Omniture

» see omniture.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Omniture sold the thing that tells a company what happened on its website yesterday. Not the website, not the ads, the count. Josh James and John Pestana started it in Orem, Utah in 1996, incorporated it in 1998 under the name SuperStats.com, renamed it MyComputer.com in 1999, sold the small-business half to Network Solutions, and only in 2002 became Omniture. The product everybody knew was SiteCatalyst, which was a page of numbers your marketing department looked at on Monday morning.

The growth looks implausible written down. Its own last annual report lays the revenue out in one line: $20.6 million in 2004, then $42.8 million, then $79.7 million, then $143.1 million, then $295.6 million in 2008. Over those same five years the company never once turned a profit, and the biggest loss was the last one, $44.8 million against that $295.6 million of revenue. It listed on Nasdaq in the summer of 2006 as OMTR and spent the proceeds buying competitors, including Visual Sciences for about $394 million in a deal that closed on 17 January 2008, which is how the old WebSideStory lineage ended up inside it.

Adobe announced the purchase on 15 September 2009 and completed it on 23 October at $21.50 a share, around $1.8 billion in total. Omniture filed to leave Nasdaq the same day and deregistered ten days later. By 2012 Adobe had started taking the name off the products, and in November of that year it emptied the Orem offices and moved the division up the valley to Lehi.

~ the record ~

~ a hostname that looked like an address ~

For almost everyone, Omniture was never a company. It was a hostname that appeared in the status bar while a page loaded, and the hostname was 2o7.net, with a letter o in the middle of what looked like a number. Subdomains of it read like private network addresses, 192.168.112.2o7.net among them, and people who read their own firewall logs noticed and did not like what they concluded. The accusation that followed, that the name was chosen to make the traffic look local, was never proven and never shaken off, and blocklists carried the domain for years.

Dial-up at 33.6k turned every extra hostname on a page into a pause you could sit through, which is how I came to know the name years before I knew what the company sold. That was the arrangement with enterprise analytics generally: you never bought it, and you were never the customer. Microsoft, Nextel, Rakuten, Sony and Telstra were the customers, by its own filing's reckoning. You were the 3.7 trillion.

~ the revenue line ~

There is a second reading of those five revenue numbers, and it is less flattering. Omniture bought Touch Clarity for $51.5 million in 2007, Offermatica for $65 million the same year, Visual Sciences for $394 million at the start of 2008, and the search end of Mercado for $6.5 million that September. A good part of the jump from $143 million to $295 million arrived through the acquisition door rather than out of the sales team. Adobe bought a company that was growing fast and also buying its growth, which may be why $1.8 billion looked reasonable in the September of a recession year.

The patent bill is a period detail worth keeping. Omniture had to license web analytics patents from NetRatings, paying $10 million and then another $4 million once the IPO closed, with further payments owed if it ever acquired certain named competitors.

~ snowbird ~

The mechanics of the last day are in the filing. Adobe's acquisition subsidiary, Snowbird Acquisition Corporation, needed to get above the threshold where a merger can close without another shareholder vote, so on 23 October 2009 it exercised a top-up option and Omniture issued it 46,435,793 brand new shares at $21.50 apiece. That is an aggregate price of $998,369,549.50, and Snowbird paid for it with a promissory note. A billion dollars moved on paper, in one direction, between a company and the company that already owned it.

What Adobe actually kept is still shipping. SiteCatalyst became Reports and Analytics and then Adobe Analytics, so the measurement tags on a large share of corporate websites still trace back through that lineage to a Utah company whose founders had been selling hit counters to small businesses in 1997. The old domain still answers too, with a redirect into Adobe's experience cloud page.

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