I read last night that I’ll be recouping some of my losses after betting on Omniture a couple of years ago, with the pending buyout by Adobe.  The early take on this is that Adobe needs to pick up some ongoing subscription revenue, I am assuming because they simply cannot keep raising the price on the 167 legitimate licenses for Photoshop which are sold to designers in New York that everyone else copies over to Pirate Bay.

So, the revenue part I get.   But where’s the Bonus Fat?

• Up until now, Adobe provides a suite of tools that creates and converts various bits of digital eye candy for presentation on the web, but has precious little to do with the operations part of actual presentation layer.  Adobe has become the de facto ’solid document’ format with .pdf, but there’s no real money there.  They also offer the Scene7 technology, which can convert a multipage .pdf or other print document into a “browsable” online catalog (which is insane to me, but that’s how some people like to shop, I guess).  Flash is becoming more prominent but it’s never been able to get passed the debate of ‘needless cartoons’ vs. ‘functional website navigation’.

• Omniture is all about the data.  Their strategy so far has been to build up all the back-end marketing tools needed to run a dotcom: page and traffic analytics, A/B comparison, keyword tracking, affiliate relationship management, some crude BI.  They are in the driver’s seat on a lot of this– despite the disappointment that a lot of these platform tools came in through acquisitions, and didn’t necessarily play nice with each other.

So, what to make of this acquisition?  We have someone who has some juice in the front-end presentation layer, who now will have a hand in the back-end data that should be driving that presentation layer.  One thing is for sure: every marketing service in the dotcom space has one thing in common– somewhere in the sales pitch you’ll hear the salesman say “we simply take your traffic data from Omniture and…”

Ah.  There it is: product personalization, merchandising, traffic shaping, and all that crap getting shoved through the presentation layer touches Omniture-derived data at some point or another.  If Adobe can make the merchandising and happy bouncing balls that appear on the website become that more integrated and real-time personalized with the Omniture data, then they have something.

But wait– someone’s doing exactly that– they’re taking Omniture traffic data and showing personalized merchandising via Adobe Flash out to the Consumer.  They’re name is Allurent, and I bet they’re next.