As one of our clients said recently: “I just want any two data points to match”. But beyond this seeming impossibility - Jim Sterne’s ‘true but not accurate’ has become a mantra – it’s the competing trends and missing connections in the various data sets that are the real frustration.

A system like TouchClarity is based on user profiling and subsequent personalization, so the benefits of both data integration and control with SiteCatalyst relative to both defining the on-site behaviors that define the profile or user segment and reporting on the personalization results in combination with other commerce or pathing information is clear.

I hope Omniture takes advantage of their ownership of both sides of this integration to really do a showcase implementation enabling all the connections and reporting options a hard-core real world user would want. And then figures out how to generalize this ability to allow all Genesis and other API connections to go that deep.

This leads to my fear about this strategy and an idea that might help to prevent it. I worry that as Omniture adds components via acquisition we get solid but not spectacular integrations, a gradual disincentive to open or support the API to allow competitive components a fair shot, and pricing that creates an analytics/optimization suite further limiting the access of 3rd parties. It’s brilliant business for Omniture but the road to Microsoft Office for the rest of us.

The trouble isn’t bad faith but reality – each of these products is incredibly complex and the desired integrations against all the relevant user scenarios even more so. Take this across an expanding product line, and all the market segments which are adopting Omniture which each have very different ‘last mile’ needs, and the fact that most current users can’t seem to get past 10-20% utilization because the software already overwhelms them, and you have a world where things are getting more and more complex and most users need more and more simplification while a relative few (say 10-15%) want the exact opposite.

SiteCatalyst is probably the most complex piece of software I’ve ever used. I’m over two years in and feel like I’ve got a good handle on about half of it. It continues to impress me in many ways – which is saying something given its complexity and that of the tasks for which I use it – but there is also a nearly endless stream of things I want it to do that it can’t. Importantly it usually isn’t that what I want isn’t technical possible or even structurally unsupported, it’s usually that there is no UI some rather trivial issue of how the data is currently stored/related.

So here’s my idea (desire): Open up the presentation layer of SiteCatalyst so others can extend/replace report writing and graphics etc for both verticals and special needs. It would be great to have 3rd parties and users creating bookmark/dashboard packs that add-in for different type of analysis – not just with the current capabilities (which would be a nice start) but some of which are dependent upon plug-ins that actually extend the presentation or computational capabilities. And with full access to data from third parties via Genesis, data sources, and future API extensions.

I’m suggesting that Omniture take the ‘platform’ word in its tagline seriously, and enable a new class of 3rd parties to participate in the eco-system at the visualization layer. It seems a lot safer bet for everyone than having to rely on one company to keep up with the explosion of demands that the rest of the platform growth ignites. I have no idea of the technical issues implicit of this request, but put a couple of guys on it will ya  :-)

The market need to understand and control online business is massively under-served right now and as more companies move from their backwater little 1999 implementations into the kind of much more robust situations they need to be relevant and competitive in the future the needs are going to grow geometrically.

It’s great to see Omniture taking such a bold approach to this market. I think they’re dead-on to make moves like this acquisition (and to sacrifice some short term profitability) to take ground now while it’s relatively cheap and perhaps more importantly there isn’t significant competition for these deals. I think they fully realize how large of a game they’re playing and the associated requirements and risks. There are challenges there including those I’ve mentioned, but I’m really looking forward to the next moves and the ongoing execution.

Update: Coverage at ClickZ and Paid Content