Last week, eZ Systems announced the purchase of odoscope, a behavioral sentiment dashboard eZ customers can now use to analyze visitor behavior and better target content. This follows on the heels of August's purchase of recommendation engine YOOCHOOSE.

Gabriele Viebach, CEO of eZ Systems says her customers need to have a way to understand their customers better. "eZ customers are investing heavily in their digital initiatives, and providing a compelling experience can't be successful without understanding the true motivation of the visitor," she said.

She says that was part of the motivation for purchasing odoscope."eZ odoscope allows you to understand what your visitors are doing on your site as well as visualize and analyze the click habits of specific types of users," Vielbach said. 

With the addition of these new tools, eZ, an open-source content management publishing tool, is acknowledging that understanding visitor behavior and providing them with a customized experience can help give websites an edge. It's also interesting that eZ, as an open-source vendor, is going the acquisition route to fill in holes, rather than simply waiting for the community to build missing functionality.

That's not to say that eZ doesn't count on the community too. Just last week it also announced the addition of eZ Content Cockpit, an add-on developed for the eZ Market, an applications development environment for eZ partners and customers. This one was developed by Hyperroad Design and acts as plug-in for eZ Publish Enterprise Edition users, giving them a dashboard or cockpit where editors can view work and share ideas with other editors.

These developments show that eZ is willing to go whatever route necessary to build the functionality customers require inside their product--whether that involves developing it themselves, buying the missing pieces or leaving it to third parties to develop it in the marketplace.

For more:
- see the odoscope purchase announcement
- see the eZ Content Cockpit announcement

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