Vignette tries to start a WCM Vendor Meme… (yawn!)
Disclaimer: The following is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Alfresco Software.
It didn’t take too long after the CMS Vendor Meme inspired by Kas Thomas, kicked off by Day Software and so well documented by Jon that Vignette tries to start their own “WCM Vendor Meme“. The original meme, while not really exclusively related to content management (I’d argue it applies to pretty much all enterprise software), was a fun and lighthearted little game but Vignette comes along and tries to usurp the idea to their own ends.
I’m going to say right now that, for my part, I will not offer an Alfresco response to this “meme”.
First of all, I’m not sure any vendor should come up with the list of questions as Vignette has done here. Kas is an independent, and arguably impartial third party and that’s the main reason I chose to respond to the first meme.
I found this comment interesting:
“The meme summary compiled by Jon on Tech hit me over the head with this reality since the enterprise-class competitors I ‘tagged’ in my meme mostly ended up in the lower part of the list, along with Vignette, while the high ranks were populated by vendors we rarely encounter in our conversations with Fortune 2000 enterprises.”
I would argue that one of the main reasons that happened was because Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum are entrenched in 7-15 year technologies and mindsets that have resulted in stagnation while the smaller, more agile vendors that ranked a little higher on the list can more successfully innovate and adapt to changing market conditions. That’s probably one of the main reasons Vignette’s earnings continue to drop and, more alarmingly, Vignette Professional Services account for roughly 50% of their revenue. Very scary…
Vignette continues…
“That’s why, in creating the meme below, I consulted the research of several WCM analysts and even reached out to some of my competitors to find out if they had any questions they’d like to see addressed in the same candid fashion. The questions in this meme are based on high level business and technical buying criteria for Enterprise Class WCM.”
My view is that many of those highly overpaid analysts (who were possibly bribed by the vendors) are finding themselves slowly slipping into irrelevance while a new breed has been taking their place. I would argue that analysts do their customers a disservice by publishing impossibly long checklists that virtually no single vendor can possibly meet.
Customers should consider turning things onto their heads and identify a few existing CMS solutions they like best and come up with requirements based on those. It’s way less expensive to do that than to try to mold your chosen CMS into the image cast by that laundry list of requirements. Customers will be happier, users will actually adopt the technology, and the project has a real chance to actually go live on budget and on schedule.
In looking at Vignette’s questions, I can’t help but laugh. As a former Vignette SE (Alfresco employs about 12 former Vignette employees) these are instantly recognizable as a thinly veiled and highly biased checklist highlighting Vignette’s self-perceived “strengths”.
I’m going to highlight some of the more amusing ones…
“Our software is massively scalable; we have live customers handling hundreds of sites, thousands of content contributors, millions of users, and billions of page views per month.”
Just tell that to the major hotel chain, world-wide sporting organization and others who had their Vignette implementations come crashing down until Vignette Professional Services came in to customize the product to work. All vendors must be very careful about claiming “massive scalability” as every implementation is unique and while the software may be capable of scaling in one use-case, it could die in sputtering, driveling fits in the other.
“We provide a one-stop shop for enterprise Web Experience needs, offering a full range of capabilities including at least 6 of these 7 commonly requested enterprise functionalities:
- Web Content Management
- Rich Media Management for Images, Video & RIAs
- Social Media
- Implicit & Explicit Content Targeting
- Site Analytics & Optimization
- Operational Analytics
- Email/Offline Marketing tools”
After wasting investing hundreds of millions buying OnDisplay, DataSage, Revenio, Epicentric, Intraspect, Tower Technology and most recently Vidavee, one could argue that Vignette could *possibly* address all those areas, but the dirty little secret is that even over a decade after some of those acquisitions occured, Vignette has positively and quite spectacularly failed in truly integrating all those services.
Customers foolish enough to buy from Vignette are faced with an 8 page-long pricesheet (please take a look!) and software that distributes its content across multiple disparate repositories (each product has its own) where they share only the simplest “integrated” UI veneer. This probably explains why/how Vignette Professional Services is keeping the company afloat.
Next up, when you only have a hammer…
“Our software provides presentation services that are portal-like with strong personalization, application creation & integration services and delegated administration.”
The Vignette Application Portal is pretty much the only *simple* way to render content. While the sales and sales engineers might say that customers can create websites using any web framework and programming language, a realization of the effort involved will serve as a near-instant death-knell to such foolhardy notions.
