Will it never end?
Whilst I (and the rest of the world) have been predicting consolidation in the industry for the last several years, and it was no secret that Visual Sciences was looking for a buyer (or being courted, depending on who you ask), this news is still a shock to me. Omniture has spent well over $500 million – a quarter of its market cap – on acquisitions since the beginning of the year, and whilst its earlier acquisitions were for complementary functionality to the Omniture suite, there’s a huge overlap between Visual Science’s technology and Omniture’s.
So a lot of the value of this acquisition will be burned off by retiring product lines and switching customers from one platform to another. Presumably Omniture sees sufficient synergies to justify the nearly $400m price tag (albeit that this mostly a stock deal), but it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out. They’ve got a ton of integration stuff to do there.
Is this part of a well-thought out strategy to broaden its customer base and acquire essential new functionality, or an expensive way to prop up Omniture’s extraordinary stock price? Only time will tell.