Adobe Acquiring Omniture for $1.8 Billion

Deal touts embedding of optimization and analytics tools at content creation stage.

By Bill Mickey
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Adobe Systems Incorporated plans to acquire Web analytics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion, the company announced today.

The offer represents a 45 percent premium over Omniture's average closing price over the last 30 days, and will create a company that effectively merges analytics and optimization tools with the content creation stage. Omniture's trailing four quarter revenues were $335 million.

In a world where marketers want audience data down to the content level and publishers want the ability to optimize and track usage across content properties, the deal appears to deliver on that ideal.

The deal gives Adobe an anatlytics platform it can merge with its content creation products and allow it to get deeper into digital advertising and e-commerce. "For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications," said Adobe in a statement announcing the deal.

In a third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Adobe's president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, said the deal will help Adobe's customers measure and optimize the impact and value of the content "experiences" created with Adboe products.

Omniture CEO Josh James said in the call that the combined entity will essentially allow the integration of measurment "into the front end of the content creation process. Bottom line, this improves the content engagement, advertising effectiveness and user experience." 

This capability, however, is not necessarily a breakthrough, or that unique. "[The industry has] been integrating these tags through our CMS systems for years," Eric Peterson, founder of Web analytics consultancy Web Analytics Demystified, told AD. "Whether they're going to automate that with an 'Omniture-ize This' button in Dreamweaver will have to be proven out by Adobe."

Nevertheless, while synergies may not be readily apparent to most—IBM and WPP, which bought a $25 million stake in Omniture earlier this year, were considerd more logical buyers—Peterson says the deal brings some needed exposure to the analytics realm and is intrigued by the combination of creative and data-based business models.

As part of the deal, Omniture will become a business unit within Adobe. Omniture's James will become SVP of the new unit, reporting to Narayen.

The deal is expected to close, pending regulatory approval, in the fourth quarter of Adobe's fiscal 2009.

More on the deal via Adobe here.

Update: It appears there might be more than regulatory approval pending. Competitive bids for Omniture may be looming. PaidContent points to a Marketwatch story that says because Omniture competes with Google in the analytics space, analysts are watching out for a late bid from Microsoft.