Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Adobe Buys Omniture

Adobe said Tuesday that it has reached a deal to acquire Web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called the move a "game changer" for the company.

"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online," Narayen said in the press release announcing the deal.

In an interview with CNet, Adobe senior vice president Paul Weiskopf said the deal will allow Adobe to merge the "art" of developing and delivering content with the "science" of measuring the impact of that content. "Today that's a real pain point for customers," Weiskopf said. "We have the opportunity to integrate what is today a pretty disparate and not tightly integrated set of workflows."

The deal is the Adobe's largest since its $3-billion-plus acquisition of Macromedia in 2005.

1 comment:

Ernie Schell said...

Tom Sullivan writes in his blog, No Turn on Red:
First, realize that Omniture is not just an analytics company. Sure, that may be what they are known for – but they have many components of their software suite that work seamlessly with each other. Omniture also does merchandising, recommendations, website testing, and site survey – all tasks that are analytic driven. Many of these components are used by e-commerce retailers and I know several retailers that love their packages.

Second, realize that Adobe has already stepped into the e-commerce world when they acquired Scene7 in 2007. Scene7 is a fantastic solution for managing images for retailers. (I’m not rehashing some Adobe marketing, I’m speaking as a developer who’s used Scene7 – I really like this software). Scene7 is now used by many, many retailers around the world to dynamically serve their images.

Short term I’d expect some sort of analytics package being applied to Scene7. I’m not sure what type of analytics you’d see, but I’m sure there are metrics that can be applied. If there are metrics available, there is a marketing person who will want to analyze them.

Longer term, I think it would be killer if there was an e-commerce platform that offered seamless integration with Omniture analytics and Scene7 image hosting. Of course Adobe isn’t an e-commerce platform, but not for long. I don’t think we will see 2010 come and go without a major, major acquisition by Adobe of an e-commerce platform. I think it would make perfect sense for Adobe to grow in this world. The industry has so much growth potential and Adobe could be perfectly situated to take advantage of this. It’s almost a no brainer to me.
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