I attended Omniture's annual summit last week in Salt Lake City, and I have to say that it was an amazing event. Not only did they pull off a top-notch conference for 2000 people, but they also topped it off with some great new product announcements.
SiteCatalyst Version 14 was announced as well as Search Center version 3 and they both received a great reception from the crowd. There were new tools added to both products, as well as some tremendous (and overdue) usability upgrades made to the interface.
The High lights:
SiteCatalyst Version 14
New improved user interface with greatly improved usability (in my opinion this was long overdue) making it easier to find and create the reports that you need
Integration of their recent acquisition of Offermatica and touch clarity into the Test and Target area
Improved video/rich media tracking that allows for very detailed metrics to be created regarding video consumption
A brilliant quick search feature to help find report, tools and help information
More options chart types to choose from for improved information communication
Share and distribute reports more easily and quickly
new API
upgraded and improved ExcelClient
…plus more
Search Center Version 3
Portfolio optimization and campaign modeling. The new Search Center will allow you to model how your performance would change should you increase of decrease your daily budget. It will now optimize your bids base on your 'portfolio' of keywords based on your budget and your business rules, and not just individual keywords based on business rules such as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Last week's Omniture announcements along with this week's Google Analytics announcements are great news for the web analytics community. The new features will allow companies to get more insight into how their businesses are performing with less effort.
As far as Omniture needing to worry that the Google Analytics product is developing at light speed, I don't think that is really the case. Google Analytics has been making major improvements to their tool very rapidly at light speed perhaps, but Omniture has continued to update and improve their 'optimization platform' at warp speed (I'm assuming that warp speed is faster than light speed)
