In answer to the question as to when Omniture might open source their
hosting code I would say definitely not before they let Charles Manson
out of jail. I could be wrong. I am genuinely interested in the movement
toward hosted systems that are driven by proprietary software. Many of
these systems are data collection and reporting systems that serve
business needs. The data belongs to the subscriber of the service while
the core software remains proprietary and belongs to the hosting
provider. In many cases these systems provide open APIs for clients to
customize their own installations. In reading the thread I am
interpreting from some that service providers such as Salesforce should
open source the software that drives their service business. Indeed I
have heard calls for Red Hat to open source RHN. Google is a proprietary
software service that makes money off indexing open source websites as
well as the rest of the world. Does it make sense for an open source
community driven website to collect revenue from banner ads pointing to
its site through Google?
Mike McGrath wrote:
On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Jesse Eversole Jr wrote:
Sure,
Omniture uses what I call a "client side" tracking technique using javascript
to dynamically markup an image tag with a query string and fetch that image
from Omniture's servers sending data to them via the query string. Google and
Yahoo offer similar services with less sophisticated features, but the
approach is effectively the same. The data is stored on Omniture's servers
and available for reporting in near real time especially when it comes to
basic traffic data. It is probably important to note that Omniture and
awstats are not mutually exclusive. One is server based and the other runs on
the webpage sending data to a hosted platform.
I would have to dig into details to completely expose what our license
agreement with Omniture is as is applies to the usage of their software since
is a service that we buy from them. Omniture is more akin to Salesforce.com
and Google Analytics.
To get started with the base functionality of Omniture you drop in some
javascript, hopefully in a header or footer, and a few minutes later you can
login to your account and start looking at traffic reports. Omniture has many
sophisticated features one of which has the interest of Red Hat in response to
your comment about Red Hat's needs relating to Fedora. We have the capability
with Omniture to do cross-domain path analysis. That is, we can gain much
deeper insight into the relationship between the two or more sites from
tracking cross site browsing behavior. We can track visitor paths across
multiple sites including our international sites. This extends beyond simple
entry and exit page analysis. The data is rich and the reporting interface
powerful to the extent that it takes some time to explore all the different
capabilities should the Fedora community wish to use Omniture for some of its
own reporting.
I think this is great, really. I'd love to do it but Omniture has chosen
to build their software in a closed source manner so I don't think we can
do it. Unless they want to OSS their code, we won't be able to use it.
-Mike
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