Content management and portal provider Vignette Corporation is buying enterprise collaboration software company Intraspect in a deal worth $20m (£12m).

The move is aimed at extending Vignette's portal and content management functionality with the J2EE-based collaboration capabilities of the Intraspect platform.

Vignette's European director of business strategy, David Thorpe, said Vignette was in a good financial position to extend its core product offering into the emerging 'smart enterprise suite', which links database, content management and collaborative systems through a portal.

"Intraspect represents the next leg of the stool for us, allowing for collaboration around information as well as enabling knowledge sharing on an enterprise scale," Thorpe said.

"We have based our products on an open layer architecture and Intraspect fits in well with our strategy to evolve a product stack based on the open architecture of J2EE."

The deal will be finalised in the last quarter of this year, while there are plans to release a Vignette-branded module of Intraspect's collaboration platform by the first quarter of 2004 following its integration at portal level.

In the meantime Intraspect will continue to support its users, as well as combine its sales channels with those of Vignette.

Intraspect Europe's vice president and general manager, Dan French, said: "We are very excited about the fact that a tangible suite is taking shape that will deliver on the vision of an integrated, unified solution that includes content management, portals and collaboration at an enterprise level."