They've gone and spent a load of cash and I didnt even get a phone call.
So, Visual Sciences is planned to become part of Omniture. Interesting...
We all know Visual Sciences have been on the market. As such their customers have been in a position of uncertainty for a while now and this has also hampered their competitiveness in the market place. My first thoughts were really not
- "Wow, we just got some cool technology" or
- "Great, we just gained a nice bit of market share" but actually
- "Its probably a good job a BI/CRM vendor who concentrates on the offline world didnt buy them with the goal of turning their offerings into actionable insight from a proper 360 view of customer"
Taking those points in reverse:-
(point3) The NetGen buyout by SPSS was conceptually quite ahead of its time, but for reasons I'm not going to go into now it failed miserably. This wouldnt have stopped someone now, over half a decade on from making a success of combining an online analytics/operational platform with a offline one. This would have created serious competition for Omniture and indeed all of the online web analytics vendors as well as few offline ones. No company currently has strengths across all channels in both analytics and operational optimisation but it has been interesting to note the slow but gradual improvement of the offerings from some of the offline vendors in this area (Unica, SAS+Speedtrap etc.)
(point2) Omniture just bought itself a lot of customers. 400 million dollars worth of customers? Thats not clear to me, but I dont really tread in those financial circles so find it hard to comment. I expect their current customer base isnt anywhere near that but the removal of competition from future deals and developments probably amounts to an awful lot in this ever increasingly valueable area of business. Had noone purchased VS I would have expected them to have gradually have lost market share anyway with a combination of Google Analytics and Omniture sharing the spoils dependent on customer size.
(point1) I'm not going to claim to be fully versed in their product suite but VS clearly had some cool technology. Will this be incorporated to Omniture? Is that why Omniture purchased them? I expect not - in the realm of real time reporting or making actions based on real time data an application is very dependent on its data architecture and the way data gets into the system. I find it hard to believe Omniture would adopt a completely different architecture in order to benefit in what really amounts to only a few specific bits of functionality, its probably quicker and easier just to development them internally. That being said, there may be some interesting areas of cross over (Omniture Discover vs. Visual Site) and also useful technology from the approaches VS made in the other channels (Visual Call and Visual Mail).
However you look at it, these are interesting times and I expect the consolidation of vendors in the online area to continue (site analytics, adserving, onsite search, email, online marketing etc.).
So, my question is "who's going to buy who next?"
