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December 21, 2004
Omniture: On-Demand Web Analytics
I spent some time with Omniture this afternoon. I knew these guys pretty well when they were MyComputer.com. Omniture (nee' MyComputer.com) has always been in the ASP space (now called "on-demand applications") and they were one of the early innovators. I remember seeing Josh James at least a dozen times on the plane between SLC and Silicon Valley in the old days. I didn't really believe that the ASP model would work for analytics then, but now its the only model I can imagine using. I'm not alone in that--many Fortune 500 companies use Omniture and an on-demand application model for analytics.
The biggest reason this model is a winner in analytics is what's called "global roll-ups." By that, I mean that Omniture and other on-demand analytics tools allow Web sites on multiple hosts and with different domains to be treated as a group and analyzed as a group. At iMall, we spent a lot of time building tools to create analytics from dozens of hosts and domains. If I were making that decision now, I'd just use Omniture or something like it.
A recent Jupiter Research study asked CIOs what web site technology they were going to deploy in the next year. Web analytics was first with almost 60%. Search technology was second with 52%. This isn't too surprising--people need to measure things to justify ROI.
I've used Webstat.com to track visitors to this blog and my UtahPolitics.org blog for over a year now. The idea is the same, but Omniture is much more sophisticated. They're customer list reads like a who's who of online companies. The sophistication is based on custom variables that are put on pages so that Omniture can segment traffic according to things that aren't typically part of a standard Web page request.
Omniture's reporting it really impressive. When you see how they generate fallout reports on custom tracks through a site, you'll understand why they have the customer list they do. This kind of information is pure gold and not something you get from run-of-the-mill Web analytics tools.
Understanding behavior relies on not just seeing what visitors do, but also understanding the changes in behavior in the context of what is happening on the site. Say, you're drop-off rate decreases. You'd like to know why. That implies that the Web analytics ought to be tied into the content management system in some way, or be able to track changes on the site to show behavior changes in light of site changes.
Omniture doesn't really solve this problem (one of the downsides of on-demand models), but they have a tool called A-B comparison. The tool lets you pick a date range and show metrics from those dates side by side. To see the behavior in light of page changes, you'd have to encode those changes somehow in the page variables. This may not be manageable for random page changes, but its very manageable in a situation where you can randomly show different users different pages and use A-B comparison to measure the response to those pages.
I was surprised to find out that Omniture doesn't yet have a way to feed real time analytics information out to their customers. Right now, its pretty much their dashboard or nothing. I'd like to be able to take their data in real time and combine it with data from my business in something like Iteration. That's the future of business intelligence and a critical feature for any company hoping to sell me analytics of any kind.
I suspect that Omniture is trying to figure out how to provide the data and still provide sufficient value that they don't get disintermediated. The answer is to not provide raw data. Instead, provide report building tools that allow me to create custom data feeds that merge, filter, and sort the raw data into custom reports that come across as XML instead of HTML.
I haven't really followed Omniture for a couple of years, so its was good to catch up with the company and their technology. Another positive data point in the on-demand application space.
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Interview for Marketplace on Corporate Blogging
I was interviewed yesterday by Bob Moon of the public radio show Marketplace. The topic was using blogs inside the corporation. The show will probably air sometime this week, I'll link to it once it does.
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BYU Tie to Discovery of Google Flaw
One of the students at Rice University who discovered the security hole in Google's desktop search tool was a recent graduate from BYU's M.S. program, Seth Nielson, who's now pursuing his Ph.D. at Rice with Dan Wallach (of eVoting fame). Apparently, the flaw was found as part of a class project at Rice. Google was immediately notified and given a chance to fix the flaw before the problem was made know publicly. Reportedly Seth has been offered an internship at Google this summer. :-) Here's a technical report (PDF) that gives the details.
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Customer Interaction Hubs and System Integration
Customer interaction hubs is the term Gartner coined (and now Forrester and others are using) to describe the integration of every customer interaction system under a single, unified strategy and vision. I wrote about customer interaction hubs, or CIHs, in a Connect Magazine column earlier this year. I think they define an important next step in enterprise systems.
A recent article in CRM Daily, asks if the customer interaction hub is within reach. One thing I've believed for some time, and the article points this out as well, is that a CIH is not something you buy from a vendor, it follows from a strategy and results from integrating myriad systems into an infrastructure that flexibly meets business needs. Interestingly, that same sentence is something I've said about digital identity infrastructures. Furthermore, I think the methods that are used to create digital identity infrastructures are the same ones you need to create a CIH inside of your company. The real winners in the CIH space won't be product vendors (although they'll do alright), it will be the systems integration companies that help companies create and execute a CIH vision.
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OSBC2005: A New Twist
Matt Asay, cofounder of the Open Source Business Conference, writes that he's "reclaiming the conference from the sponsors:"
This year, the Open Source Business Conference has made a conscious decision to seek less sponsorship money. Our goal is to deliver cutting-edge content on open source trends and how they affect the enterprise, both CIOs and vendors to those CIOs.
Our keynotes have been solicited based on their intelligence and insight, and not on their ability to pay. That's why we have Jonathan Schwartz (President and COO, Sun Microsystems), Marten Mickos (CEO, MySQL), Larry Lessig (Author, Free Culture and professor at Stanford Law School), Geoffrey Moore (author, "Crossing the Chasm"), and others keynoting. Others will be announced soon, including some high-profile speakers that will surprise many because of their seniority in the industry, among other reasons.
There will be no vendor pitches from the OSBC pulpit in 2005. We're reclaiming the conference from the sponsors. It will be more like DEMO or D or OSCON, and less like Linuxworld (vendor exhibition) or the various CIO conferences (which are really just glorified vendor pitches).From IT Manager's Journal | Open Source Business Conference, 2005: What price integrity?
Referenced Tue Dec 21 2004 07:35:33 GMT-0700
This is partly in response to some criticism from me after last years conference. In all, I thought the conference was great and it looks like Matt is taking steps to capture some new energy and make it even better this year. If you're interested in how business can use and profit from open source, this is the conference to attend. You won't be disappointed.