Our friends and partners at Omniture announced Thursday that they’ve completed their acquisition of Visual Sciences. This is a huge event for the company and the industry. Congratulations are due on both the vision and execution.

The official press release makes clear (for the first time to my knowledge) that their intent is to migrate HBX customers over to SiteCatalyst. For the time being the product will be renamed SiteCatalyst HBX, which the release says will “continue to be supported until the key features have been integrated into Omniture SiteCatalyst.”

From my experience, that was done in 2002.

But the transition/migration is still a very large project since the site tags are incompatible (at least they have been until now) and more importantly SiteCatalyst ‘Classic’ has infinitely more capabilities and tagging requirements and options.

More importantly, the user interfaces and everything else about the two programs will require just about complete retraining of every user. The resistance will be high and the migration, if unprompted, would take a long time. It looks like Omniture is being wisely aggressive with events, training sessions, and a general gung-ho attitude.

I presume they did this acquisition for market share purposes, and who needs two incompatible code bases and two sets of training and customer service issues to chase the same market?

But are they the same market? Only partially.

It would be great to see Omniture use this opportunity to build a true mid-market product, both in recognition of market realities and in service of their higher end market and broad optimization platform.

Here’s what I would do:

• Rename HBX back to HitBox. The HBX rename was an attempt to upscale a downscale product. SiteCatalyst HitBox is a recognized, respectable and mid-market sounding name.

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• Retool SiteCatalyst HitBox as the lite, mid-market version of SiteCatalyst Pro (you know they’re not going to call it Classic). Give it a streamlined UI and strip out all the super-power-stuff that many won’t ever use. Enable a one-button upgrade to Pro.

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• Include free ‘taste’ features from Pro: Three Alerts. Two Classifications on Product, Pages, and Campaign Tracking Codes. A|B Comparisons on up to two metrics. Five Dashboards. Five Bookmarks. Two Targets. Three eVars. Two Correlations. Three Calculated Metrics. And killer video tutorials showing how and why to use each one of them.

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• Price SiteCatalyst HitBox very aggressively. I’d suggest about ¼ of the cost of Pro with a minimum of $3000 per year. Leave the free stuff to Google and Microsoft, but provide serious analytics and more importantly an upgrade path for a price anyone actually doing business online can afford.

Here’s why:

• They need it anyway. The vast majority of SiteCatalyst users and more importantly prospective users in existing client companies can’t handle or digest the ‘Pro’ feature set and UI. This will certainly be true of HBX users who suddenly face 2X or 3X and controls, options, menus, etc. The company rightly prides itself on depth of adoption inside client companies, and could probably double it with an approachable UI version. (No economic loss here, Pro companies just get the option to let some users log into the HitBox version) And ultimately perhaps 25% of HitBox users migrate into Pro users or cross-product suite users over time.

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• There is a mid-market. The distance between Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst is huge, in price and capabilities. Online businesses in the $1M to $10M segment haven’t been your target but there’s a lot of them. I believe SiteCatalyst Pro is a justifiable investment for them, but most can’t be convinced to make the leap. A way to ease into it – both financially and by tasting what large benefits the higher end could provide, would be very successful.

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• Tomorrows Analysts are GA users today. From blogs to startups millions are getting used to GA, and will migrate to new and large companies over time and say ‘it’s good enough’ to bosses who don’t know better. Push GA down market with a legitimate mid-market option. Let all those folks in the $1-$10M companies get hooked on power and convince their companies to upgrade.

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• Sell The Blades. Omniture has built an impressive suite of products, and beyond HBX this acquisition provides a bunch more. As these mature and continue to be integrated a broader set of customers can only get pulled either across the line or up into the Pro line.

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• Data. It’s clear that data is the oil of the 21^st century. Anyone who can sit on top of lots of it and knows how to get at it (or will let someone pay for that privilege) will be fat and happy for a long long time. Taking another 25% to 50% of GA’s market share is like annexing Kuwait in terms of traffic, behavioral and transactional data. Given this, the other four reasons hardly matter.

Why not:

• Fear. The main reason not to do this may be a fear that less will be good enough, thereby spawning ‘downgrades’ and lower ticket new sales. I think it’s a legitimate worry. It should be taken as a challenge to prove the value of the high end and make SiteCatalyst ‘Pro’ approachable via a better UI and an experience that enables more customers to take full advantage. The value is there it just needs to be made more accessible.

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• Resources. Yes it’s an additional project on a list that must be miles long. For all the above reasons, with the ultimately limited amount of information I have from the outside, I think it’s worth it.

Coda

I should disclaim all of the above with the information that Commerce360 is an Omniture Platinum Partner, I’m on their Customer Advisory Council, and I’ve been over time briefed and subject to NDA’s on future Omniture products. I’ve never had a discussion with anyone there about the HBX merger or HBX products or anything relevant to this post in terms of their product line directions or these suggestions. No animals were harmed in the development of this blog post.

Part of the reasons for this post is that I’ve seen this movie before. In the early 1990’s I had a lot of involvement and ultimately worked at Aldus, the PageMaker company when they were the hot young public software player in the darling space, revenues shooting past $100M and acquisitions rapidly growing the product line. They also had a huge industry player (Microsoft) giving away competitive programs (via the then new Office bundle) and one remaining legitimate competitor to each of their main high-end programs.

There are a lot of dis-similarities here too, but Aldus wound up acquired by Adobe for a number of reasons you would have never predicted in 1992.

I also want to be clear (if it isn’t already) that I’m a huge Omniture fan. I think SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter are the only reasonable serious analytics choice in terms of the features they provide. They’re far from perfect, but I’m pretty well versed in each of their competitors and would/do strongly suggest to anyone that picking any of them is, based on my experience with current versions, a compromise at best and a bad (or very bad) decision at worst.

This a great but complicated and important time for Omniture. They’ve been navigating it brilliantly, and I’m rooting for their continued success.