That is one acquisitive company.
Offermatica is a great fit in the Omniture range of services. It’s been well-known for some time in the industry that despite its strengths, Touch Clarity’s technology wasn’t going to give Omniture the full range of testing & optimization capabilities they needed. I had thought that perhaps the Omniture board were starting to feel distinctly sated with all their recent acquisitions and might balk at another. But they clearly have bigger bellies than I gave them credit for.
There’s a rule of thumb that says as markets mature, they tend to shake out into three major players, with other players either being squeezed out or having to survive round the edges as niche players (the so-callled “Rule of Three“). Omniture is clearly emerging as a major force in this market and are unlikely to go anywhere; so this afternoon’s parlor game is: who will the other two be? Your thoughts in the comments, please.
Gatineau? 🙂
I guess there is a gap between the tools that, fits web analytics professional needs and the ones with better brand position and price.
Indextools is in my opinion one of the most flexible and professional platform I’ve ever used and it has really affordable prices. This is probably because they have (or had) a less positioned brand than omniture has.
I really like Coremetrics as well, its also flexible and with logic prices.
So in my opinion the three big player should be Indextools, Coremetrics and Omniture, but the truth is that the market is getting wierd, and the web analytics tool analysis goes from a flexible and very expensive Omniture, to a free and non-flexible Google Analitics. Why non-flexible? Because as much easy to handle the tool, as less flexible is. Unless the tools have the posibility of switching from beginners to professional profiles, they offer or a very easy to handle tool with a fix quantity of metrics to choose from, but with no chance of customizing your metrics and KPI’s like Google Analytics. On the other hand, tools like SPSS for web analytics are extremely flexible, actually you can analyze your data with total freedom but it’s not friendly at all.
So, in my opinion in a near future we will have two type of tools. The flexible ones (Indextool, Omniture and coremetrics) professional oriented, with prices situated at levels between Indextools and Omniture, and the easy to handle ones, end user (beginners) oriented, with GA, Gatineau and Yahoo’s(?) for free.
Hi Juan,
Thanks for the plug about seeing us in the end game. It means a lot to us! However; I would (being objective for a second) not discount good old Webtrends yet, they really seem to have gotten their act together lately.. I am sorry to say 🙂 ha ha
Cheers
Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog
Hi Dennis, I don’t want to invade “Ians place” with something a bit out of topic but I would like to explain why I left webtrends out (this is a very personal opinion).
They are not taking care of two important process for the web analytics vendors “chain value”, Sales and Suport.
I’m working in web analytics for a long time for Fortune 500 companies what gave me the oportunity to meet lot of vendors and their solutions.
My feeling (and the feeling from other people I talked with) was that they think webtrends is the best solution in the world which make you feel like you owe them a favor.
You could have the best solution in the world (webtrens is a very, very good one, but is not the best) but if you have no clients then you have nothing. You may probably say, webtrens have and important market share, and that’s completely right, but that’s present and we are talking about future. What’s different in the future? Two markets instead of one.
1- End users (non-professional) clients: This market is for free providers (Google Analytics, Gatineau, and Yahoo’s (?). They need easy to handle tools for free.
2- The professional market: web analytics is becaming more and more professional (thanks to the WAA and people like Eric and Avinash). The new professionals are completely different to the ones when webtrends gained their market share and positioned their brand. They look for more flexible and professional solutions taking care of their money (I will pay more only if your service worth it).
So my analysis was made in this context.
Sorry Ian for the long comment 🙂