Blackbeaks Blog….All things Analytics

By sacking half the executive board by all accounts. Portland Business Journal keeps a close eye on what WebTrends are up to because it’s where the company is headquartered. Sacking may be a strong word but my theory is based around the fact that according to this article WebTrends hoped to be bought by Omniture and that 4 previous members of the board are no longer represented on the Webtrends website. According to the Portland article there is a wall of silence from all concerned.

The man they have chosen to replace Greg Drew has no credentials in the web analytics industry. However that’s not to say he is a bad choice to steady the ship.

If you look on the WebTrends website the CEO has been replaced by a guy called Bruce Coleman, a professional interim CEO from Taos, N.M. His credentials are good having been CEO of no less than 4 companies in the last 10 years, while also being CEO of his own company. While I have no doubt that Mr Coleman is a talented individual who leads by example according to everything I’ve read about him I feel he is moving into a very difficult situation. Though I suppose that’s what he gets paid for.

WebTrends are losing market share to Omniture and Visual Sciences as well as losing staff to Omniture left right and centre according to facebook! Notably people like Ian Tickle also recently abandoned ship. That’s particularly telling for us here in Northern Europe (Ian was previously WebTrends Northern European director of sales). So Bruce has a tough job ahead of him just keeping his staff it appears.

What does it all mean? The Webtrends response to Omniture is very important. If they were as the article suggests looking for a consolidatory move with Omniture where else can they go now? I really don’t feel that WebTrends is BI ready like Visual Site was. So Webtrends is unlikely to be a popular choice for one of the big BI giants.

They will be the second biggest player in the field behind Omniture with most of their market share still remaning in the US and the UK. They may look at consolidating with CoreMetrics another US/UK focused market and then grow from a position of strength in those retailing markets. However whether that is attractive for CoreMetrics is another entirely different question.

In any case, we’re certainly in an interesting period. Are Webtrends going to betten down the hatches, ride out the storm and attempt to build on what they have with intelligent acquisitions? If so I feel they are going to have to attract some talent and quickly. It’s not their tool which is the problem, I know they have a powerful offering. However where they do have a weakness is staff turnover and that is something they need to fix and very quickly otherwise they could sink altogther.