Why the acquisition of Visual Sciences makes sense for Omniture?

I had a question on this blog a few weeks ago about why Omniture’s acquisition of Visual Sciences was a good thing. Partly the reason I had stated so is that the more things Omniture brings under its wing the more goodies I’ll see in the tool. What do I mean by that? Development of new functionality within the web analytics toolsuite comes at a big cost, this includes partnerships, integrations, correlation tools, modeling, database architecture, coding, etc. By acquiring Visual Sciences, Omniture acquires a substantial customer base. This increased customer base will allow Omniture to spread out development costs and hopefully speed up new innovative functionality.The other big reason for me is that Omniture’s main flaw is that their reporting interface is somewhat clunky and not very visually appealing. Visual Sciences brings to the table much better reporting capabilities which should leverage Omniture’s strengths such as data integration. While the diminished level of competition might seem like a bad thing, I think there are still enough players in the industry to help push new innovations. You still have WebTrends, Coremetrics, and GoogleAnalytics. Additionally, since Omniture is the dominant player now, I think it will help consolidate a standardization in the web analytics space and help in future partnerships and integrations for web marketing and content management vendors.