WebTrends Talks Smack

Here's the latest on the increasingly boisterous Web analytics vendor scene: WebSideStory bought Visual Sciences, a maker of streaming data analysis and visualization software. Within hours, we here at Business Intelligence Pipeline heard from Greg Drew, CEO of WebSideStory rival WebTrends, who gave his take on the matter. He is, in a word, unimpressed."It comes as no surprise that WebSideStory is trying to bolster its offerings, especially since it scored poorly compared to leaders such as WebTrends in a recent independent analyst firm's market report," Drew said, alluding to a recent assessment from Forrester Research that ranked WebTrends highly, along with Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences. (What? No Google?) Drew continues: "We're also not surprised that they followed our lead in offering on-demand and software solutions to meet the full-range of enterprise-class customer needs, but we believe it will be really interesting to see how they attempt to integrate two very disparate platforms."