So on the same day that everyone goes crazy over Mint‘s exit to Intuit, Omniture gets bought out by Adobe.
I had a bunch of other things to do with my life (being sad about life changes for one, pack, write, bah humbug), yet I really wanted to take a good look and think about that deal. It was one that interested me on an intuitive basis. In start-up land, no one seemed to be paying as much interest as people should be. Omniture does not usually provide analytics to anyone in StartUp Land. Meanwhile, Adobe is best known as the people you go to to build you pretty fluffy stuff, for such products as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash.
I’m a little more circumspect. Omniture has had scaling issues with customers. Further, in a well known incident to those who occasionally peruse Ars Technia, Omniture was providing some sort of service to Adobe back in 2007 to track some sort of CS3 behavior through a special Ominture owned domain. Omniture currently has developed and is supporting analytics from a special Actionscript library for those building off of Flex and Air, both products by Adobe.
And Adobe Air, next to Flash, is probably going to become a huge player in the next generation Twitter and Twitter-like link and information passing technologies. So far, the only browse- like Twitter Manager that is not built on AIR is HootSuit*, from what I can tell. Right now, Adobe has first mover advantage for proof-of-concept that a Rich Internet Application as a stand-alone browser application on someone’s computer can and will be downloaded by consumers. They are the only production model in play. Silverlight, by Microsoft, has yet to fully take off full steam ahead, although it may eventually find its niche inside other Microsoft products (a Walled Garden Situation). AIR had a product that is not owned by Adobe. And now they own the richest (from a tool and ease of use) analytics model as a complement to their production model. The only thing they don’t own right now is Bit.Ly, which also offers (albeit in a much more limited sense) analytics through the link itself. What if Adobe could build ways of tracking those link, no matter how much they’ve been shortened or reshortened, through AIR and it’s crippled, one purpose only browsers that AIR can build? What can Adobe build out this new, untested ground? What if Adobe can get rid of what’s causing the revenue drop inside Omniture while keeping cash flowing?
There is value in the company, I suspect Omniture is mucking it up and will have to scale back post merger into a defined role inside Adobe in order to recoup whatever is causing it to leak cash. Further it will have to refocus that it does analytics, and it needs to to do analytics for the next generation of Web products (ie possibly little easy to use sub-browsers, such as what we are seeing now with TweetDeck) It’s totally possible that Adobe wants an early stake in that game, before anyone else touches it. Especially because Omniture has a large number of corporate clients.
So essentially Adobe bought their minion. It’s a minion that leverages information too. It’s a new, untrained minion, with growth potential, due to the place where the minion was born. So now Adobe can leverage information from their minion, by being very careful to whom and what kind of information they sell in an analytics package based not only off the web, but also off AIR, depending on how it trains its minion.
Meanwhile, their stock is deflated because of Q3 results and this purchase. Let’s see if they can pull off the minion thing, long term. (I want a minion, damn it)
(One of the basic questions of an M & A, can you see value out of the assets of the merger coming together? Umm, I want a minion, too?)
*And I hate the way three quarters of the links I see passed through HootSuite. Stop with that extra bar. You are distracting my reading.
Behind on What I Wanted To write About: The Adobe-Omniture Deal
So on the same day that everyone goes crazy over Mint‘s exit to Intuit, Omniture gets bought out by Adobe.
I had a bunch of other things to do with my life (being sad about life changes for one, pack, write, bah humbug), yet I really wanted to take a good look and think about that deal. It was one that interested me on an intuitive basis. In start-up land, no one seemed to be paying as much interest as people should be. Omniture does not usually provide analytics to anyone in StartUp Land. Meanwhile, Adobe is best known as the people you go to to build you pretty fluffy stuff, for such products as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash.
I’m a little more circumspect. Omniture has had scaling issues with customers. Further, in a well known incident to those who occasionally peruse Ars Technia, Omniture was providing some sort of service to Adobe back in 2007 to track some sort of CS3 behavior through a special Ominture owned domain. Omniture currently has developed and is supporting analytics from a special Actionscript library for those building off of Flex and Air, both products by Adobe.
And Adobe Air, next to Flash, is probably going to become a huge player in the next generation Twitter and Twitter-like link and information passing technologies. So far, the only browse- like Twitter Manager that is not built on AIR is HootSuit*, from what I can tell. Right now, Adobe has first mover advantage for proof-of-concept that a Rich Internet Application as a stand-alone browser application on someone’s computer can and will be downloaded by consumers. They are the only production model in play. Silverlight, by Microsoft, has yet to fully take off full steam ahead, although it may eventually find its niche inside other Microsoft products (a Walled Garden Situation). AIR had a product that is not owned by Adobe. And now they own the richest (from a tool and ease of use) analytics model as a complement to their production model. The only thing they don’t own right now is Bit.Ly, which also offers (albeit in a much more limited sense) analytics through the link itself. What if Adobe could build ways of tracking those link, no matter how much they’ve been shortened or reshortened, through AIR and it’s crippled, one purpose only browsers that AIR can build? What can Adobe build out this new, untested ground? What if Adobe can get rid of what’s causing the revenue drop inside Omniture while keeping cash flowing?
There is value in the company, I suspect Omniture is mucking it up and will have to scale back post merger into a defined role inside Adobe in order to recoup whatever is causing it to leak cash. Further it will have to refocus that it does analytics, and it needs to to do analytics for the next generation of Web products (ie possibly little easy to use sub-browsers, such as what we are seeing now with TweetDeck) It’s totally possible that Adobe wants an early stake in that game, before anyone else touches it. Especially because Omniture has a large number of corporate clients.
So essentially Adobe bought their minion. It’s a minion that leverages information too. It’s a new, untrained minion, with growth potential, due to the place where the minion was born. So now Adobe can leverage information from their minion, by being very careful to whom and what kind of information they sell in an analytics package based not only off the web, but also off AIR, depending on how it trains its minion.
Meanwhile, their stock is deflated because of Q3 results and this purchase. Let’s see if they can pull off the minion thing, long term. (I want a minion, damn it)
(One of the basic questions of an M & A, can you see value out of the assets of the merger coming together? Umm, I want a minion, too?)
*And I hate the way three quarters of the links I see passed through HootSuite. Stop with that extra bar. You are distracting my reading.
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