What's happening at Visual Sciences?

I guess I should state for the record before we go any further together, I'm currently an Omniture man so I'm just going to state what facts I can and then speculate wildly.

Visual Sciences has just announced a poorer than expected set of earnings. Not terrible by any mark except perhaps by those that really do matter in the city.

Is the a down turn in Web Analytics or something specific to Visual Sciences? I suspect it is the latter, suffering in an ever more competitive market. There is the interesting comment that there "has been approached by a number of strategic buyers"

Who would this be then? I don't suppose it would be another vendor in exactly the same space but would expect a vendor who is trying to complement their offline offering.

Google of course has its free web analytics tool, so one would expect Microsoft to naturally be interested but I would be extremely surprised if they got involved despite any rumours (doesn't every tech firm have a rumour about Microsoft wanting to buy them?)

However I could see someone in the other areas such as Oracle, SAS (who currently partner with Speedtrap, a very cool piece of UK web analytics technology), IBM, Business Objects having a sniff. As the online channel becomes more and more important the lack of ability to collect, report, support and deliver applications on the online channel is becoming a glaring hole in the portfolio of these companies despite most claiming to already have 360 view of customers and various ways to interact with a customer in their value lifetime.

I dont know Visual Sciences intimately but do believe they have some cool technology. I've always been a believer their products dont represent a paradigm shift, in particular the Visual Sciences product is really spit and polish on an old OLAP web reporting paradigm but punters do like that kind of thing, flashy graphics etc. so its always likely to sell - to repeat a point, its a technology that many are envious of and I can only hope for their sake that any integration in the future would go a lot better than that of others in history of on/offline mergers, particularly in the analytics space.