Vignette Corp. announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Epicentric Inc. Vignette will pay up to $32 million in cash and restricted stock for Epicentric. Shareholders representing a majority of the Epicentric shares have agreed to vote in favor of and have executed voting agreements approving the transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in December. With the acquisition, Vignette will increase its customer base by approximately 250 in industries ranging from energy and financial services to healthcare and telecommunications. Vignette will integrate Epicentric’s portal technologies with its content management solution, enabling customers to work with a single vendor to build and deploy business applications for the Web. 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. The combined products also will offer the ability to use and manage content where it lives, regardless of its format or repository. Full Epicentric support for Vignette V7 is slated for the first quarter of 2003. www.epicentric.com, www.vignette.com