January 4th, 2010
The latest issue of The Seybold Report features an interview with me by Heidi Tolliver-Nigro about my Adobe-Omniture acquisition report, Adobe’s Designs on Web Analytics: The Omniture Acquisition. (The link to the report is broken.)
While I do offer a fairly generous excerpt on my site, this interview will give you a lot more detail of the content and thinking behind the report.
What I feel is most salient about Adobe’s move is what a great shift it signals away from the company’s print roots. As I remarked: “Now, when Adobe talks about print, it’s funny because it’s almost in a peripheral way—like whispering about Granny who lives upstairs and we have to sometimes take her out for a walk.” I’ve commented several times before that Adobe has over the last decade or more gone cold then warm then cold, etc. on the issue of print. I think it’s now 100% certain that Adobe management (and Adobe is not alone, and I’m not being critical; just stating the facts) sees print as a modest part of it overall software portfolio, with a diminishing future. The Omniture acquisition has essentially 0% to do with print and 99.9% to do with the Web.
I do however think that Adobe might find some fascinating ways to link Omniture-type technology to variable print-on-demand…it’s a fascinating opportunity that I hope Adobe explores.
In the meantime I weigh in largely favorably on the whole deal. The ROI may be slow in arriving, but I can see now that with the acquistionof Omniture, Adobe has clearly made a bold and brave move.