11/19/08, Westin Copley hotel in Boston, MA. WebTrends, Teradata, and Stratigent held on of their WebTrends Connect seminar in Boston and these three companies understand their missions and believe in them. About 50 people attended this seminar that was organized and presented well. What was interesting about this 3 hours seminar?

First, WebTrends which was the lead sponsor is in their own words changing their mission from a "web analytics company to a marketing optimization" company. They started in 1993 as one of the first analytics companies and have progressed to one of the big three along with Omniture and Coremetrics. How are they going to change mindset from web analytics to marketing optimation - I don't know really. They clearly have products that can be sold into the marketplace and shaped to optimize marketing. Perhaps their consulting services business will be the leader in this, from the seminar it wasn't clear at all. They have products and partnerships but the process of optimizing marketing was not laid out clearly.

Second, the relationship of WebTrends to Teradata was not clear either. WebTrends has a data warehouse product, its not in the same cleass necessarily as Teredata but thats a vendor selection problem. The relationship between the two is clearly a partnership but there was no line drawn from one company to the other. When Stratigent, the consulting company presented its wares, the same thought crossed my mind. Other than Stratigent saying they could help, they have well developed slides showing their engagement process I didn't see a connection between Webtrends and them.

Was this a good investment of time? That depends onwhat you were looking for. If you wanted to know something about web analytics and how it is evolving bringing online and offline business presence together you learned something. If you looked for technique, how to solve problems, information about these vendors from a problem-solving point of view, you didn't get much.

there is no bottom-line to my observations and opinions here, WebTrends provided a vehicle to show some of their wares and thinking and I am grateful. I wish the combination of these three companies would have made better sense, there is the only real lacking from my point of view.