Pattern Finder

Yay!: DoubleClick Buys Performics

On Monday, May 17th, DoubleClick announced it was buying Performics, a search engine marketing company, for $58 million in cash. Once the acquisition is completed, the Performics capabilities will be branded as Dart Search, a complement to DoubleClick's Dart for Advertisers product and SiteAdvance, the company's Web analytics product.

The impact of this? DoubleClick, like other forward-thinking vendors, is re-making itself to better serve the process orientation of today's online enterprises. DoubleClick is moving from being a best-of-breed, point solution vendor to becoming a supplier of an online optimization suite. Other vendors rushing to fill this market vacuum include Keynote Systems and Watchfire (from the Internet performance sector) as well as Atomz and iUpload (from the Web content management sector).

For a long time, vendors in this space have viewed themselves as members of a group defined by technology -- for example, Web content management or Web analytics. This technology-centric point-of-view made sense when the technologies were immature and poorly understood. However, as the major vendors reach feature parity, the technology is no longer a challenge -- the challenge is now how to integrate these disparate bits of technology into an enterprise's daily work.

In short, as a way to save enterprise time and effort, one stop shop for optimizing an enterprise's online presence is a good thing. No one vendor is there yet; but at least several are heading in the right direction. Let's hope the rest of the herd plays follow the leader.

Siebel and Teradata

A week ago (4/20/04), Siebel Systems and Teradata, two CRM analytics powerhouses, announced a technology alliance. Within the next six months, all Siebel analytic applications will be optimized for the Teradata Warehouse -- in other words, will generate Teradata-conformant SQL as well as leverage specific Teradata capabilities. In addition, the companies are saying that by the end of Q3 2004 they will link Teradata's industry-specific logical data models with Siebel's Analytic Application data models to speed system implementation.

So what's this mean? Well, first of all, that both companies have some pretty large joint customers. DIRECTV, Royal Bank of Canada, and Union Pacific Railroad were mentioned in the press release, but I know of many more. Second and third, that these customers were getting miffed at having to do or pay for the integration work, and that systems integrators that depended on such work had better start looking elsewhere for revenue.

Fourth starts to get interesting. Both Siebel and Teradata have quietly put together applications that analyze multi-channel marketing. The marketplace has an outdated view of what these companies do. Siebel still gets pegged as a Sales Force Automation vendor, and Teradata is known for -- to quote a Teradata customer -- delivering "honkin' big" data warehouses. However, if you track where the sales growth is in the Siebel portfolio, and listen to Teradata customer stories, you realize that both companies have been delivering high-end CRM analytics for some time. Siebel, via its growing number of applications distributing information to enterprise employees (Sales Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Service Analytics), and Teradata by virtue of its ability to rapidly process millions of records and terabytes of data on the backend. Scrimp on either information delivery or information processing, and you short-change the other.

The ability to perform flawless multi-channel marketing is the desire of many a Marketing VP. By connecting these two systems together, the marketplace now has access to a highly scalable, multi-channel, CRM analytics system supported by two multi-billion dollar corporations. Multi-channel marketing just got a lot safer to ponder -- assuming you can afford the price of admission.