Discover 2.5 and Visual Sciences

What Omniture will do with Visual Sciences has been a hot topic – and one we’ll be focusing on during our first Ask Semphonic this coming Tuesday (see http://www.semphonic.com/analytics/asksem.asp).  It’s impossible to predict the future, but I’ve been using Discover 2.5 recently, and there are things about it which might be a foreshadowing of things to come. 

Firstly, at its heart, it’s still Omniture Discover.  If its parents are SiteCatalyst and Discover, the genes are almost entirely the latter.  If they try to integrate it with Visual Site, which they’re going to have to do, in my opinion, those same strong genes will trump anything coming from VS. 

At the same time, there is a strong SiteCatalyst look and feel to Discover 2.5 – the left navigation and color schemes, for example.  Discover 2.5 does not, in its present form, replace SiteCatalyst 13.5, but one has to ask whether Discover’s new look hints that this may be Omniture’s intention down the road.

In which case, what would fill the vacuum created by the phasing out of SiteCatalyst?  HBX.  Or rather, a product whose parents are HBX and SiteCatalyst.  The half-way point between the richness of SiteCatalyst and straightforwardness of HBX would be a product that could be too simplistic for a current, heavy user of SiteCatalyst, thus pushing them to Discover 3.X and producing more revenue for Omniture. 

In any event, that’s one scenario worth speculating about.  Ask me again on Tuesday.

Comments

[Steve]

Have used both VS and Disc. I don't understand how Disc is better in any way/aspect. Maybe a personal opinion, but the technology of VS seems to be a few years ahead of Disc. Whether that is a good thing or bad thing remains to be seen.

[paul legutko]

I agree -- VS is superior in many ways, particularly in its flexibility (Discover 2.5's segment builder is still inferior even to SiteCatalyst's Data Warehouse). I just predict that new releases of Discover post-acquisition will still technologically remain rooted in Discover's Java-based application and will only minimally assimilate technology from VS. What will happen to VS is an open question -- to convince a client to purchase both VS and Discover would be a tough sell. But we'll see...