Intelligent Enterprise

Well, timing is a funny thing as I just wrote on Monday about the gossamer threads that are web analytics financial stability. No sooner had the proverbial ink dried than Adobe acquired Omniture.

It's an opportunistic deal for Omniture. As I've been writing over the last year, I think their business model is suffering as companies delay purchases of add ons such as Test & Target, Search Center, Discover and Genesis integrations, and the company faces increasing competition from the likes of Unica, Google Analytics, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Yahoo! Analytics and Nedstat. And, as the company continues to lose money, finding a "sugar daddy" to support its online marketing model moving forward certainly makes sense.

On the other hand, I think this deal could signal the focus for how the future of web content shapes up and how it will be analyzed.

One thing that I heard repeated on Adobe's quarterly release call this afternoon was the idea of embedding Omniture into the Creative Suite (CS) products. Sure this is Adobe's largest business unit, but the largest market for the products as a whole are creative professionals, a group that has been historically slow on the uptake of web analytics. However, if there is a focus on the Flash Media Interactive Server or the Flash Video Streaming Service, perhaps developing a more integrated method of tagging videos...maybe that's the hook.

But if you look beyond the CS unit, you have the Platform line of business, which includes mobile and video business units. The Platform Business Unit focuses on the development, marketing and licensing of Adobe Flash Platform technologies. Adobe Flash Player is on more than 98 percent of Web-connected personal computers. In addition, the cumulative distribution of Adobe Flash Lite, which is licensed by mobile handset and consumer electronic device manufacturers, hit nearly one billion devices as of the Fall of 2008.

Another focus of the Platform unit is to broaden the reach and viability of the Adobe Flash Platform through the delivery of Adobe AIR. Based on Flash, PDF and HTML technologies, Adobe AIR enables the creation and delivery of Web-enabled desktop applications that run outside of a Web browser, on the desktop.

I think this is potentially interesting because the businesses within the Platform unit include Adobe's fastest growing businesses on a percentage basis based on 2007 to 2008 revenue, even though they don't come close to the CS segment.

Perhaps the purchase of Omniture and the potential for enabling analytics within the platforms creates a compelling selling point... and certainly helps the company compete against Microsoft Silverlight on the Rich Internet Application side, and Qualcomm, Sun and Apple on the mobile device side.

So, by moving in with Adobe, Omniture may actually have latitude to expand into growth areas of web analytics: video, mobile and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). As a market driven company to this point, they've been spending so much on SG&A that their technological advancement has slowed down over the years. And their commitment to selling Genesis partnerships and integrations hasn't taken off. So without the pressure of trying to sell Genesis as aggressively, Omniture may be able to focus on becoming more of a pure analytics company in these new areas.
Come to think of it, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to me if a lot of the Genesis partnership integrations, many of which are not fully baked, are left to whither. I understand from conversations that I've had with customers that the e-mail integrations are really the only ones that work well. Great opportunity to cull the Genesis program down to what works and forget about the grand scheme. Or just let it mature slowly as the market catches up to it, but focusing on the growth areas in analytics...video, mobile and RIA.

So, if you're a customer how does this play out? My expectation is that things won't change much. Perhaps you'll be getting less pressure from you sales rep to move into Genesis. I don't think customer support will improve... could it get worse? Depends. Adobe says Omniture will operate as an independent business unit, but it will remain to be seen how this might affect headcount or integration with existing Adobe infrastructure.

If you're considering a purchase of SiteCatalyst, I'd normally suggest that you have a heart to heart with your rep, but I'm not sure what they'll be able to tell you at this point. As I said in my post from the other day, it can be a bit unpredictable during times of acquisition. As a company that has done its share of acquisitions and migrating customers into its own solution, it will be interesting to hear what they'll be saying over the next few weeks.

Interesting times ahead. What do you think?

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