So as you may have heard, Adobe has bid to purchase Omniture for $1.8B.  For such a steep price tag, you’d expect the synergies to be more obvious.  I’ve heard various reasons for the deal…

• “We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets” - Shantanu Narayen, chief executive of Adobe
• “May help offset declining revenues from the company’s Creative Suite of software” - Trip Chowdhry, managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research
• “The deal will help it “transform” e-commerce by combining its content creation tools with Omniture’s online measurement and optimization technologies to help “increase the value Adobe delivers to customers.”"

To get to a little more detail, one pundit posits:

video developers and agencies will build Adobe Flash creative with Omniture tracking codes implanted from the beginning. This will enable them to track the views and virality of that creative across the web, and perhaps begin to micro-charge for every view, partial view or forward of their content.” – Advertising Age

I’m afraid I don’t get it.  There are already analytics solutions that can be implanted from the beginning, such as Google Analytics, or even Omniture as it is now, so why would they need to buy Omniture to make this happen?  I don’t see HTML coding tools buying up analytics providers…why would the makers of Flash coding tools need to do so?

Not to mention, Omniture’s solutions are extremely expensive, and not accessible to most developers anyway.  Even if you can afford to use Omniture, you then need to hire consultants to set it up for you because it’s a bear to get the reporting you want out of it.  How is this going to help Adobe?

If anyone out there has a clear idea of how this integration would work and what real advantages it would have for Flash developers, please leave a comment.