Adobe's Omniture May Build, Acquire or Partner Its Way Into Mobile Even More

It is the goal of Adobe’s Omniture to track consumer behavior no matter where it occurs–the Internet, social networks or mobile.

While the company focused this week on addressing the shift to social networks at its annual customer conference in Salt Lake City, an area it finds even more exciting is mobile.

“We have to think mobile first,” said Brad Rencher, the VP and general manager of Adobe’s Omniture business. “It can’t be a channel. It can’t be something we do part time. If we do, then we are going to miss a huge wave of innovation.”

“We’ve moved mobile to the top of the list,” he added.

Already, Rencher is willing to make the bold claim that his company is the largest mobile analytics software provider in the world–even though he’s not willing to give us the figures to back it up.

What he is willing to say is that today Omniture manages five trillion clicks through its customers’ experiences on the Web and mobile and that “a significant percentage” of those come from mobile.

While computer clicks are increasing too, he said, mobile is growing faster as consumers buy more smartphones and start to adopt tablets.

Rencher said Omniture’s platform  is able to measure a wide variety of mobile traffic, including which browser a person is using on what phone and operating system.

But it is interested in doing a lot more.

Omniture is currently discussing whether to buy, build or partner with other analytic providers to have a comprehensive service. “We have our own internal initiative, but there might be something we absolutely have to have that we need for the platform,” Rencher said.

While mobile is the fastest growing part of its analytics business, he said, video is also a significant growth driver.

Of course, Omniture is very familiar with acqusitions. It was acquired by Adobe 18 months ago for $1.8 billion, and Rencher’s background at the company stretches back to 2005 when he was working at Morgan Stanley.

He first worked on taking the company public and later represented it in M&A deals. He then joined the company full time and moved to Utah.

Rencher said that Omniture continues to be based just outside of Salt Lake City and that Adobe has committed to building a long-term facility on land it has purchased.

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