“We provide support for production deployment in virtual environments including VMWare”
Oh look! My product can be virtualized! I’d be hard-pressed to find any enterprise CMS or other product that *doesn’t* run in VMWare. It’s dirty secret time again… Vignette’s product suite is so expansive and disjointed that the typical Vignette sales engineer cannot even fathom how to install them all. So Vignette has a “Sales Enablement Team” whose primary job function is to figure out how to install all these moving parts and set up a hosted VMWare environment so that they can demo it. I pity my brethren there who still have to run more than one Vignette app on their laptops.
“Our solutions are NOT one-size-fits-all or small, medium, large only. We have a single price list plus a Global Direct Salesforce that is trained to consult with our customers to make sure that we provide the right mix of capabilities and scale to meet their enterprise needs.”
One look at the Vignette price sheet pretty much tells you that only the largest, wealthiest companies could ever afford Vignette software. In this current economic climate, there are far more affordable solutions that can solve the problem and do so better.
“I tag the same folks as last time plus Day who kicked it all off: Interwoven, Fatwire, Tridion, Oracle, Day & OpenText … I would be very interested in the responses from Ektron, CoreMedia and many of the others that were quick to respond to the first meme.”
I hereby grant all those tagged a reprieve from responding to this “meme”. Some things are best left dead and buried.
If you want a meme, I suggest we revive the “Hamster Dance” or “All your base…”.
[...] April 4] Alfresco’s @LuisSala offered his opinion on Vignette’s ECM meme effort. Very detailed, with many examples, which should not come as a [...]
Hi Luis,
I think I sense some hostility here
I've posted my thoughts on your comments on my blog:
http://jonontech.com/2009/04/04/when-cms-memes-at...
Jon
Thanks for the response. I see that, in general, you agree with my observations. From a personal perspective, one of the reasons why I left Vignette was because I lost faith in the products and the company. I grew tired of hiding the facts from my customers only to find some of them dissatisfied with incomplete projects that have gone over budget. Customers pay so much in up-front licenses that they're left with little with which to implement.
I still get irritated when I learn that, as a company (not necessarily as individuals), things simply haven't changed that much. Some things improve, but mostly things seem to wallow in festering heaps. I resent that practically all engineering has been outsourced, I believe that to have adversely affected product quality and innovation. I am perhaps overly "sensitive" when the subject of Vignette comes up, but to me it's like a sore that refuses to heal properly. I still hold affection in my heart for VAP and VBCS but the rest still needs help.
Thanks again…
– Luis
As shrill-sounding (arguably!) as your analysis is, I don't find a huge amount to quibble with here. I might have worded some of these things a bit differently here and there. But then again, I didn't work for the company; you did. I do know what it is like to work for such a company. I'll save that analysis for another day, though (or you can just ask Matt Asay, who also worked there).
Thanks, btw, for calling me an independent and impartial third party. I try to be. And I'm grateful that you didn't lump me together with the "dark-side" analysts (who take money from vendors). I agree with you that the old-school analyst model is "slowly slipping into irrelevance." I wish it wasn't so slow.
Vignette problems are complex and (this is really an awful word choice…) interwoven. Sadly, the company has become something of a whipping boy at this point. On top of all its other problems, it has a brand-rebuilding problem now.
I actually wish the company well. I don't envy executive leadership at this point. They're the ones saddled with turning this ship around. Unfortunately, though, it's the rank-and-file employees who tend to bear the brunt of the punishment. And that's what's really sad, to me.
Thanks Kas, my wording definitely borders on the, uhm… vitriolic. Given that it's personal editorial, I chose to keep it that way. I'm glad that you and a few others in the analyst world are around to keep vendors and each other honest. Hopefully the big guys will eventually change as well.
From my view things took a turn for the worst at Vignette during the Tom Hogan and Patty Jones era but the current administration has seemingly (from afar, anyway) elected to mostly maintain the status quo. It's understandable considering how a drastically a "reinvention" would impact the current customer base (and maintenance revenue), but perhaps it's better to quickly cut off the unnecessary limbs from the product portfolio before sepsis kills the body. They can then invest on the key products. More importantly, truly getting rid of products as opposed to keeping them on the price-sheet, gives the sales team (and customers) a clearer understanding of Vignette's value proposition. Who knows, maybe their new price-sheet will reflect this.
I tried to aim my comments at the company rather than the individuals, though some seem to be getting a wee bit high on the Kool Aid and believing what they're told rather than trying to act as agents of change. It is admittedly difficult to change course on such large a ship, but the culture there doesn't really encourage independent thinking and accountability. During my tenure there I witnessed more rear-end covering than actual accountability and am told by recent defectors that things still haven't improved much on that end. I find it interesting, though unsurprising, that some of the remaining "rock stars" have been effectively given "gold handcuffs", ie. large financial incentives to stay. Good for them, I guess…
Anyway, thanks again, and keep up the good work!
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