Our friends and partners at Omniture went public today, and we congratulate them. BusinessWeek takes a purely rear-view-mirror financial view, while TheStreet.com provides some more thoughtful analysis.

Commerce360 is an Omniture Platinum Level Partner (although they still have our old Precommerce Group logo on their site), and we've been actively using SiteCatalyst for almost two years. Our decision to use and (to the degree possible) standardize on SiteCatalyst and their SearchCenter product has been based on both the technical capabilities of the product and the business requirements of this kind of partnership.

On the technical side, it's the extensive capability to customize SiteCatalyst to specific client needs that we find the most beneficial. Our favorite features include:

• The virtually unlimited support of custom variables for traffic, commerce, and 'success' events
• The ability to highly customize reports (changing visible data columns, defining calculated metrics, defining custom A|B comparison timeframes)
• The many available methods of accessing data and reports (bookmarks, dashboards, email alerts, site overlay, desktop player, and excel-integration)
• The ability to 'subrelate' just about any data element - meaning you can see sales revenue sorted by traffics source with a secondary sort on products sold, or see revenue by product category with a secondary sort by campaign.

On the business side, the company and people of Omniture have been consistently impressive. Growing a sales and support organization as fast as they've been growing, and with the technical depth of a product like theirs is very hard. As a personal 'worst case scenario' for sales or support people who aren't up-to-snuff, I have only complimentary things to say about the many people we've worked with at Omniture. Someone there knows how to hire and/or train for a software and service organization. They also know how to stock and operate a hot tub at 1am, but that's another story...

There are plenty of challenges for Omniture. I could (and have) written feature request lists a hundred miles long, scaling their infrastructure to maintain performance needs to be a priority (they handle more analytics page tracking than all other competitors combined, so it's a big job), and there are dozens of very important 3rd party integrations that really need to be a priority (athough their new API should help spread the workload on that one).

But most importantly the senior team has the right philosophy about what web analytics is and how it needs to become a unified marketing dashboard. They're attacking the problem in a substantial way appropriate for the size and complexity of what lies ahead. I'm glad to see the capital markets provide them with additional resources, because I'm highly confident that the tools and capabilities we'll see as a result will benefit all online marketers (or at least those of us who are Omniture users) in both the short and the long term.

We really believe analytics is the driver of great online marketing, and I look forward to writing a lot more detailed posts about how we use SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter to drive marketing programs for our clients.