I found this recent release from the edcos page. Seen it yet?
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Vignette and edocs Form Alliance to Enhance E-Relationships with Bill Presentment and Payment
Tight integration of Vignette solutions with BillDirect™ expands scope and personalization features of online bill presentment
AUSTIN, TX - Sep. 15, 1999 -- Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN), the leader in building E-Relationships solutions, announced a partnership with edocs, the leading provider of Internet billing software. Under the agreement, customers across the industry will be quicker to market in adding flexible bill presentment and payment capabilities to their Web sites. The partners will tightly integrate Vignette StoryServer™ 4 software and Vignette Syndication Server™ software with the edocs BillDirect™ electronic bill presentment and payment system.
For the first time, companies will be able to combine data from bills and statements on their legacy systems with knowledge of the consumer's Web behavior to deliver customized bill presentment and payment and make offers that closely fit the consumer's needs. Companies offering consumers the ability to electronically view and pay their bills online benefit from deeper customer relationships and reduced customer care and remittance processing costs.
"Our customers want the speed of collection, reduction in float and other benefits of online bill presentment, but they don't want to spend months making it work with their systems," said Bill Daniel, senior vice president of products at Vignette. "We partnered with edocs, to enable our customers to not only present bills, but to personalize the user's experience based on the actual contents of their bills and statements, and to get it all working in a matter of weeks."
Additionally, the integration between Vignette and edocs will allow companies to syndicate billing data to portals, so customers can have a single place to view and pay bills online.
"We're pleased to partner with Vignette," said Jim Moran, executive vice president and co-founder of edocs. "Integrating Vignette's solutions with edocs BillDirect gives us access to a new class of customers—the portals—by enabling customized bill presentment and syndication of content. Together we will provide technology that will, for the first time, enable portals and other sites to aggregate bill and statement presentment with partners so a consumer can see his electric bill and his phone bill on the same personal Web page."
Bill presentment syndication, is enabled by the ICE-protocol-based integration of Vignette Syndication Server with edocs BillDirect. With this new capability, billing companies can provide summary data to aggregators and portals while maintaining the integrity and branding of their information.
"Internet content and marketing are becoming more precisely targeted and personalized toward each individual user. Combining online and offline knowledge of a customer is a major challenge for most marketers," said Paul Hughes, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group. "The edocs and Vignette convergent solution enables marketers to easily access some of the most sophisticated and comprehensive customer profiling capabilities available today."
About edocs
Founded in 1997, edocs is the leading provider of Internet billing solutions that deepen customer relationships and dramatically reduce the costs associated with customer care, bill and statement delivery, and remittance processing. edocs' BillDirect product has been selected by some of the world's largest billers and bill and statement service providers, including Bell & Howell, Boston Edison, CheckFree and Lason. edocs' BillDirect includes a complete, standards based rapid application development and deployment environment for EBPP applications. edocs makes it easy for billers to deploy and manage high volume EBPP solutions that deliver personalized and interactive bills, statements and invoices through the biller's own website, via e-mail, or through ebill consolidators such as CheckFree and Transpoint. For more information about edocs, visit our Web site at www.edocs.com.
About Vignette
Vignette Corporation (Nasdaq: VIGN), the leader in building E-Relationships, provides enterprise solutions for companies that are building businesses online. More than 290 global companies, including U S West, National Semiconductor, DaimlerChrysler, Nokia, Qualcomm, CNET, Bertelsmann and Ziff-Davis' ZDNet, use Vignette solutions as part of their online strategy. Vignette has won numerous industry awards including the Crossroads A-list Award; Red Herring Magazine's 100 - Top 50 Public Companies in 1999, Best Overall Private Company in 1998 and 1998 Best Product Award for StoryServer™. In April 1999, the company's StoryServer™ 4 was included in the Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Vignette spearheaded the Information & Content Exchange (ICE) initiative with more than 80 other member companies including Microsoft, National Semiconductor and Sun Microsystems. Based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), ICE 1.0 is the world's first protocol to enable content syndication. Vignette's product line includes Vignette StoryServer™ 4, Vignette Development Center™ (VDC™) software, Vignette Multi-Channel Server™ and Vignette Syndication Server™ (VSS™), the world's first ICE-compatible product. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Vignette Corporation also has offices located throughout Europe and in Australia and can be found on the Web at vignette.com.
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