Omniture Summit: Adobe Unveils SocialAnalytics, Upgrades SiteCatalyst

Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) announced a new product Adobe SocialAnalytics and upgraded SiteCatalyst at its Omniture Summit, which is currently being held at Salt Lake City, Utah between March 8 and 11.

The company's Omniture segment provides Web analytics and online business optimization products, solutions, and services to manage online, offline, digital, and multi-channel business initiatives.

Omniture is about 10 percent of sales at Adobe Systems but is growing at around 20 percent per annum and is therefore one of Adobe's fastest growing assets, Jefferies & Co. said.

Next-Generation Platform

Adobe also announced a new, next-generation platform for the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture. This new platform dramatically improves how the Online Marketing Suite processes data and derives insight, powering the Suite’s analytics products with new capabilities and setting the stage for deeper, more valuable integrations between the products across the Suite.

Adobe used the event to highlight how the Creative Tools, the Enterprise Tools (LiveCycle), Omniture (Web Analytics), Demdex (Audience Optimization) and Day Software (Digital Asset Management) can be used in together in an integrated workflow for asset creation, management and analysis. We sense from conversations that this is beginning to resonate with customers more, said Ross MacMillan, an analyst at Jefferies.

SocialAnalytics

With Adobe SocialAnalytics, customers can monitor and measure popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, forums and any place where social conversations are occurring to see their valuable social data in context with all of their online initiatives.

This new and separately priced product moves into beta in April and is expected to be generally available in July. The Adobe Social Analytics product allows marketers to search over 45 social networks by keyword for relevant postings, tweets, etc, and then pull the data into the core analysis platform. A number of customers we spoke with were positive on the release, highlighting that it will avoid the need for third party tools for social analytics, said MacMillan.

MacMillan said the summit attracted 2,600-plus attendees which was up over 30 percent year-over-year. Adobe Omniture’s focus on the high end of the market was evident from the statistic, that around 30 percent of U.S. Internet advertising was present in the room, in the form of attendees from major corporate brands and large agencies.

The user summit highlighted higher user interest (attendance up over 30 percent year-over-year); improving integration with Adobe products; and new initiatives (Social analytics) that should help sustain growth in the business, said MacMillan.

SiteCatalyst

Adobe also announced a new version of Adobe SiteCatalyst, which includes enhancements that directly result from the new platform capabilities. SiteCatalyst provides marketers with actionable, real-time intelligence about online strategies and marketing initiatives.

The company has spent 3 years reworking its product architecture and a new version of the core SiteCatalyst product is in beta at 75 customers and will be generally available in second quarter of 2011. Existing customers will be migrated to the new platform over time.

MacMillan said the new product has improved capabilities around mainstream segmentation; better target segmentation for the Test and Target product; and improved processing rules that drive faster analysis. Positive customer testimonials from Ford and Salesforce.com.

Demdex Technology

Adobe said it is expanding its partner ecosystem with partners that integrate with the audience optimization solutions the company acquired with the recent purchase of Demdex, a data management platform company.

With Demdex technology, Adobe is enabling clients to aggregate and manage their strategic data assets as well as make data actionable in a broad range of third-party advertising technologies.

Data is what will ultimately drive efficiency in buying and selling billions of dollars of online media, and Demdex represents our commitment to help advertisers and publishers benefit from this trend, said John Mellor, vice president of strategy and business development, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe.

We are excited to establish these strategic relationships and will continue to invest in this solution as a key part of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, said Mellor.