Keeping it real

As part of its Real Time Enterprise initiative, Vignette has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Epicentric. The companies report that under the terms of the agreement, Vignette will pay up to $32 million in cash and restricted stock for Epicentric.

Vignette believes the acquisition of Epicentric will accelerate its ability to deliver real-time enterprise Web applications by adding advanced portal and delivery management capabilities to VignetteV7, which was introduced recently. Vignette will integrate Epicentric's portal technologies with its content management solution, enabling customers to work with a single vendor for the key technologies required to build and deploy business applications for the Web.

In addition to lowering risk and decreasing deployment, maintenance and integration costs, Vignette says, the Epicentric acquisition will enhance the Vignette foundation with a number of portal-based services such as security, central role management, presentation management and targeted content delivery.

Benefits of the combined solution are said to include:

• fully integrated capabilities from a single vendor to reduce total cost of ownership, risk and deployment time;

• an open foundation built on industry standards (including Web services) to power a variety of operating systems, hardware, database and development languages; and

• flexibility to implement either the individual components or a fully integrated solution.