What is Enterprise Class?

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I spent most of this past week in Washington, D.C. with many of my colleagues at eMetrics.  The show was abuzz with forecasts of the future,  press releases, announcements and a even a few proclamations.  From our own declaration of data independence to John Lovett & Bill Gassman agreeing in a joint session that “the future of web analytics is data integration” (as Tweeted by @jdersh) -  the buzz was heavy.

One buzz-worthy event was Avinash’s announcement of the latest enhancements to Google Analytics (GA), which include custom reporting, new visualizations, segmentation, an export API, and AdSense integration.  Following the announcement, much was made in the social mediasphere about the now certain impending failure of, as ClickZ’s Anna Maria Virzi called us, “the big guns like Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics.”  GA was even referring to themselves as “enterprise class” on their booth and the less formal “enterprisey” on their sponsored eMetrics badge insert.

This begs the question, though – What makes a web analytics solution an enterprise web analytics solution?

What are the challenges that an enterprise faces that are not faced by individual practitioners, small companies, or individual departments when choosing, deploying and using a web analytics solution?  The challenges are many, but I think it’s worth thinking about the phrase enterprise software for a moment.  Google provides the following definition (referenced from Wikipedia), which is instructive:

Enterprise software is software that “solves” an enterprise problem (rather than a departmental problem)…

Enterprises are complex organizations, often spanning multiple geographies, cultures and legal authorities.  Geographies and departments span multiple budget centers, centers of excellence, and technology infrastructures. Disparate geographies engaged in the same business often have variant business processes and divergent meta-data models to describe business events, and yet still must be able report business performance to HQ in a unified way.  Customer marketing itself is an enterprise function, requiring data from fulfillment, sales, marketing, and more.  And, yes, data from what has traditionally been a silo of data – online marketing and web analytics.

So, what makes a web analytics solution an enterprise solution?  We believe an enterprise solution must be:

  • Open
  • Flexible
  • Powerful

Openness means you can easily integrate customer-level data with other marketing technologies and into existing enterprise data warehouses.  Openness means you can analyze site operations and customer data with our tools or with the analytics and BI tools of your choice.  Openness means ODBC connectivity, Web Services APIs and a published schema that allow you to build best-of-breed marketing solutions with our products, our partners’ products, and your existing investments.

Flexible means being able to buy software, use hosted software as a service, or blend the two according to your specific needs.  Flexible means being able to collect data with log-files, JavaScript tags, server-side calls, direct calls, or the combination that best fits your technological environment.  Flexible means unlimited custom parameter collection and being able to sessionize on almost anything – our cookie, your cookie, user ID, IP address and more.  Flexible means building the tag you want – nothing more, nothing less – with TagBuilder.  And flexible means having access to deeply knowledgeable product support and engaging services in the way that works best for you – through us directly or through our partners.

Powerful means no sampling in data collection and access to unsampled visitor-level data.  Powerful means redundant data-collection centers and the ability to handle traffic spikes on the largest sites on the internet.  Powerful means true custom reporting with custom dimensions and measures – not just the dimensions and measures that come out of the box.  Powerful means having a relational, visitor-centered warehouse with import and export APIs so you can build (visually or through SQL) and market to rich segments created with not just web data, but data from other customer-data stores.   Powerful means having the only cross-domain first party cookie in the industry, a technology that accurately tracks a visitor across multiple domains.  Powerful means accurate reporting of visitors at individual domains and when rolled-up across domains.

Ultimately, governance of the solution itself becomes one of the primary concerns of the enterprise when deploying an enterprise solution.  Enterprise software takes this into account by offering the openness to integrate seamlessly, the flexibility to deploy successfully across disparate units and geographies, and the power to bring it all together with the degree of control required to meet both internal and external governance requirements.

So now you know what we think.  What do you think?

  • http://www.kaushik.net/avinash Avinash Kaushik

    As my favorite author Mark Twain remarked: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

    : )

    It is hard for me to imagine scenarios without a robust Web Analytics tools ecosystem. People wrongly think of this as a zero sum equation. The ecosystem is very very far away from that.

    Any vendor that provides value to its customers will thrive. I think, humbly, that the easy ride is over.

    Each vendor learns from the others and the pie will grow. I hope WebTrends will have advanced visualizations like Motion charts as a feature, and I need to beg / threaten a few people to create Tag Builder for Analytics. : )

    -Avinash.

