Greg Drew, CEO & top executives leave WebTrends

These are truly fascinating times for Web Analytics.

An article in the Portland Business Journal dated Oct.31st reveals thats WebTrends was hoping to be acquired by Omniture, who decided in favor of Visual Sciences.

Greg Drew, WebTrends’s CEO has now been replaced by Bruce T. Coleman.

Excerpts:

CEO Greg Drew and three other executives at WebTrends Inc. have left the company. Details of their departure remain unclear.

Pictures and biographies of each executive disappeared from the company’s Web site late Wednesday. Calls and a visit to the company, as well as a call to Drew, received no responses.

Drew had headed Portland-based Web analytics firm WebTrends for the past four years, and was part of the management team that took the company out as a separate enterprise from San Jose-based NetIQ Corp. in March 2005.

The WebTrends Web site now lists Bruce T. Coleman as CEO. He is CEO of El Salto Advisors, a consulting firm that provides interim management to computer software and service companies. He was most recently interim CEO of San Diego’s Websense until May 1999 and remains a director of that company.

[…] They speculate that with its market share slipping, WebTrends management wanted to sell the company to its biggest rival, Omniture Inc.

This particular piece of news begs the following questions:

• why would two companies that just recently launched major upgrades to their product lines want to be acquired?
• why sell to Omniture when WebTrends and Omniture have different views on Web Analytics?
• were Visual Sciences and WebTrends in the same race and aware of it?
• was Visual Sciences really favored over WebTrends? If so, what were the decisive factors in Omniture’s decision?

I am sure many people in the Web Analytics industry are as sad to see Greg Drew go as we are and wish him the best.

Thanks to Lars for pointing to the article!

As usual, constructive comments are welcome! 🙂