Guest post by Tony White

My company, Ars Logica has been asked repeatedly in the last year about why so many content-technology vendors have been investing heavily in analytics technologies. Adobe acquired Omniture; IBM acquired no fewer than four analytics software companies; and the rest of the acquisition list is too long to fit [but we covered it this week in our Mergers and Acquistions Round-up]. There are four primary reasons for the trend--three specific, and one general.

First, the eCommerce platform market is re-emerging as one of the fastest-growing sectors in content management. Second, the promise of advanced personalization put forth a decade ago is only now materializing. Third, web engagement management (the ability to control individual users' web experience on a fine-grained level) has ascended to the top of marketing managers' buying-decision list. And last, we now stand at the intersection of cultural change and technological evolution, namely the decade-long trend toward the individual, and not the demographic group, as the target of advertising.

To effectively deliver in any of these four areas requires heavy lifting on the part of analytics technologies. In the past, business intelligence software took the lead in analytics feature-functionality. But as every software market dependent on advertising, web experience and online sales, attempts to communicate with the discrete individual, the need to understand uniqueness per se underpins the ability to execute on underlying business goals. With the increasing ability to understand the individual rather than the group, technologies such as collaborative filtering have given way to more sophisticated personalization algorithms, which--as an example of a cycle that feeds on itself--will mean that in the future, only the long tail of marketing will exist.

Although the trend of content management vendors buying analytics tools started roughly two years ago, I see no end in sight. In the world of online marketing and advertising, to the victors go the spoils. The victors will be those who reach the individuals (yes, I do mean just one) with highly-personalized (so personalized that there may well be only one permutation of a given web page) content. The victors will be the vendors and corporations enabling the most engaging web experiences, using the most sophisticated personalization algorithms, providing truly optimized web experiences...and more generally speaking, satisfying the cultural expectations of a "me generation" that makes the last "me generation" seem altruistic. 

Tony White is Founder of Ars Logica, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that helps companies evaluate their web content management requirements and select suitable WCM software. Ars Logica also assists software vendors in analyzing the market and planning their product roadmaps. Prior to founding Ars Logica, Tony ran the WCM Practice at the Gilbane Group; he was an analyst at the Yankee Group and Giga Information Group; and he served in senior marketing roles at Interwoven and BroadVision.

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