Walking into the Lion’s Den: Insights from the IBM Portal Excellence Conference

July 27, 2010 jseacrist — 1 comment

This year, IBM changed the name of its annual Portal Excellence conference to “Exceptional Web Experience,” reflecting the shift in focus to using web data to deliver to a superior experience to visitors. It’s not surprising, given IBM’s recent acquisition of Coremetrics — one of our competitors — that the focus would be using data-driven optimization.

While it’s true that more WebSphere customers use Webtrends than any other analytics provider, and IBM has said that they firmly committed to supporting their customer’s platform of choice, I had that sinking feeling going in. But this was no lion’s den; we were welcomed warmly and graciously by the IBM WebSphere team and by the attendees. Webtrends was the only web analytics company there. We even gave a presentation, and to a full room at that! Clearly, my trepidation was misplaced.

A few themes emerged after three days and about a hundred conversations:

WebSphere Portal has become a mainstream web development platform
About 2/3 of the people I spoke with are using WebSphere Portal as their main web development environment, for both internal and external sites. This is increasing the need for accurate and actionable metrics to improve business results

Communities and collaboration is on the rise
Mmany customers are leveraging IBMs “Collaboration Accelerator” to add communities, blogs, profiles, and social tagging strategies to their external-facing sites, and are struggling to find a way to measure what it all means

Visitor-centricity
Many people that I spoke with were trying to move beyond aggregate metrics, and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of individual visitors. They were stoked to see the in-depth reporting on individual visitors that we were showing, and to see Webtrends Segments pulling user information from Visitor Data Mart. They could envision real ways to use this information for behavioral retargeting

Testing is becoming hot
As more externally-facing WebSphere sites are built, A/B/n and multi-variate testing is starting to become an imperative.

Internal portals are alive and well
The owners of those sites are thinking more than ever about how to optimize the user experience to increase adoption, contribution, collaboration, and ROI.

Bottom line: portals are websites too
And like any website, using data to optimize the user experience is the secret to delivering exceptional ROI. IBM knows that. Webtrends knows that. And now our shared WebSphere customers do, too.

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