You have seen the CNET. Inc's World Wide Web sites and watched it's television shows. Pretty soon, you will be able to use the software.

Vignette Corp., an Austin Texas startup, bought the server software used by CNET to support 1.3 million hits per day on it's sites for delivering online news, searching the Web and finding shareware. The CNET sites comprise the equivalent of tens of thousands of pages. Much of the information is stored as structured data in Sybase, Inc. databases and converted to Web pages as users request it.

Laying the foundation

Vignette plans to use the Presentation of Real-Time Interactive Service Material (PRISM) software as the basis for a new commercial Web server product aimed at large Web sites. The product also bill include software fro Andromedia, Inc. that was designed to track traffic patterns on a Web site.

The Andromedia software--scheduled to be available late next month--reports how many hits a site receives, which pages are requested in what order and other traffic patterns.

Vignette's new server product is due to go into beta-testing in October and will become generally available by year's end.

It will support databases from Oracle, Corp. and Sybase and will run on Windows NT and common Unix variants. Pricing hasn't been set.

Sam Gassel, a technical manager at Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. in Atlanta, said commercial software that runs large Web sites could be very attractive. Gassel helps manager the CNN Interactive Web site (www.cnn.com).

"Almost anyone would want to buy the software rather than build it," Gassel said. "The content is the most interesting thing."

But the software would have to match a company's way of doing business before it will be accepted.

For instance, some companies require that Web content be approved by several managers before it is posted.

"If it's customizable, there's going to be a learning curve, and if it's not customizable there's a question of whether it does what you want." Gassel said.

Vignette stands to gain something very rare on the Internet: software with a proven track record.

Other server systems for managing very large Web sites have just been introduced by Oracle; Next Software, Inc.; Broadvision, Inc.; Applix, Inc; and others.

Didn't want to do software

Apart from an equity investment in Vignette and a seat on Vignette's board, CNET gets to leave a business it never wanted to be in: software development.

"When we first started out, we had no intention of building this." said Halsey Minor, CEO of the San Francisco company. "But we couldn't find anything like it."

PRISM was designed to allow nontechnical people to create content using their favorite graphics or word-processing tools. that content is stored in a relational database.

Separately, production staff builds Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) templates that will control how pages look online. When a page gets called up, the templates and content are merged. Frequently used pages get stored as HTML documents, ready to view, while less-popular pages are broken down and stored as components.