18th Jan: http://www.omniture.com/instadia

So the acquisitions for 2007 have started in ernest… As we last wrote at the beginning of the year, it looks like 2007 is going to be just as busy as 2006 for mergers and acquisitions. The Instadia acquisition would certainly appear to be an obvious move by Omniture for the following business reasons:

1. Instadia is a high end product that was pitched directly against Omniture in Europe.
2. Instadia has a strong market share for enterprise sized clients in the Nordic region and Germany (Omniture is relative weak in those regions).
3. Instadia has strong market penetration in the Automotive, Manufacturing and Finance verticals

From what we have seen at trade shows and exhibitions, Insatdia also has a strong product offering. Some of its USPs include:

• The combining of online surveys with web analytics. For example, you can pop a survey in response to behavioural activity or combine survey data with clickstream data and perform segmentation/profiling.
• Visitor scoring system to measure partial conversions
• Ad-hoc data reprocessing
• Real-time reporting

However, I can’t help thinking that Omniture is only interested in Instadia’s client list and staff expertise (instant recruitment for an industry starved of expertise) and that the product itself will slowly disappear.

Will there be more than a handful of WA vendors by the end of 2007?