Intelligent Enterprise

Omniture recently announced a 78-percent increase in revenues over the second quarter of 2006 and 15-percent increase over the first quarter of 2007. Much of this growth was driven by international sales that accounted for $8.8 million, or 26 percent of all revenue. This was a 184-percent increase over last year. Of course, with growth comes challenges.

Ominture entered Europe two years ago starting in the UK, and it has since built a presence in France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. Its January purchase of Instadia established a foothold in Scandinavia, and was quickly followed by the acquisition of UK behavioral targeting company, TouchClarity.

To the company's credit, CEO Josh James articulated the importance of support and relationships to success in Europe during his call with the analysts. However, James somewhat downplayed an analyst's observation about the oft-mentioned industry predicament of a lack of qualified Web analytics resources.

On the ground, having enough resources to support a growing client base is indeed an issue, according to Omniture VP Marketing EMEA Neil Morgan. "Having a live person is very important; relationships are highly important; local language is a requirement," he notes.

So, while Omniture knows that it needs qualified resources, the company faces a balancing act between acquiring new customers and servicing customers once they come on board.

Like many other vendors, the company is addressing the challenge via expansion of its partner program in Europe to certify firms to take over support functions. Of course, this is easier said than done. In the case of its migration of Instadia ClientStep customers to Omniture SiteCatalyst, Omniture has trained Instadia's team to support SiteCatalyst. Five months into the migration, all of ClientStep's 200 customers have started on the path to SiteCatalyst, according to the company, and Omniture expects to have all customers migrated completely by June 2008.

The key is execution. Omniture added 300 customers to its rolls in Q2 2007, including some high-profile European companies, such as Siemens AG Medical, British Sky Broadcasting Group and FD Mediagroup. It's certainly in Omniture's best interest to get new customers up and running as soon as possible, but as a customer, you should carefully plan and manage implementations so they're not rushed. Be sure to address all of your data collection, reporting and metrics development requirements. In addition, I suggest that you build in time to perform sufficient quality assurance and testing of page tag placement. This will go a long way toward ensuring an implementation that is built to last, regardless of your vendor's local footprint.

Phil Kemelor is Vice President of Strategic Consulting Services for Semphonic, a Web analytics consultancy. He is also a lead analyst with CMS Watch and consults with enterprises looking to select Web analytics technologies or apply best practices.