I invited Sebastian, author of Webanalyticsbook.com  meet me at Omniture kickoff of Discover 2.0 and Touch Clarity at NASDAQ tonight but security would not let Sebastian in because he forgot to take his id with him.  And I guess after 3 glasses of red wine and a couple of great conversations, I'm tired –but I'll try to tell you the stuff you can't read about anywhere else.

Ok, there were a lot of Omniture customers at NASDAQ tonight (and I spoke to a few of them after the presentation) and I was impressed with what I saw of Discover 2.0 (but never working with Discover 1.0, this is the first time I actually saw it).

OK, here goes - what you can't read anywhere else:

Josh James - CEO, Brett Error, Chief Technology Officer and Matt Belkin, VP Best Practices  and analytics managers from two Omniture clients, Scripps Networks and Overstock.com were present and spoke.

Omniture made a convincing case it's platform is the best positioned to answer the increasingly complex questions many businesses have.  Using massive parallel processing and heavy investment in ramping up their datacenters, Omniture improved their Data Warehouse to allow almost unlimited queries down to the element level in real time.  I found Brett Error and Josh James a little vague on the details of the infrastructure and programming changes to allow Discover 2.0 to function - but I realize this was not the right venue for that kind of discussion.

Omniture handles all the infrastructure costs and you just sign the contract, tag your pages and start using Discover/Discover 2.0 and it's other products and your data is saved indefinitely in their data warehouse.   Matt Belkin showed how you can segment and use Omniture to answer complex business questions in real time; and, the two clients they brought along did a good job showing how Omniture helps improve their businesses.

Finally, The founder and now partner in Touch Clarity, the acquisition announced today, spoke for about 15 minutes on Website Interactive Optimization - and how Touch Clarity is the leader in Europe for developing the technology to display the right ad to each visitor of a website and to how Touch Clarity measures the Revenue "Lift" their platform produces (anywhere from 200 - 800%) when properly deployed.  In fact, data collection will now be done via Omniture's tags, meaning all clients are already enabled to use Touch Clarity as of today.

Here's my thoughts on the whole thing - tonight:

You can set up Omniture and get data on your pages which then leads to more questions and interaction and the platform allows you to interact with the data to answer more and more complex questions in real time - that's partly what your paying for when you buy Omniture (plus the no-hassle storage of data to the n-th dimension - so I'm told). I would think you can say the same thing about Visual Sciences.   But here's the tack: It take the right people working with these products to get the most out of them.

In fact, the two clients that presented tonight (Scripps and Overstock) made better arguments about Omniture's use than Matt Belkin.  Matt brought up cases where Omniture helped paid and organic SEO measurement but spoke way to generally about how that information might benefit anyone - and did not solve one real problem - maybe it's not the right venue for that  - but I feel that if your going to get up and tell people why Omniture is so great and you give a general explanation - "see..it helps this demo company improve it's sales via analysis of search traffic" ….that's the same pitch I've heard so many times  -that what I really want to hear is real cases and the details of each one - and he could not provide that - but his clients did - and I guess that's OK.

I also see applications for Touch Clarity - something like that would have definitely, I feel, helped my clients and many companies.  But, like anything else, it's a methodology - if your going to present a different ad to each visitor, based on behavior, you have to have many versions of the ads your going to present - and that requires some marketing department buy-in.

It did seem to me that Overstock.com made a good case the data from Omniture helped them make real time decisions on the changes they made to certain of their sites and the ROI that entailed.

So, to end this long post - I'd say that Omniture made a strong case that it is the market leader in analytics and also has the most money (stable company) and so most large companies are now clients. 

Based on what I saw, Omniture appears to leapfrog over Coremetrics and tries to reach parity with Visual Sciences, while having a much larger user base.  On the other hand, I have not used either platform but I feel that Visual Sciences is working on Analytics that's ahead of it's time, and is continuing to evolve while Omniture (also evolving) is a matured, market leader.  It's clear both choices are good ones, depending on what kinds of goals your organization has (each platform may have advantages the other doesn't -and this has to be evaluated on a case by case basis).

I walked away with a free copy of The BlackBook New York 2007 Guide to New York Restaurants, Bars, Clubs and Hotels and a couple of business cards (while I only gave out one - because I ran out).