    PS: This is a great definition of “enterprise”. My own little rant is at the below link (but I think Aaron that you and I are not that far apart):

    Redefining Conventional Wisdom On “Enterprise Class” Web Analytics
    http://is.gd/4WlX

  • http://www.waomarketing.com/blog Jacques Warren

    Aaron,

    You’re quite right. The problem I see, however, is that to many people, what you are describing is perceived mainly in terms of difference in degrees. This does that, and that does it *better*. It is hard to sell degrees i.e. “We’re the more better stronger bigger product”, especially when the alternative is free.

    Another problem now is that WebTrends (and “OmniCore”) main differentiations are on features that are often deep inside the application, that 80% one rarely uses because one doesn’t know how. It’s hard to sell to people who don’t know they don’t know.

    I too think (and on record for a long time) that the future of great products like WebTrends lies in data integration. I don’t know how you guys will be able to become the application of record in a customer data integrated world, but there is definitely a lot to be done in the near future. And that requires expertise and commitment a free product organization cannot provide (and is not expected to).

  • http://www.webtrends.com Aaron Gray

    Avinash,

    So happy to see that you subscribe to the feed! I read your rant, and I think that you are right…you and I are not that far apart. And I agree, too, that the easy ride is over and we’re finally getting down to serious business.

    Also, thanks for your repeated kudos on TagBuilder. Stay tuned for more on that.

    -Aaron

  • http://www.webtrends.com Aaron Gray

    Jacques,

    We don’t see ourselves as the center of the customer data world. How could we? Digital marketing and web analytics are not the center of the customer marketing world, why should our data be the center of the customer data world?

    What we provide is the best data collection and analysis technologies in the industry, combined with an open framework that allows us to easily exchange visitor and site operations data with other systems, be they other marketing optimization tools in the ecosystem, or enterprise customer data-stores. In fact, we have found that there often isn’t a central repository or warehouse of record. We play equally well in a centerless data ecosystem and a centralized data ecosystem. Either way, we’re not at the center of the data ecosystem…we’re a seamless part of it.

    -Aaron

  • Nick Potter

    Aaron,

    There’s a couple of other categories I would add to your Openess, Flexible and Powerful.

    Your article I think focuses on the data-aspects of an enterprise class solution. Whilst this is fine, any enterprise solution can’t lose focus that as well as providing access to the data where ever and how ever, it also needs to have a user model and permissions structure that can be molded to meet a businesses requirements. If it doesn’t offer such things as robust security, and a flexible permissions model, then no matter how enterprise-worthy the data model is, it’s still going to cause problems for any large global organisation.

    The whole blog post is relevant but I think your last paragraph kind of sums up what I think are the real challenges for an enterprise class product. I can certainly speak from experience when I say the challenges of deploying something to multiple business units globally whilst maintaining ownership of any centralised data models, allowing a certain amount of localised freedom and flexibility/self-service, but retaining oversight of how any tool is being used, and meeting regional business needs but still having the ability to obtain the 10,000 foot view of the whole picture is one of the hardest things I deal with on a day to day basis.

  • http://www.webtrends.com Aaron Gray

    Nick,

    Great points. You are correct. An enterprise solution needs a robust permissions model that supports implementation across the enterprise. Thanks for pointing out my omission.

    -Aaron

  • http://husbandsanddads.com Cory Huff

    Good stuff Aaron. It’s amazing, as an owner of a rapidly growing site, to see what data helps and what data doesn’t matter. I can spend hours reading stats, but it takes quite the learning curve to figure out what actually matters.

    How do you guys help companies who are just getting into analyzing their website data? How do you help them figure out which of the “Enterprise” functions are important? Are they all important?

  • http://www.webtrends.com Aaron Gray

    Cory,

    This is the quintessential web analyitcs question! But the question isn’t really about web analytics – it’s about your business. What data do you need to manage your business? That’s the question you need to answer in order to know what you should be getting out of your analytics solution. We have a consulting group who spends a lot of time with our customers helping them answer that question. Once we understand the business, then we can determine what data you need to collect in order to manage the business.

    Really it comes back to the old addage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” When you know what you need to manage, and what you need to measure to manage it, you know what data to ask for from your analytics solution. We, and our network of consulting partners, help our customers get there.

    Thanks for such a good, and important, question, Cory.

    -Aaron