The Epicentric/Vignette deal is interesting. Portals are about aggregation and CMS is about publishing. It links the portal and content management space and demonstrates that webservices will be a part of content management – no big surprise.
More interesting, however, is that this is the model that was innovated on a grass-roots level with hybrid RSS news aggregation and weblog publishing systems like Dave Winer’s Radio Userland.
Weblog publishing via standard XML based RPC API’s coupled with RSS aggregation are perhaps the template for all future enterprise content management systems.
On a secondary note, it is bad news for Plumtree, with Epicentric, their nearest rival, selling for $32M it proves that they will have to go way beyond the current portal space into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) to validate their $70M market cap (already way below their peak of nearly $300M). To do this quickly will involve developing adapters into Enterprise apps. Much of this will require development that would be unnecessary if started later, as standardized SOAP API’s become more commonplace.