Not unexpected, but definitely refreshing - the high end of Web Analytics - Omniture and Visual Sciences, are now one.

What does it mean?   It means Omniture now, pretty much, owns the high end - leaving Coremetrics, more or less - isolated.  Maybe that's not a bad thing, but I tend to think it is - because anyone that's going to spend a load of money on an analytics solution - will want the very best one.  

"…With the tremendous growth opportunities we see in the online optimization market, we believe that in addition to being financially accretive to our shareholders, this is a strategic investment that will drive increased value for customers and partners," said Josh James, CEO and co-founder of Omniture. "We are facing a very significant opportunity defined by the rapid growth of online advertising and online business in general. This acquisition enables Omniture to accelerate our investments in advanced solutions that drive customer success as well as create further opportunities to cross-sell our growing portfolio of products to a combined customer base of more than 4,000 customers."

So, Omniture just bought the proprietary database technology that makes Visual Sciences more powerful -thereby putting it 3-5 years ahead of anyone else.  

The low end is taken up by Google Analytics - which is becoming more and more powerful and popular - even offering some advanced features like event tracking of Flash and Ajax.  I don't see how ClickTracks can compete - down the line, both Coremetrics and ClickTracks will be forced out to the fringe eventually.