Lotus Notes is gone? What am I supposed to use now, and why didn’t anyone tell me? What about the rest of my very large company? Why is Howard Stern still using it?

thevarguy.com in January 2010 said: “Microsoft and IBM have resumed their 15-year-old email cat fight — only days before IBM kicks off Lotusphere 2010. Microsoft is promoting free training and three key channel partners — Binary Tree, CASAHL Technologies and Quest Software — to help customers migrate from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.” Did everyone else move to Exchange and SharePoint and forget to tell me?

I think the most likely integration point between Cognos and Coremetrics is around the Coremetrics data warehouse. This will be a much easier integration than trying to integrate the stream. Dealing with real time streams of web data and getting them into a form that is usable by a BI tool is tricky. The same applies whenever people talk of connecting up SPSS.

While these look like quick wins, they don’t really move the dial beyond making something that you could have done already, a bit easier.

On Test and Target, I understand what you’re getting at, but the challenge here is to make this stuff easier and much more automated. Stepping back from web analytics as a whole, it’s still way too hard to get up and running, and too hard to get any deeper insight beyond the high level metrics that 90%+ use. Only a tiny proportion of ecommerce teams actually test anything at all……

Charles

Ideally they would try to integrate Coremetrics’ data stream with the Cognos BI solution.

Charles, you say “Where web analytics needs to go is to optimize the individual visitors journeys as they progress through a website.” Adam would certainly know more about this than me, but won’t Test & Target do a form of this already?

But whether they can exploit it, however, remains to be seen. Certainly the IBM Coremetrics division should see growth in revenues as it gains access to a much broader customer base (as both Cognos and Business Objects have benefited from being purchased).

But it’s altogether more complex to actually integrate all the parts to make them into something greater than the sum of the parts. Many have tried and not succeeded down this path (include me in this list – I know from personal experience that it’s hard). And in the meantime, it’s very challenging to keep innovating, particularly whilst wearing a stripy blue straightjacket!

A Universal Tag standard would undoubtedly spur innovation and we would welcome it and enthusiastically support it. I’ll put it on my Christmas list and keep fingers crossed.

Good point on Omniture looking left out BTW.

Thanks for commenting – it’s always great to get the Gartner viewpoint.

Your prediction about Coremetrics slowdown in innovation may be correct, especially with the blue-washing they are about to receive, but I think the result will be a stronger offering. SPSS technology will likely provide predictive features, which as you say, is a rarity in today’s market. IBM also has plenty of complex event processing tools to add more real-time features than Core already has. Yes, Core already offers real-time capabilities in segmentation, and has a real-time prediction engine, but it could do more. I’m not convinced of your claim that it would require an architecture overhaul.

Does this mean lower prices? Probably not to Coremetrics customers. It was, after all, IBM that purchased them. But, Coremetrics was never about cheap. The features it provides over Google Analytics, especially in the area of remarketing, is where the value is. Coremetrics offers applications on top of data that Google Analytics does not make available to analyze. Google Analytics is an accessory to those who generate enough eBusiness revenue to afford “the good stuff”. But, it leaves the small-midsize business market a bit behind.

This creates a bit of a vacuum in the market for the next generation of innovation, such as what Seewhy offers, but users are not in a mood to be buying many stand-alone, non-integrated products. Until a tagging standard is here (maybe IBM can help), the suite approach like Adobe, AT Internet, IBM, Nedstat, WebTrends and Unica are going to rule. I think Coremetrics, er… IBM, will do well. Where is Omniture going to get its world-class analytics to keep up from? Adobe?

I always like a Devils Advocate!

I think you are spot on. The web analytics market is ripe for innovation. It’s too hard to make sense of the data you get in so many ways, let alone optimize. The existing companies started out counting sessions to provide some simple visibility of traffic in aggregate.

Ecommerce is a whole lot more complex now. It’s hard for them to ditch their legacy, so inevitably there will be another generation that picks up the mantle and charges forward.
Thanks for taking time to comment.