Adobe Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Omniture for the former to acquire the latter in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. The proposed offer represents a premium of 45% over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days through yesterday’s close.
The completion of the transaction, pending regulatory approval, is expected to close in Q4 of Adobe’s fiscal year. The company believes the acquisition will be accretive to its non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2010.
Omniture will become a new business unit within Adobe. Omniture’s CEO, Josh James, will be joining Adobe Systems as the unit’s Senior VP, reporting directly to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
At the same time, Adobe reported that third-quarter earnings fell to 35 cents per share from 50 cents per share a year ago. Adobe shares fell 3.6 percent in after-hours trading to $34.34. Omniture shares were halted after the close.
From the official statement:
By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.
The combination of the two companies will increase the value Adobe delivers to customers. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will enable advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences.
Omniture was founded in 1996 and currently counts approx. 1,200 employees worldwide. It’s the largest worldwide provider of Web analytics, with a product portfolio of 12 products serving over 5,000 customers across the globe. It reported revenues in fiscal year 2008 of about $300 million.
lame
Visible Measures is done….BK watch has started.
It will probably be acquired by some other company.
This industry has been on acquisition-merger overdive these past few years:
Web Side Story -> Visual Sciences -> Omniture -> Adobe (in about 2yrs)
Plus, the whole Urchin->Google Analytics
What I’m interested in seeing is if Adobe lowers the price of the Omniture product.
We used Omniture prior to switching to GA… but $100k /yr for something that doesn’t offer much of a competitive advantage over GA is simply not worth it. In this, or any economy.
Wow, this is a really big deal. I hope Adobe doesn’t screw it up…
Why don’t they give me 1 million dollar huh -.-
another network growing and will probably be bought pretty soon http://bit.ly/ZPSXh
why tell me why? I give it 3years before it’s undone.
Now if they could just teach designers to create unique title attributes (meta tags) maybe the web would be a better place.
Any logic to pricing ? What were the revenues of Omniture ?
It’s a public company, best to look at market cap. Revenues in 2008 = $300 million
also expected 88 mil 3rd Qtr up about 10% from last year
Soon Adobe will know the videos you’re watching online and the PDFs you’re reading.
Yeah, but what are they going to do with that information? Deliver me ads? How does this help Adobe?
It’s a stretch… but maybe they’re trying to diversify?
With the advent of the Acrobat.com and other online services, they may be trying to form some type of SaaS group.
Don’t really get this
Why doesn’t Adobe focus on the face that their software is buggy as all hell instead?
I agree 100%. With Adobe rushing out a new version of Creative Suite each year, their software is getting progressively more buggy and unstable as the years go by. Dreamweaver and Premiere are especially bad in terms of bugs and performance issues.
Adobe needs to focus on delivering stable, optimized software with real improvements rather than try to continually milk their customers for money each year.
Congrats to Josh James and the Omniture team. Perhaps with all this analytics data Adobe will see that flash isn’t that great for SEO.
Funny you should ask: http://www.tech...lash-like-html/
Brilliant, MSFT will no doubt have to respond. What of webtrends? If it wasn’t on the block before, it must be on the block now.
Dude — they were bought by Omniture years ago
MSFT bought deepmetrix, renamed it as adcenter analytics, screwed up and gave up. Simple!
What’s next in the software companies radar – Safeway, Starbucks ? How about IKEA ?
I greatly dislike adobe. Flash especially needs to be used less.
What exactly do you dislike about Adobe?
maybe this would help: http://www.tech...lash-like-html/
Did you just spam me comment?
I think you’ll find that’s “my” comment, and, no the poster was referring to a TC post on a startup threat to Adobe. But thanks anyway for your insightful comment.
Nobody cares. Flash will be used more than ever in the next couple of years. Learn to deal with it.
HTML5 Boy!
Meant to say fact not face.
To complete the flow they need a CMS, CRM and an Adserver, besides Test & Target and Sitecatalyst, how does this provide them with an integrated suite? It seems to me that they could have done this much cheaper if they really just wanted Analytics. What about Coremetrics?
The big thing here isn’t the software (Omniture’s core product offering isn’t great IMHO) however, visual sciences has some amazing stuff and they’re owned by Omni.
Another thing, Omniture has a CMS as well as a site search tool– this gives Adobe more than just an analytics package
sorry– the “big thing” I meant to mention is the client list of omniture.
Step 1 in a 3 part plan
I’ll bite, what are the other two?
Interesting news, I wonder if they are positioning themselves for a bigger piece of the cloud.
I also wonder when we can expect news of an Adobe OS
Honestly it does make a good amount of sense. Now Adobe will be able to do the full package from design to development to production to analysis of the final version
1.) They’re missing the delivery component.
2.) Is analysis really the biggest missing need for their design products?
3.) How will this improve anything beyond what customers could already do with Omniture?
