WebTrends in the Spotlight…Again!

My inbox buzzed with news alerts on WebTrends at least a dozen times in the last two weeks, but yesterday’s event nearly slipped under the radar.

Tim Kopp, the marketing visionary that WebTrends snatched from Coca-Cola less than a year ago has decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities. His departure follows the dismissal of several other key management executives, which begs the question…What’s going on at WebTrends?

My sources at WebTrends informed me that Tim would remain actively involved with the company until the end of the year and that “he’s really quite involved with customer relations on a day-to-day basis”. Despite the recent changes, the company reports that the staff is excited to move forward and that they’ve received great response from customers and prospects on recent initiatives. Expect to see several press releases within the next 30 days announcing new customer wins in media and financial services industries. Additionally, the company reports several key renewals within the retail industry leading up to this year’s online holiday shopping season. Existing tier-one customers such as Kimberly-Clark and Dow Chemical have also recently agreed to conduct new business with WebTrends indicating optimism in their ongoing capabilities.

The internal shake-up in recent weeks is unfortunate for WebTrends because the company was (and perhaps still is) gaining momentum with their ML2 product suite. Their Score product attempts to quantify the elusive and increasingly popular customer engagement metric. They recently announced a partnership with email services provider SilverPop, which leverages WebTrends’ Open Exchange network by automating delivery of targeted emails based on integrated unique user profiles. And they’ve enabled measurement of Microsoft Silverlight to capture analytics within streaming video and other rich Internet applications built with Silverlight.

Despite these promising developments, skeptics may still be wary. I expect that WebTrends won’t have much to say publicly about Tim’s departure and that it will get rolled under the board’s “pursuit of accelerated growth” umbrella.