WebTrends will not be acquired by Omniture

I just read Eric Peterson's post this morning about Tim Kopp's departure from WebTrends.

While there's no way to predict what will happen with WebTrends, I would certainly not bet my money on an acquisition from Omniture.

Most of WebTrends' customers are still in the SMB market...clearly not a match for where Omniture is going with their product development.

If WebTrends were to be acquired by any web analytics vendors, I'd say there's more potential to be taken over by Coremetrics' or Lyris, formerly J.L. Halsey, owner of ClickTracks. Coremetrics' created an SMB offering in September and considers 35% of their customer base to be in the SMB market. Part of their motivation for creating this offering was to compete against WebTrends. Lyris' historical focus is the SMB market. In fact, they just announced their name change and new Lyris platform yesterday. Seems like the sophistication they are bringing in combining analytics, PPC and email marketing could be quite attractive to SMB companies.

While I have no basis to say whether the change in management at WebTrends is either good or bad, the anecdotal evidence I've gathered indicates that take up of their enterprise offering Marketing Warehouse, has been extremely slow. If the management team was banking their company's success on this offering, and it wasn't successful, maybe it was time for a change.

From my perspective, WebTrends has spent a lot of time transitioning customers from its licensed solution to its On Demand solution,yet it still has had to support its licensed and log file-centric customer base. I imagine that's had to be a drain on resources.

In short, the company has tried to be all things to all people - log files, page tags, licensed,subscription, SMB and enterprise all rolled into one...there isn't a vendor on the market today that is spread so broadly.

If WebTrends does stay in the game, new management will need to refocus what the company is selling and to whom...and hope that enough of its customer base is willing to stick with them.

Comments

[Lars]

Well, Coremetrics and ClickTracks are invisible in large parts of Europe. WebTrends could help them quickly gain visibility on the European market. Still I doubt they'd acquire WebTrends any time soon. But we're all really guessing here..

[Phil Kemelor]

Lars, thanks for the comment. I agree, we're all really guessing!