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

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.”