Omniture are looking Omnipresent!
I was sleeping when the Visual Sciences email dropped into my inbox and didn’t read this massive news till this morning. VS have agreed to be acquired by Omniture for $394 million. This is one I didn’t expect. I expected one of the BI companies (SAP for instance) to come in for Visual Sciences, but not their leading competitor.
I posted back in August that Omniture’s purchase of Instadia was dissapointing because in buying Instadia they basically took a powerful tool out of circulation. In this case I see it as a massive consolidation of two of the industries powerhouses. For SATAMA, this is great news, being partners with both Omniture and Visual Sciences means we are in a very strong position in Europe when this consolidation starts. We have the people trained in both systems and the consolidation means we’re dealing with one company. What is interesting is how this consolidation will effect the tools.
If it were me (knowing what I do about both sets of tools)
Visual Sciences (Visual Site) is in my opinion the strongest offering on the market today. I would keep this on a completely stand alone development path from the current Omniture offerings. I would also keep the current pricing models because they make sense. Expensive yes, but the model makes sense and you get what you pay for.
In my opinion HBX is the weakest system Omniture will own. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst and the data wharehouse should be combined as one offering, the exisiting HBX clients moved to SC and then Discover discontinued. Why waste time with it when you have Visual Site as part of your portfolio? I would move the people developing Discover to the Visual Sciences development team.
Other plugins that Omniture have bought (like offermatica) can be combined with VS and SC to make some interesting analysis options.
The interesting thing will now be how WebTrends, IndexTools and CoreMetrics respond.
