Omniture Acquires Mercado
I received an e-mail this morning that Omniture has acquired Mercado, one of the largest players in on-site search. The funny thing here is that Omniture has only recently started selling the rebranded VisualScience product (which was formerly a WebSideStory product) for site search. I am guessing that Omniture will take the same direction here as they have with their Discover product, making the VisualScience product a “lite” version compared to their newly acquired product from Mercado. Here’s the e-mail Omniture sent this morning making the announcement:
Dear Omniture Customer,
We are excited to let you know that Omniture has agreed to acquire the assets of Mercado, a leader in site search and merchandising and a long-standing Omniture partner. This acquisition includes certain technology and intellectual property assets.
The addition of Mercado’s applications presents a unique opportunity for Omniture to further expand our online business optimization platform with increased site search and online merchandising capabilities.
The acquisition will be highly complementary with our Omniture SiteSearch™ product. SiteSearch customers should know there will be no impact on the current Omniture product offering. In the future, however, we anticipate bringing together the best features of both so we can continue to provide the most comprehensive site search and merchandising solution available in the market.
For additional information, please read the press release announcing this news, visitwww.omniture.com or contact your account manager.
It would seem that Omniture is pushing full steam ahead in creating their “online marketing optimization suite.”
At this time, my company is using Endeca. I don’t know that this will make us take a look at this new offering or not, but it will be interesting to see what kinds of integrations they have planned down the road in terms of their other products.
Update:
I’m hearing on Twitter that this was a bit of a fire sale (http://twitter.com/jbillingsley/statuses/959067564). It also looks like Mercado wasn’t doing so well and that the software-as-a-service business model wasn’t helping the issue (http://www.startupisrael.com/mercado-shutting-down). I know that Omniture uses the same basic business model, but they also have the advantage of a huge customer base.
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