Omniture’s Neil Weston talks to E-Consultancy
E-consultancy the UK based online marketing and best practice website just sent a newsletter in which they interviewed Neil Weston on Omniture’s Strategy. Neil discussed some fairly well known stuff about the acquisitions made in 2007, Instadia being bought for market share was common knowledge though I would add also that they also bought really great staff. Touch Clarity & Offermatica were strategic acquisitions around the tools with Offermatica only having 115 clients in the US and about 5 in Europe. This is particularly telling. I have only just started to see A/B Testing or multivariate testing in Europes practitioners. Web analytics is not mainstream yet, so testing platforms are likely to be followers of the web analytics market. Visual Sciences was also bought for customers but also the technology platform Visual Site.
Neil also discussed how they might develop SiteCatalyst into the one platform solution with VS being separate from that as an in house solution for clients with higher end requirements. This makes sense, though I’m interested to see what the guys at Omniture make of VS when they get their hands on it. WebSideStory admitted they have been doing it wrong for years. Omniture might have to do the same.
He also drew a line in the sand where Google and Microsoft are concerned. When asked “Do you see Microsoft and Google as a threat in your space then?” He expects them to compete with Omniture in the future saying;
I think we have got to assume that. We’ve got a reasonable revenue track and the cost of entry would be very high, particularly to get to where we are now. But Microsoft and Google certainly have the wherewithal to do that if they want to.
Their strategies are typically to seed the market with something and then turn it into money. So it would be remiss of us not to assume that both of them will want to come and eat us up at some point in time.
Personally I’m not so sure. Microsoft & Google are probably using their data as a giant panel to see how the Internet works though they would never admit it. This in my opinion is more valuable to them than taking a few thousand clients from Omniture. However as Neil suggests it’s possible so lets see.
