IBM announced on June 15th that they acquired Coremetrics, the web analytics company. This is interesting because in the portal world it’s no longer about portal as an employee tool but portal as a customer or partner/channel tool. Once that occurred, people started demanding much more information about what’s happening in the portal. Where it gets interesting is when events start happening at a sub-page or portlet level. That means that web analytics companies have a growing and vibrant business. It also means that products like IBM’s WebSphere Portal needs to work very closely with vendors like Omniture, Webtrends, and of course Coremetrics.
IBM started by working closely with all three so they could develop a core reporting and eventing framework. They announced that result in the summer of 2010 with partnerships with all three of the above mentioned vendors. Based on what I saw at the conferences, Coremetrics was the most committed to the effort. All three web analytics vendors have full support for it though.
What will be interesting in the near future is to see what will happen with Webtrends. Adobe bought Omniture. IBM bought Coremetrics. Who will buy Webtrends or will they try to go it alone?
