New Vignette Product Recognized by eBusiness Community

Vignette Corporation's launch last week of its new V/5 eBusiness Platform has generated a groundswell of support from the worldwide eBusiness community. The product is the cornerstone of Vignette's new V/Series architecture and is the only complete eBusiness platform that provides the business insight, rapid business reconfiguration and integration across multiple touchpoints required for online success.

"Vignette's new V/Series architecture and strategy demonstrates their understanding that enterprises currently need a more integrated online solution," said Guy Creese, senior analyst, Aberdeen Group. "Many corporations now want software that manages, personalizes, and syndicates content, as well as enables them to integrate that content and affiliated processes with the rest of the company's systems. Vignette's V/Series answers that multiplicity of needs and marks the company's move into the eBusiness platform marketplace."

Designed for both B2B and B2C applications, the V/5 eBusiness Platform provides a powerful analytical and data mining foundation to provide clear business insight into how and why customers behave in certain ways. Based on this business insight, the platform allows personalized interactions with endusers via multiple communication channels such as the Internet, e-mail, wireless phones and pagers so that eBusinesses can provide a coherent experience to an online audience.

According to Uwe Luhrig, manager of interactive media for debis Systemhaus, one of Europe's leading information technology service providers, the platform will allow his company to better serve its systems integration customers that require world class wireless capabilities. "The platform's V/5 Communication Server provides debis' customers with a robust platform for developing mobile business applications and managing relationships with our customers, partners, and employees via multiple electronic touchpoints," said Luhrig. "The V/5 Communication Server will play an important role in serving our systems integration customers looking for best-of-breed wireless services."

One of the initial users of the platform's V/5 Relationship Marketing Server is The CheckOut Entertainment Network, the recognized online entertainment leader. "Vignette's Relationship Marketing Server's analytical capabilities will enhance CheckOut.com's existing personalization infrastructure," said Edmond Mesrobian, CTO, The CheckOut.com Entertainment Network. "This service will also improve the ability of our marketers to clearly understand the specific needs of each of our site visitors and to respond with highly relevant information and product offerings."

Complimentary to the V/5 platform is Vignette's recently introduced V2B Services, an online user community and marketplace that serves as a "one-stopdestination" for purchasing, implementing and using eBusiness applications. Vignette customers and technology partners are embracing these services and foresee an industry-wide market demand for resources that simplify the process of building and maintaining an online business.

"The Vignette V2B Marketplace addresses the needs of today's organizations by providing a means to rapidly source eBusiness applications and augment their online offerings," said Dave Mullan, Vitessa chief executive officer. "We applaud Vignette's vision and see the V2B Marketplace as a valuable channel to deliver our eCommerce solutions to a rich eBusiness audience."

The Vignette Application Foundation (VAF) element of Vignette's V/5 Content Management Server product, a part of the V/5 eBusiness Platform, has also proven appealing to application developers like Octane Software, which provides Internet Relationship Management applications and infrastructure software. "By integrating Octane 2000 with Vignette's VAF open architecture, we are enabling our joint customers to rapidly implement Octane products on Vignette's highly scalable platform to manage relationships between customers, buyers, suppliers and employees across multiple communication channels -- Web, email, chat, phone and fax," said Todd Rowe, Octane vice president of business development. "The integration provides a consolidated, consistent view of customer information accessible through the Vignette architecture, which enhances high-volume Web sites' ability to engage, acquire and retain customers in the new Internet economy."

Another leading company committed to integrating with VAF is Motive Communications. "Motive believes Vignette is delivering significant value to the industry through the Vignette Application Foundation (VAF)," said Scott Harmon, CEO of Motive Communications. "The VAF provides an open architecture and methodology for easily integrating capabilities such as e-service into any eBusiness application. The industry has clearly recognized the importance of a single point of service, and Motive will meet that need by tightly integrating its products with the VAF. The integration will enable companies to easily snap-in our robust e-service network solution that automatically connects users to answers and experts when they have problems."

About the V/5 eBusiness Platform products

The V/5 eBusiness Platform consists of an open and scalable architectural foundation, and includes the following integrated set of products:

• The Vignette V/5 Content Management Server provides tightly integrated content management, scalable content delivery and "content aware" personalization;
• The Vignette V/5 Lifecycle Personalization Server brings a wide array of proven personalization capabilities for eBusinesses to provide highly personalized service to customers, employees and business partners;
• The Vignette V/5 Relationship Marketing Server provides a complete, closed-loop eMarketing solution that enables business users to gain critical business insight by measuring and analyzing customer interactions across multiple businesstouchpoints;
• The Vignette V/5 Communication Server empowers eBusinesses to connect to a mobile audience and manage relationships with customers, partners, and employees via multiple electronic touchpoints such as e-mail, pagers, PDAs, and WAP enabled mobile phones;
• The Vignette V/5 Syndication Server enables customers to expand their eBusinesses to a scalable network of affiliated online partners; and
• The Vignette V/5 Advanced Deployment Server allows users to manage enterprise-wide development, testing and production environments for eBusiness applications.

