I interviewed Neil Morgan, who leads marketing for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Omniture. The interview was done for Resoner.nu/Ecentric.org and was published in Swedish. This post contains a summary of that interview.

TouchClarity

• Almost all of TouchClarity’s clients are located in Europe. There are some 30–40 clients of which only five or six are located outside of the U.K.
• Omniture considered acquiring several other businesses before deciding that TouchClarity was the best fit. Neil makes a point of the fact that TouchClarity is not rules-based but self-learning.
• There are no plans of a closer integration with the Omniture suite yet, but it’s likely to happen some time in the future.
• Neil estimates that 1,500–2,000 websites in Europe could benefit from TouchClarity.
• TouchClarity is being introduced in the U.S.A.

SearchCenter

• I wanted to know why they have a rules-based SEM solution and not a self-learning one. Neil says they may reuse the models for predictive analysis used by TouchClarity in SearchCenter some time in the future. There are, however, no such plans yet.
• It is not easy to get another search engine network added to SearchCenter. There are several smaller, local, players in Europe that won’t be added unless the demand is high enough, which in many cases is unlikely.

Discover 2

• I asked Neil if he thinks that SiteCatalyst will be used less and less now that Discover 2 is available. He doesn’t think so since SiteCatalyst is so easy to use for the large group of less advanced users. It is likely that large organizations will have two or three users of Discover, while SiteCatalyst will be used by many more.
• It is likely that more data sources will be integrated with Discover in the future.

Integration

• Only 15%–20% of Omniture’s customers have integrated with data from CRM systems, while as many as 80% have integrated with e-mail marketing systems.

Instadia

• The plan is that all users of ClientStep should be migrated to SiteCatalyst in a year.
• Approximately a dozen accounts have already been migrated, and some 30 are currently in the process of being migrated.
• The InstantSurvey tool from ClientStep will be integrated with SiteCatalyst in the third quarter.
• ClientStep’s Excel integration will also be used by Omniture.
• There are currently no plans on keeping the filter builder (for data mining) in ClientStep.

(Note: You may also want to read the Instadia Q&A.)

Acquisitions

• I asked what the next acquisition might be, and Neil said that, in theory, all 42 partners that are integrated through Genesis are interesting.
• Most interesting are businesses active on dynamic markets that have not been fully developed yet. Maybe merchandising.
• Neil says that there are no plans for acquisitions at the moment and that what he has described is a theoretic scenario as he sees it.

Lars Johansson interviewed Neil Morgan at the Omniture Summit in Copenhagen.

You may also be interested in reading this interview with Neil done by IT Week last year. I found it today, but it’s still interesting.

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