Against the backdrop of the Sun and Oracle acquisition announcements of last week, it's easy to miss the fact that Vignette stock enjoyed a surprising spike, finishing the week 23 percent higher. Not bad, considering the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 4 percent in the same period. (See key stock statistics here.)

Vignette's stock-price pop was broadly attributed to new earnings guidance from the company concerning its fourth fiscal quarter results. The actual results won't be announced officially until this Thursday. The company said in an SEC filing that for the quarter ended December 31, 2007, "revenue is expected to exceed the high end of guidance and be in the range of $52 to $54 million."

One data point doesn't constitute a trend, however, and recent financial trends for Vignette have been ugly. At $15.00 (Friday's closing price), VIGN stock is down 30 percent from its 52-week high. The five-year trend is even worse: $100 spent on Vignette stock on January 18, 2002 would have resulted in $32.53 remaining in your pocket today.

Vignette's third-quarter numbers for 2007 show license revenues down 50 percent (yes, 50 percent) from the same quarter a year earlier, at a little over $8 million versus $16.3 million for Q3 of 2006. Revenue from services was, however, up by 8 percent.

Vignette's operating margins have been in the low single digits (percentage-wise) for several years. Compare this to Open Text or EMC, with margins in the 10 to 13 percent range (or Oracle, at 33 percent).

It would be premature to suggest that Vignette is in an unrecoverable death-spiral. With assets exceeding liabilities by $300 million, the company clearly has a decent cushion, even as it struggles to reverse a long, painful down trend in profitability.

At the same time, some large Vignette customers have told us that they are monitoring the company's financial performance and dearth of new license income with some trepidation. Customers -- understandably -- never like change. Of course, acquisition rumors around Vignette have been circulating for the last 6 years. We tend to think that Vignette (like Interwoven) would not be a easy company for another vendor to digest. We'll keep watching.