter. Today vignette.com does not answer at all, there is no Vignette entry anywhere in Open Text's product listing, and the company maintains a section of that page called legacy brands where the old name appears with a one-line explanation: the web content management and portal products became part of the Experience Suite, which is now Open Text Experience Cloud. Thirteen years of work and nine billion dollars of paper value, compressed into a redirect note for customers who have not updated their bookmarks.

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