About the Vignette Application Foundation

An integral part of V/5, the VAF is an open application framework and methodology for rapidly assembling, deploying, and managing best-of-breed, componentized eBusiness applications. The VAF lets developers dynamically "snap in" pre-packaged eBusiness application modules that can be developed internally or by third parties, allowing users to leverage the power of hundreds of Vignette customers and partners. VAF enables users to reduce the time it takes to adapt to changing business needs and market conditions by allowing eBusinesses to rapidly reconfigure reusable applications. It provides true application and content portability across platforms, database architectures, security models and site structures.

About the Vignette Application Power Pack (Power Pack)

Available separately from the V/5 eBusiness Platform, the Power Pack is a comprehensive collection of re-useable, cross-platform, packaged application modules designed to accelerate the assembly, deployment, and management of eBusiness applications. In today's market, companies typically invest significant time and money building core eBusiness capabilities from scratch in response to time-to-deployment pressures. This "develop-and-go" approach consumes precious time and development cycles. Furthermore, once the application has been deployed, these core capabilities are often difficult to extend or re-use in other applications. Built to run on the VAF, the Power Pack supports a "configure-and-go" approach that significantly advances the starting point for many types of eBusiness applications. The Power Pack application modules provide browser-based user interfaces and APIs for managing and finding information, enabling personalized interactions and building online communities.

Pricing and Availability

VAF is now available and is included in the price of the V/5 eBusiness Platform, which will begin shipping at the end of Q2 2000. The Vignette Application Power Pack is currently available separately. V2B Services is a complimentary service available to Vignette customers and partners. For additional details and pricing information, please contact Vignette.

About Vignette Corporation

Vignette Corporation is a leading supplier of eBusiness applications for building online businesses. Vignette's products enable Internet businesses to create and extend relationships with prospects and customers and ease highvolume transaction exchanges with suppliers and partners, all of which enhances customer satisfaction. Vignette powers more than 500 of the leading dot.com and Fortune 500 eBusinesses, including AT&T, BMW, CBS Broadcasting, CNET, Daimler/Chrysler, Simon & Schuster, Sprint, Tandy Corporation, and United Airlines. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Vignette Corporation has offices located throughout Europe, Asia, and in Australia and can be found on the Web at www.vignette.com.

Vignette V/Series Partner Quotes:

• Black Pearl --
  "Black Pearl is very excited to be one of the initial partners in Vignette's V2B Marketplace. Our Knowledge Broker in conjunction with the V/5 Platform delivers the most robust solution for providing rule-driven interactions in the financial services and telecommunications segments," said Black Pearl chief executive officer Lisa Hammitt.

• edocs --
  "The Vignette Application Foundation (VAF) modular architecture allows us to advance the deployment of our Internet billing and customer management extensions to Vignette's eBusiness platform," said Jim Moran, executive vice president and co-founder of edocs, a leading provider of Internet billing and customer management software and solutions. "Our BillDirect Internet billing and customer care solution is often the first core Web application deployed by our customers -- traditional off-line service companies like telcos, utilities, financial services organizations and credit card issuers. By integrating with VAF, we enable those customers to then build out a robust, dynamic and integrated eCommerce platform and quickly implement a compelling Internet strategy."

• Idiom --
  "We see the V/5 eBusiness platform as a tremendous opportunity to leverage Idiom's globalization expertise and technology," said Fred Lizza, president & CEO at Idiom Inc "The platform's highly-configurable, modular nature provides an excellent foundation for the development of global eBusiness applications that maximize Idiom's technology."

• MarketSoft --
  "Businesses using MarketSoft's eMarketing solutions can expect to convert a more significant number of Web site prospects into customers, as well as increase customer retention by leveraging V/5 Relationship Marketing Server's segmentation capabilities," said Mike Grandinetti, vice president of marketing and business development at MarketSoft. "In addition, for the first time, customers will be able to easily interact with online customers beyond the Web through the use of V/5 Communication Server. This powerful combination creates a true end-to-end eMarketing solution suite."

• MegaTribe --
  "Vignette's platform has enabled us to quickly implement and evolve our fully scalable and integrated scheduling engine," said Gabriel Whyel, MegaTribe's chief technology officer. "Now our customers will enjoy automated, real-time appointment and reservation scheduling on the Internet as well as wireless networks. Built on top of Vignette's technology, our product matches the pace and flexibility of businesspeople working any time, any place."

• Resonate --
  "Vignette has a great track record as a leading platform for building online business applications," said Stan Chin, vice president of business development at Resonate Inc "With Resonate technology seamlessly integrated into Vignette V/5, dynamic online services become highly available and scalable to provide a predictable online customer experience, enhancing customer satisfaction. With Resonate technology, Vignette V/5 now offers load balancing of V/5 components across multiple hardware machines, automatic failover if one machine goes down, and automatic backup and recovery."

Contact Jack Taylor of Vignette Corporation, 512-970-2515 jgtaylor@vignette.com Website: www.vignette.com.