Adobe buys analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion

Adobe has decided to beef up its presence in the online commerce world by purchasing Omniture, a Web analytics company, for $1.8 billion.




Source: CNN

What on earth can Adobe make with Omniture that they can sell ?

Analytics built into Dreamweaver ?
Better ways to track Flash ? //this sounds pretty good really
Do they just want to get their hands on that gigantic archive of statistics Omniture has so they can see what their next moves should be ?

I wondered the same. I don't get what the intention is. I looked up a few alternative sources, but nobody seems to 'get' what they're up to, they just regurgitate something similar to what CNN had. If they're really hoping to stress the analytics market, I can't believe they would wait so long before they made a move. Google analytics won't be easy to compete with.

If they just wanted the data, why pay so much more than the company is worth? $4 extra per share is pretty far up there, esp. with sums totaling in the billions!

I'm really starting to think it has alot to do with Flash.

One of the main reasons people seem to avoid Flash, other than SEO reasons which are probably number one, is how much of a pain in the ass it is to track anything that happens in Flash.

Silverlight seems to be catching up capability-wise. Having an edge on tracking and reporting couldn't hurt.

Flash is still client-side so speaking from tracking things such as e-products,,, well,,, those are in a db. I got tired of Lynx not seeing flash but the data is external so tons of work arounds to reporting for that page/item that is actually displaying the data thru flash. So, yeah, what is their intention? Google analytics is going to be extremely hard to compete with. It'll be interesting to see exactly how hard Adobe is going to make the analytic code to be added into flash. Furthermore, Flash 8 I think added some enhancements that I really haven't myself fully utilized/explored that helped with crawlers recognizing the embedded movie content.

Individual clicks and advertisements could help depending again on how easy this tracking code will be to add. If it's not easier than the workarounds I could try then it's not worth it.

You know how Flash video works right? RTMP is a proprietary protocol.
When I say tracking for flash, I envision something like that. Omnitures back-end gives Adobe a jump-start on having something to couple Flash with.

Ooooo cool. Actually I wasn't even in that mindset about video but was thinking about tracking things that happen in flash because I do enjoy making complete flash sites and that was a pain seriously without creating my own tracking stats. Anyway, got my wheels turning joebert.