The Big Integration

I open this section for us to discuss everything we know about the new Visitor Intelligence from WebTrends.

Here's what I said in the blog after I saw it last week at Engage07 in as Vegas:

"After seeing the new module, Visitor Intelligence (VI), in action (well, just the surface of it of course, since those events rarely give the opportunity to go deeply) I must say that I was quite impressed. I remember that at one point I couldn’t contain myself and asked to get one. “I wanna play with that new toy!!” was how I phrased it I believe.

Those of you who came to Web Analytics from the BI world will scream “At last!!” when you see VI. It is your very powerful drag and drop “n” dimension analysis tool that puts all the measures around the visitor. If you’re a heavy WebTrends Analytics user, you know there are many things we can’t get “by visitor”. VI puts an end to that situation. VI, running on SQL, is a true query application, which means that the need to reprocess the data when you change a configuration is over. Yes, you read well. Finito the obligation to re-analyze a profile ‘cause you forgot something, or want to ask a new question.

VI is not a replacement to Analytics, WebTrends insists. It makes perfect sense, since our old friend will still be in charge of analyzing the traffic in more traditional terms. But it is my opinion that Analytics will not develop aggressively in the coming years with Visitor Intelligence becoming the main product with its growing adoption. Apart from some UI and minor changes, 8.1 is the same product, and when you will see VI, you will understand that the latter got most of the R&D budget. This raises the question of how quickly WebTrends will be able to recoup those costs, since most of the people I talked to (outside WebTrends) doubted that VI adoption would be quick. "

I will post here more information when I get it.