Adobe, makers of Photoshop, Flash, and other software that doesn’t get paid for as often as it should, has announced that they are purchasing website analytics and optimization company Omniture in a deal worth 1.8 billion dollars.
This is a huge deal for the e-commerce industry and not just for what it means for Adobe today. This is a huge deal for the type of company Adobe can now position itself as and for where they could potentially be in 18 months.
First, realize that Omniture is not just an analytics company. Sure, that may be what they are known for – but they have many components of their software suite that work seamlessly with each other. Omniture also does merchandising, recommendations, website testing, and site survey – all tasks that are analytic driven. Many of these components are used by e-commerce retailers and I know several retailers that love their packages.
Second, realize that Adobe has already stepped into the e-commerce world when they acquired Scene7 in 2007. Scene7 is a fantastic solution for managing images for retailers. (I’m not rehashing some Adobe marketing, I’m speaking as a developer who’s used Scene7 – I really like this software). Scene7 is now used by many, many retailers around the world to dynamically serve their images.
Short term I’d expect some sort of analytics package being applied to Scene7. I’m not sure what type of analytics you’d see, but I’m sure there are metrics that can be applied. If there are metrics available, there is a marketing person who will want to analyze them.
Longer term, I think it would be killer if there was an e-commerce platform that offered seamless integration with Omniture analytics and Scene7 image hosting. Of course Adobe isn’t an e-commerce platform, but not for long. I don’t think we will see 2010 come and go without a major, major acquisition by Adobe of an e-commerce platform. I think it would make perfect sense for Adobe to grow in this world. The industry has so much growth potential and Adobe could be perfectly situated to take advantage of this. It’s almost a no brainer to me.
I have my own ideas in my head of who I think Adobe could acquire, but I will keep them to myself right now. Let’s just say, that any e-commerce platform offering an ondemand SAAS solution would be the type of company I would think Adobe would gobble up.
The next 18 months are going to be very interesting in the e-commerce world.