Adobe Buys Omniture…
Earlier this week, Adobe announced that they are acquiring Omniture for $1.8b. For those of you unaware of the broad suite of solutions available from Adobe, it’s probably worth looking at their suite of offerings. At the highest level, Adobe provides a number of products for the creation of media & content from their suite of photo & video editing tools as well as their document creation and management tools. Additionally, Adobe plays heavily in the rich media presentation space with Flash and Acrobat. They have also made plays into the middleware space with Adobe Lifecycle, a fairly robust workflow management suite of tools.
Adding Omniture to their stack is actually a pretty natural fit. As the graphic from their web site (and reproduced on this blog) shows, there is a major opportunity to tracking and ‘understanding’ consumer behavior. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by logging user actions against typical HTML objects and trying to understand usage scenarios. But, with the advent of AJAX, Flash and richer delivery platforms, it’s become more complex. By incorporating Omniture side-by-side with Adobe’s Flash technology, there is an opportunity to make this simpler.
Of course, this all sounds great on paper. I think the biggest challenge is going to be organizational. Omniture works and thinks very differently from Adobe. And, the creative types (i.e., Flex / Flash) and analytical types tend to think about problems quite differently.
