Adobe’s Acquisition of Omniture Starts Making Sense of “The Distributed Internet”

In: business strategy|cloud computing|design|user experience

23 Sep 2009

Most of us who think about Web analytics and the metrics of online success (and then blog and tweet about) were left dumbstruck and gobsmacked at the announcement last week that Adobe Corporation would acquire Omniture, one of the top three players in the paid Web analytics market.

I said it reminded me of such online head shakers as eBay buying Skype. Now the thread of logic behind this billion dollar move is starting to be understood.

Adobe has always been a builder and seller of graphics and publishing tools like Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash and the new Air platform. They’ve been challenged in some of these markets by aging behemouths like Microsoft with their Silverlight platform.

So slowly Adobe has been becoming less and less of a software licensing company and more of a publishing tools and services company. The “services” piece is key to understanding the new Omniture acquisition. As the Air platform becomes better integrated with its other tools, Adobe can move further and further into the publishing process. Designers and editors can use their tools now to create content and manage digital assets. But moving forward those same actors will be able to publish content using Adobe services—and now with Omniture they will be able to measure how effective content is in the marketplace. If content needs to be changed or edited, Adobe will have a full value chain from “Create–Design–Publish–Measure.”

This all happens as two other vast movements engulf the software world:

1. Saas—Licensing of individual installations—”copies”–of software is being supplanted by delivery of software as a service, “SaaS,” relying on the cloud for distribution.

2. The Distributed Internet–Each of us no longer publishes content to our “Website” and that’s that. What I call the Distributed Internet now allows content to be delivered, captured, re-assigned and re-syndicated all over God’s creation by the publisher and by reader/curators.

Adobe can sit still with it’s old-fashioned business of selling you a copy of Photoshop for $999, or it can begin to build a supply chain for its customers that runs from the designers desktop to the final destinations for content all over the Internet. By providing analytics from Omniture, Adobe will be delivering not a single copy of software, but a living creation process that allows for real-time changes and evolution of content, all within its toolset, all of which will eventually be delivered through the cloud as SaaS.

The next missing piece is content management—something that Adobe could fulfill with some strong, simple building blocks—think about a server providing Drupal like capabilities which could be customized.

Then there’s storage in the cloud and distribution like the edge caching that Akamai does.

I’m not sure who buys who or when Adobe adds the next piece to the value chain, but for the time being it’s clear they’re working on that value chain as their big bet for the future.