NEWS16 June 2010

Webtrends CEO: Coremetrics takeover ‘ruined most of my day’

Data analytics North America

US— IBM’s bid to buy Coremetrics has set tongues wagging about whether Webtrends – the last of the big independent web analytics players – will be next on the auction block. But Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder says the company has no plans to go shop itself.

In an audio interview, Yoder (pictured) explained that news of the Coremetrics deal had “ruined” most of his day as people sought his reaction.

“I had a pretty busy day planned and now its kind of distracted from that, with people asking for comments and feedback and stuff,” he explained.

Giving his view on the planned acquisition, Yoder said: “What this means is that analytics in and of itself is a core part of any business function and finally the web is being taken really seriously as a core component or medium for commerce to be completed.

”Google buying Urchin, Adobe buying Omniture, and IBM buying Coremetrics – these larger players with pretty massive portfolios want to add analytics in as a layered offering.”

Addressing the obvious question, ‘Why Coremetrics, not Webtrends?’, Yoder said: “Coremetrics has been on the market for at least a year. It’s been very well known in most of the banking community that they would either try to go public or be acquired. They have been aggressively shopping, and we haven’t. That hasn’t been a core part of our strategy.”

But still, as Yoder says, “the market likes to speculate”. Webtrends is backed by a private equity firm, Francisco Partners, which makes a doubly-rich vein for sale rumours, and so it is that Charles Nicholls, founder of SeeWhy – developers of website conversion technology – has blogged about the possibility for Webtrends to be bought, or at least merged, with ecommerce company ATG, with which it has already deployed a joint solution via its Open Exchange platform.

As Yoder himself acknowledges, Webtrends now faces a different – read ‘bigger’ – form of competition. “A couple of years ago our competitors were Websidestory, Omniture, Urchin and Coremetrics,” he said, “and now essentially our competitors are Google, Adobe and IBM.”

But still, he said: “We haven’t aggressively shopped ourselves, we don’t have any immediate plans to.”

Brian Tarran

Data analytics North America

@RESEARCH LIVE

5 Comments

Michael

14 years ago

If you talk about the big players in analytics, you have to also mention Unica's NetInsight solution. Named a Leader in Forrester's latest waive report, they boast clients in every vertical - ING Direct, Fidelity, HBO, Dean & Deluca, Sprint, GEICO, CISCO, even IBM!

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Anon

14 years ago

Alex Yoder should perform a little introspection. Webtrends has been singularly obsessed with Omniture since slipping behind in the rankings nearly a decade ago. Webtrends has not regarded Google seriously because it is a free solution. Webtrends has also paid little attention to the other analytics companies behind it. After the disaster of Greg Drew, Webtrends finds itself trying to get its product up to date, to keep moving ahead, and to regain market share. Oh, and the code behind the product needs serious revision if not a total-from-the-ground-up rewrite. Will Webtrends spend the time and money to do so? The new reality seems to reinforce the notion that Webtrends will be a bridesmaid for a while to come. They aren't attractive enough technically or financially to attract a mega corporation to buy and to integrate them into their line up of products.

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Anon

14 years ago

WebTrends "still not for sale" - I know many talented people who *used* to work there, and it was for sale for awhile, but turned down good offers hoping for the non-existent Pot O' Gold at the end of the rainbow. Now it's just a count-down to their bankruptcy. It will take awhile, but it will eventually happen.

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Michael

14 years ago

I don't know - it's a part of most every company's cycle to either go public or get bought out; I am curious as to whether or not you get a higher ROI as an investor if you aggressively shop your company, or if you let the bids come to you. http://www.ruinedmyday.com

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Anon

12 years ago

Hi, Mike. We are an Omniture shop and just satrted to investigate some of the additional tools available in the market. After examining Quantcast we also ran across Crowd Science and Vizu. Have you had a chance to check these guys out? If so, how do they compare with what Quantcast is doing?Thanks,Chris

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