In a recent news release, IBM announced it is acquiring Coremetrics, a prominent online web-analytics company.This is somewhat surprising given that their largest competitor, Omniture, recently sold to Adobe Software for over $1 billion. Adobe and IBM seem like very different sorts of companies within the technology universe that would have an interest in web-analytics software. Needless to say, this shows the breadth of focus for large diversified tech companies to get a piece of the internet marketing revenues that are continuing to explode as web marketing expands. IBM focused in on their desire to leverage Coremetrics to address the need for tracking and analytics around social media. They weren’t clear about what their areas of interest were within social media, but we all know that discipline is a hotbed for innovation and focus among marketers. I’ll be very interested to see how IBM begins to make inroads into this seemingly unfamiliar territory.
