I have asked Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, to sit down with me and have a chat about WebTrends future, organizational integration and the state of Web Analytics in general.
Ivan Bager Alex YoderThere has been a major shift of focus in WebTrends development during the last year or so. From a focus that used to be on following the competitors and just trying to keep up, WT has moved to a focus on doing things better, more agile and more elegantly than its counterparts in the WA space.
The new drive in WT is a set of pillars, Power, Elegance and Openness. I chose to focus on the two lather. The elegance is already shinning thru the new designs and much more userfriendly interface in version 9.
Visually WT has moved away from the crayola fetish that is so rampant in the WA tools out there. Alex tells me that Stephen Fews work has been inspirational for the design team, it shows and it's great. The new designs are indeed much more credible, like something pulled from the pages of a pink paper. Clean sleek and succinctly informative. It still needs work, but they're getting there, certainly leaving the fingerpainted competitors.
Openness is actually almost palpable in the presence of the WT crew, they are open about their past mistakes, the shortcomings of the product and their organizational weaknesses. But this blunt honesty gives a certain sense of confidence in them and in the products future. Openess is also a principle in the software itself providing easy and flexible access to the contained data thru direct REST exports, APIs and a plethora of other possibilities.
We have a good long talk on organizational integration, 'free' vendors, the world at large and privacy issues. But that's for another post.
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