1) What are we considering the delivery component? Omniture has a CMS “Omniture Publish”
2) I would be willing to place a small wager that omniture has been working on an ad server. It just makes sense for their business model. (They have Search Center which is a search ad management tool)
4) It doesn’t immediately help Omniture customers but if you think long term I can see: easy tag integration built into the flash compiling process, a full “enterprise” level start to finish web development and tracking environment. (Currently, you have different numbers from MIS systems, behavioral analytic, and ad numbers…try explaining that to management 100 times a day)
Agree with point 4 @Paul D. This isn’t about analytics, it’s about adding optimisation tools at the beginning of the creative process…
What do you mean by, at the “beginning” of the creative process? Are you referring to integrating a tracking layer & measurement planning as part of the creative in existing Adobe tools?
1) The publishing platform is most likely Business Catalyst which was acquired by Adobe only a few weeks ago.
Strange one. I was expecting this to be eventually bought by Oracle or SAP instead. Don’t see how a high end high price business suite like Omniture will fit into Adobe’s mainly long tail strategy. Is there any real synergy, any cost cut, any benefit for a customer of a competing product to switch to Omniture ? At this price level, this move looks like a very dilutive and risky bet with a very very uncertain outcome.
This makes a lot of sense for both companies. Great move.
What is the public opinion on Adobe acquiring? Check it at:
omniture
http://bit.ly/UEf8
We’re also dropping Omniture’s Site Catalyst for Google Analytics. SC is just big and clunky and terrible and expensive. Google Analytics meanwhile has been releasing features left and right. I just don’t see what Omniture can do in the face of Google — both GA vs. SC and Test and Target vs. Google Website Optimizer.
I’ve used both for years – there are lots of reasons:
1) GA doesn’t play nice with non-Google paid search (no way to import cost data, thus no ROI numbers!) and no serious search marketer only buys Google. For a decent sized retail operation with a 7 figure search spend, Omniture pays for itself here.
2) there are only 5 URL parameters allowed for campaign URL link tags, which is crazy
3) No APIs are available to correlate 3rd party data sources such ad servers or email marketing databases (though this is admittedly a PITA integration with Omniture or Coremetrics or Webtrends)
4) only one user-defined variable is available in GA compared to 50+ in Omniture. This really gets to be important when you’re dealing with content or merchandise that has a lot of metadata associated with it
5) GA’s Flash reporting using actionscript (i.e. based on calls for a SWF file) is clumsy and the data can’t be correlated with the page view data in the tool – not good if your visitor conversion event happens to be a Flash event!
However that said I think GA has a much better UI and out of the box, it is a better product even if it has 1/10 the number of features because it really helps you answer big questions quickly (the new features are really good for this). Omniture’s Discover product is a bit more powerful here (especially the spectacular Visual Sciences based version), but doesn’t justify the exorbitant cost for most companies.
Thanks to AdBlock Plus as I already have a filter of: *omniture*
Perhaps this is a way for Adobe to monetize future web-based software-services?
Warm congratulations to our friends at Omniture!!!!
Weldone adobe!
The Kenshoo Team
Well this seems like a big, stupid move on Adobe’s part. Buying a company from elsewhere in the industry just to spend money. Some exec probably drew up that chart above on the back of a napkin when selling this idea and poof, it happened and in a few years it will fall apart.
Like others said, Adobe should fix their massive catalog of buggy, inconsistent products, not add a dozen more to the mess. Many of them are already ripe for startup picking.
This is a big move by Adobe. It sends a good signal to their customers, but they are going to need to keep innovating and the integration complexities are going to make that tough. At some level, this may end up creating even more room for innovation by startups in the space. A few more thoughts on it here – http://bit.ly/5q2jG.
Congrats to Josh James and Johnny P. Awesome stuff. Here is the thing- a merger takes place because it is a profitable exchange for both parties. Omniture=Great Successful Company Adobe=Great Successful Company
Obviously these two companies are successful for a reason…I trust that this will be a good move for both companies. Josh is a total stud. The founders of Omniture are complete rock stars and have been ground breaking in the industry. Props.
Unica sees this acquisition as an opportunity for Adobe to diversify and stabilise its revenue stream, rather than an acquisition based on real business synergy.
The technology synergy between the two companies revolves around the facilitation/automation of the tagging of rich media created in Adobe tools, with the biggest focus being on advertising and viral content such as videos. Tagging at the media content level is fine if we are back in the world of simply counting clicks, but we believe that this misses the big point of why companies are buying web analytics today.
Companies need a tool to help them understand customer behaviour. In addition to knowing which ad was clicked, marketers need to have access to a whole range of further information such as who clicked, the referring site and/or keyword, navigational behaviour on the site, preferred products, areas of interest and whereabouts the customer is in the buying cycle. Defining how to capture this information is part of the website construction and interactive persuasion processes and not part of the content creation process. This is the reason why, at the executive and enterprise level, CMOs are looking to companies like Unica to solve strategic problems.
Adobe+Omniture presents the first truly holistic online business offering. Everything from production to optimization and then back to production. Closed loop. Imagine designing a banner ad creative and getting live split testing data real-time in minutes after hitting the post button.
It’s easy to look at deals like this in the context of present day, I bet Adobe is looking at a bigger (and more long-term) picture.
So why did Adobe really buy Omniture? Find out at: http://bit.ly/DpYMk
This reminds me of Macromedia’s Andromedia acquisition in 2000.