Web Analytics Industry Consolidation
Analytics Web AnalyticsPublished June 15, 2010 at 12:16 pm 4 Comments
With today’s announcement of IBM acquiring Coremetrics, and Adobe’s surprising move in 2009 to acquire Omniture, it makes me wonder what’s next? I was discussing the plethora of social media metrics vendors a few weeks ago, and speculating on how quickly that space will start to consolidate, but it didn’t even occur to me that there may be more consolidation to come within the main analytics/metrics industry.
From the looks of things to me, pure web analytics may soon become folded into larger business intelligence solutions. This would make a lot of sense – if you can tie together all your social media metrics, web metrics, CRM metrics, and so on into a single solution, you get a much better idea of the performance of all your marketing efforts.
For small businesses these solutions may ultimately be more than they need, or can even afford, so there will always be some need for a Google Analytics or Piwik solution as well. They may not be as robust, but any data is better than no data, in my opinion.
I am also led to speculate what may become of some of the other big players in the industry, like Webtrends? They have changed hands a couple of times since being founded in 1993, but not by any well-known companies like Adobe or IBM. I know speculations are rampant as to which one Microsoft may acquire, if any. The next few years could be very interesting for all of us within the Web Analytics industry!
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My money is on Microsoft buying Webtrends…
Small, and medium-sized, businesses have already been priced out of robust analytics.
I think there is an opening for a savvy social media monitoring company, or agile start-up metrics software, to steal the lunch of under delivering big budget software (e.g. Coremetrics and Omniture)
The BI community of vendors have always shunned the Web analytics market. Too much data, too many custom reports, too much demand for ease of use. As the marketing organization moves to the next level, data from the rest of the enterprise has to be integrated. Not only in analysis, but also to provide in-stock and margin info for recommendation engines and customer details for personalization. My prediction is web analytics will consolidate with web content management and ecommerce engines, and adopt new BI bells and whistles as they emerge, rather than becoming a wing of the BI team and vendors. A recent acquisition of IBM, SPSS, tried to be in the Web analytics market years ago when it bought NetGenesis (of Matt Cutler fame). It won’t surprise me if some predictive analytic ability is added to Core’s offerings by the end of the year.
Nice read. As I see it them more consolidation the more room at the bottom for new innovators like us Reedge.