WebTrends Shakes Up Senior Management Team
- by Mark Walsh @markfwal, November 2, 2007
Besides Drew, Jason Palmer, vice president of product management, and Tore Steen, vice president of business and corporate development, have also left the company. Tim Kopp, WebTrends' CMO, confirmed the leadership changes.
"The company has been doing great. We're driving double-digit growth. But we believe we can continue to do better and the board wanted to make a change to help accelerate growth," says Kopp. He adds that Coleman is serving as CEO on an interim basis until the company finds a permanent new chief executive.
Coleman, who has been a WebTrends board member since 1998, has an extensive background leading tech companies. According to his WebTrends bio, he's been CEO at several companies since the late 1990s, incuding Stamps.com, Rogue Wave Software, and Web security firm Websense.
Kopp also notes that WebTrends' key executives--including himself, CFO Bryan LeBland and Nick Sharp, vice president and general manager, EMEA--are still on board. "We're conducting business as usual," says Kopp, who joined the company in January from Coca-Cola.
At least one analytics industry watcher was surprised by the upheaval at WebTrends.
"It happened very suddenly," says John Lovett, a JupiterResearch analyst who covers Web site technology and operations. He says ex-CEO Drew appeared at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in mid-October, delivering a talk on how the four P's of marketing--Product, Price, Place and Promotion--are turning into the Four R's: Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain.
WebTrends has been a pioneer in Web analytics and maintains substantial marketshare in the sector, according to Lovett. But a wave of consolidation led by Omniture is quickly reshaping the industry. Earlier this month, the Web analytics giant announced its intention to acquire rival Visual Sciences (formerly WebSideStory) for $394 million.
That deal was preceded by a string of smaller Omniture acquisitions in the field recently, including Instadia, Touch Clarity and Offermatica.
"Omniture is causing some major waves in the industry right now," says Lovett. "Their digital marketing toolbox is expanding rapidly through the acquisitions they're making."
Kopp deflects the idea that the management changes were in any way tied to the industry's heightened M&A activity.
"We're a very strong No. 2 in the market at this point [behind Omniture] and will continue to be a leader in the space," he says.
New competitors like Google and Microsoft are also altering the landscape by introducing their own do-it-yourself Web analytics solutions.
"Google Analytics has really opened up awareness of analytics tools," says Lovett. "Now everyone is watching Google." At the eMetrics summit last month, Microsoft announced its own free Web analytics package dubbed Project Gatineau.
Kopp acknowledges that Google looms as a formidable competitor. But he says Google Analytics has been geared to the lower end of the market, while "we play a lot more on the enterprise level, so we're not running into Google on enterprise-level accounts," he says.
In recent months, WebTrends has focused on the release of new tools that measure engagement, the prized but elusive criteria for evaluating Web audiences. Its Score service, for instance, lets marketers attach specific values to each of their Web pages and then automatically calculate an engagement score for every visitor. "The response in the marketplace has been beyond expectations," says Kopp.
