Jascha's Blog

At Webtrends, we’re excited about the announcement of Google Analytics public beta for their Data Export API.  Why would we be excited?  It’s simple really, because we understand that value is derived not solely from the data, but the insights you get from this data that lead you to action.  Action enabled through integration of the data into enterprise systems and processes of YOUR business. 

Gone are the days of the all-in-one suite falsely promising it can be everything to everyone.  Today’s business owners should refuse to pay for the convenience of getting at their data through vendor APIs. We launched public beta of our web services on April 7, and customer response has been fantastic – we have about 20 times more accounts (customer and developer/technology partner) enabled today than we did at the end of our private beta period a few weeks back.  The release of the Google API a few days ago reinforces all the reasons we were so excited to announce the Open Exchange to our customers.  We believe you should be able to get to your data in a way that makes sense to your business and that includes the integration of the data into tools/processes that provide true meaning of the data – whether it is a complex business intelligence tool or Microsoft Excel, a tool that most people use every day.  Providing unfettered access to your data is why we announced Open Exchange at our Engage customer conference a few weeks ago and why we talked about it during our seminar series last November.  Having Google join us in this effort is exciting.

We believe that our new web services, and the developer network community we launched, provide powerful tools for integrating Webtrends data with everything from Excel or your own custom reporting apps and everything in between.  We created these new web services so that our customers can:

• Build their own powerful applications by integrating data directly in to their apps. Custom dashboards, widgets, and analytics apps just got a lot smarter with REST URL methods
• Build dashboards in Excel by bringing in live data from your Analytics reports. In Excel, you can use the “import from web” option to import report data.

Why build something that makes it easier to get data into Excel?  Excel is the most widely used analytics tool in the world.  Fortune 100 companies to small businesses us it to analyze, understand, and present this data throughout their organization.  A typical barrier is that most business users aren’t programmers or developers, and think that REST is something your body gets at night when you are asleep.  We had a challenge to ensure that our business users could take full advantage of our new REST API from within Excel.  To support the typical business user, we developed the REST URL Generator tool as part of the new web services.  Check it out and see how easy it is to get this data out of Webtrends and into Excel.

So maybe you are reading this and thinking you’re a programmer, what’s in this for me?  The same powerful and elegant solution we’ve created for business users is what we’ve set out to accomplish for developers as well.  As I mentioned, we’re using REST, which is a powerful standard that is widely accepted to program on. Our simple XML and JSON formats are easy to consume into applications you can build.  The JSON format is a less verbose option than XML, which will make performance better for applications that can consume it.  Plus we have an Excel-specific XML format to make data appear in Excel the way you want it to – in case you are programmer building powerful Excel applications for business users described above.

Open Exchange doesn’t end with web services.  We’ve released enhancements to our solution for managing the complexity of javascript tagging, Tag Builder, to allow for easier partner connections and more efficient tag management.  We’re building a new Data Collection API to further enable customers to derive value from our partners, which will be out in beta this summer.

In all we believe that the future of the analytics industry is going to be driven by enabling customers to get their data, in a way that works for their business, that gets them to insight and leads to action.  We fully expect that all the other players in the analytics space will be moving this direction too.  We welcome it because it ultimately benefits our customers – and that is what truly excites us.

It was a great pleasure for the Webtrends staff and myself to host our customers, partners, and media at Engage 2009. Many thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this event fun and informative to attend. Our minds are already swirling with plans for next year’s event! While this one is fresh in everyone’s mind, we’d like to ask for your feedback on how the conference was for you. How was the space? The speakers? Was the food good? Did the wifi hold up well? Anything you thought was missing? What was your favorite part? Last question…February of next year…Engage 2010…Orlando, New Orleans, Atlanta….?

I read Silicon Florist, Rick’s Turoczy’s blog. I’d highly recommend it if you haven’t checked it out.

Yesterday I stumbled onto a post about  Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer and a geo mapping it has done to call out PDX twitter influencers. You can read the post here: http://siliconflorist.com/2009/04/02/twitalyzer-top-100-twitter-types-in-portland-by-influence/

It was cool to be on the list (#67). I’m new to the community and appreciate the mention.

Congratulations to Eric on the continued adoption of his cool new tool. It’s clearly useful now and seems to get better the more he invests in it and with more people added to the database.

Eric’s comment on Rick’s blog makes a nice joke about the nonsensical locations so many have in their Twitter profiles…As Eric points out, Twitalyzer searches based on people using Portland in their location. I’d echo his comment and encourage people to update their Twitter profile location if they want to be included.

All said, it is moderately ironic for me to have made this list being that I don’t live in Portland yet

Regardless, it has been a pleasure beginning my introduction into the local PDX tech community. I’ve met some wonderful and really smart people in the past few months. I look forward to actually, physically, moving to Portland once we sell our home in Seattle (DM me if you know a buyer!).

If you are interested there is a real time Twitalyzer list for Portland available here: http://twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/list.asp?l=100&f=&c=Portland&cn=Portland

It only shows top 10 so you have to scroll to see rest.

Jascha