Insightr take on Adobe's $1.8b purchase of Omniture

This morning I awoke to see over 3,800 messages in Nambu for my Omniture twitter feed so I knew something had happened, what I was amazed to see was the announcement by Adobe that it was to acquire Omniture for a staggering $1.8b. Big news indeed, and so far analyst response has been very positive for Omniture shareholders.

This represents a “considerable” win for Omniture shareholders
Scott Kessler, Analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research.

Naturally as an Omniture shareholder I was delighted to see my in-the-red-for-so-long stock go up 26% in after hours trading.

Industry professionals are now wondering what this means. I am one of them. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has said of the deal:

Clearly, we believe this enables us to participate in a large, growing market opportunity and become even more mission critical to our customers

Personally and professionally I think this acquisition is a match made in heaven; I think the number one impact of this will be that designers loyal to their suite of Adobe products who might have not been quite so interested in measurement (*not everyone) will now have an opportunity to see measurement as part of their toolkit, one only needs to look to the target audience in Adobe’s community website to see this:

Equally nerdy analysts (*not everyone) looking purely at the numbers will now be able to connect with their creative brethren. I see this as a merging of left and right brain thinking, illustrated in my diagram below.

As I am sure most people will try and do, here are a couple of my thoughts on what this means from a business perspective and for an end user point of view:

• Adobe to reinvigorate Omniture product innovation after current stagnant period by stepping up development of the Site Catalyst product and finish the dream of the “Omniture Suite” in the same way it has done for the “Creative Suite”. Omniture to get access to global community of Adobe clients, increasing their footprint (especially outside the US)
• Adobe to get opportunities to reach C-level executives through Omniture giving an opportunity to see products to the enterprise.
• Adobe to offer a free version of Site Catalyst within 6 months, with stripped down customisation capabilities, while merging the Site Catalyst and Discover on Demand products.
• Adobe to integrate Test & Target into its Scene7 product for optimisation of published content.

I want to wish everyone I know working at Omniture the very best (hoping you’re happy with your stock options now!) and I’m looking forward to developing relationships with more designers and Omniture customers as a result of this.

What a day of news!

Comments

[Rudi Shumpert]

James,

Could not agree more. I am firmly set in my use of Adobe products for development, mostly with ColdFusion. And the things that Adobe has done for the ColdFusion community is fantastic and they do have a very loyal following of users and from the chatter I've seen on twitter from folks in the ColdFusion community there is a lot of excitement.

My hope is that Adobe will take the same steps with Omniture in keeping the folks that have made it what it is, and help take it even further. And of course, make it even easier for developers like me to implement.

-Rudi