Omniture Announces Developer APIs, iPhone Integration

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I am at the Omniture Annual Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah watching Josh James, CEO and founder of Omniture, deliver the first keynote for the conference. Some fascinating and useful things have been announced, but perhaps the most significant was their announcement of a developer platform around the Omniture analytics and marketing suite. The platform, called the Omniture Developer Connection, aims to give a single point for developers to connect, learn, and showcase the applications they develop.

From their recent press release:

"Omniture Developer Connection further opens up the Omniture platform, giving developers new levels of flexibility to create, and integrate with, applications that leverage Omniture data to optimize online business," said John Mellor, EVP of Strategy and Business Development at Omniture. "With approximately one trillion transactions measured each quarter, our customers are sitting on a tremendous resource of information and we are committed to rapidly expanding the ecosystem of applications available to help them drive value from that resource."

In addition to the platform, Omniture has released a series of sample applications, including a Wordpress plugin for tracking Blog traffic, and even more significant, a SOAP API for the iPhone so iPhone developers can communicate via SOAP within their applications, including interfacing and bringing live analytics and tracking into their iPhone applications. Omniture puts it this way:

"One notable omission in the iPhone SDK is the lack of a Web Services framework like WebServicesCore from the OSX SDK. Given the iPhone’s emphasis on online connectivity, it is at least surprising that there is no native framework stack for SOAP web services. So, what’s a developer to do?"

Now, developers have full access to the vast storage of data given to publishers via Omniture, on mobile devices as just one opportunity. Omniture, with over 5,000 customers, 5 of the top media companies, 6 of the top 10 retailers, 4 of the top 5 banks, 4 of the top 5 travel companies, and boasts 250,000 transactions per second, is the very definition of mainstream analytics. Now you will see sites such as Best Buy, JetBlue, Walmart, and many more begin to make a presence on the iPhone and more as they will now be able to track their presence on these mobile devices.

With the release of this developer platform Omniture has just opened up a goldmine of data around Site Analytics, and every developer has access to this information. Mobile and Social Analytics have just hit mainstream due to this platform, and will continue to strengthen due to companies like Omniture opening up their platforms to this data.

All developer APIs and documentation can be found at https://developer.omniture.com/.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.