Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

October 30, 2007 - By leveraging Sun's identity management technologies, Vignette's Digital Services Hub enables companies to effectively market and present the most compelling content and services to their customers, when they want it, where they want it.

For more than 10 years, Vignette has played an integral role in the evolution of the Internet and the Web. Vignette realized that some clients needed more than they could deliver on their own. They needed a solution that addressed the entire digital services value chain from content management to presentation, with different commerce models, and multi-channel delivery. So Vignette partnered with industry leaders such as Sun to incorporate the additional functionality necessary to address these needs.

Sun and Vignette

Sun and Vignette have worked together for years, continuously strengthening their alliance to deliver innovative solutions to power the Internet and the Web. In fact, most Vignette solutions are developed completely on the Java platform. So, when Vignette needed a solution for identity management and access management, they naturally turned to a trusted partner and leader in identity management services - Sun Microsystems.

Digital Services Hub

Digital Services Hub is an extension of Vignette's Next-Generation Web platform specifically designed to manage and deliver rich multimedia content to any Web-enabled device through a single framework. With Digital Services Hub, Vignette and key technology partners, including Sun, bring together content, commerce, and community across multiple channels and devices and give business owners the power to control the consumer experience, drive commerce models, reach desired communities and quickly launch new services. Currently the greatest need for the solution is in the telecommunications, media, and entertainment markets. However, the technology can be applied across all markets, including healthcare, retail, financial services, or any market segment that requires anytime, anyplace, personalized connections with customers.

Digital Services Hub combines Vignette technologies with components from Sun, Valista, Volantis, and SafeNet to provide a single, flexible application for collecting, managing, approving, and delivering electronic assets and rich media to consumers based on preferences, demographics, and demonstrated interests.

• Identity management - Vignette chose the leader in identity management solutions, Sun Java Identity Management Suite, to provide a single and unified model for controlling and delivering all forms of digital objects, media content, services, and applications on multiple platforms to multiple devices. With the ability to centrally provision and manage millions of users, Java Identity Management Identity Suite also provides password management, synchronization services, access management, single sign-on, and access control, as well as the ability to track user preferences while keeping all of this data secure. "Sun's identity management is the component that enables companies to understand who their users are so they can create customized, individualized experiences for them, which is an absolutely critical piece of the Digital Services Hub solution", says Jen Wachtel, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Vignette.


• Commerce - Valista provides merchandising, payment processing, and revenue settlement capabilities.


• Delivery to mobile devices - Volantis provides optimized and personalized mobile content push, detects and recognizes over 4000 devices, each with more than 350 attributes, and renders the appropriate content to those devices in the right format.


• Protecting content and digital rights management - SafeNet provides encryption technologies that protect communications, intellectual property, and digital content, as well as digital rights management, which is incorporated into the content management process.

All of that Content Needs a Scalable Platform

Digital Services Hub can scale to millions of assets and transactions without degrading service, and respond quickly whenever new and revolutionary content commerce opportunities emerge - and this scalability can be seamless when deployed on the Sun platform. From a single-core x64 blade to the largest mainframe-class system, the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) runs on all of the systems from Sun, enabling IT to start small and grow without painful OS migrations. Sun's commitment to scalability extends to storage as well, with a complete portfolio of affordable, modular disk and tape solutions. In addition, Sun's global presence and market share in telco and media/entertainment provide a familiar platform that makes it easier to implement Digital Services Hub.

Industry leading identity management and incomparable, seamless scalability. Just two reasons why Vignette partners with Sun for Digital Services Hub.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops marketing communications for the technology industry.