The Conference for Web Analytics Professionals
We announced the Keynote for this year’s X Change Conference this past week – The Four Founders. The Keynote brings together four original founders (Brett Crosby, Matt Cutler, Bob Page, and John Pestana) of important web analytics tools – and four men who have been at the center of the dramatic changes in our industry. In bringing them together, I’m hoping to create an experience that is more personal and reflective; one that can serve as a foundation for the subsequent X Change discussions reminding us all of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go as an industry.
We’ve struggled in the past to come up with Keynotes for X Change. Since the Conference is all small group discussions and is heavily geared toward serious enterprise professionals, it’s been hard to find a Keynote that would both fit the tone and tenor of the event and also capture that broader excitement you hope a Keynote would have. But when Eric first suggested the Founder’s Keynote, we all felt it captured perfectly what we wanted.
To see why, let me step back a moment and talk about our “Four Founders.”
Brett Crosby, was co-founder of Urchin and is now Group Product Marketing Manager at Google responsible for Google Analytics. This evolution from co-founder of a feisty independent company targeting the SMB analytics market to part of what may be the most powerful company in the world is emblematic of all that has happened in web analytics in the past ten years. We’ve seen the rapid progression of our discipline from an evangelical fringe to something like a “state” church (or at least a recognized order!) in the world of big enterprise.
Matt Cutler was co-founder at NetGenesis and is now the Vice President of Marketing at Visible Measures. NetGenesis was an early, influential and ambitious attempt to support real enterprise analytics. It’s a tool we at Semphonic worked with on more than one occasion and looking back on it I think it was a prophetic effort in terms of what we all want and need to do with web analytics tools. Of course, Matt is now with Visible Measures – where the focus is on video and viral measurement. And that, too, is emblematic of the changes and growth in our industry. Many pioneers have continued to push the boundaries of measurement into the newest and most exciting areas of online.
Bob Page was a co-founder of Accrue and is now Senior Director at Yahoo! Analytics. So his story is like a perfect blend of Matt’s and Brett’s. What I said of NetGenesis I might just as easily have said of Accrue, and Yahoo! is, like Google, pushing hard for broad-based, free measurement across the whole spectrum of online industry.
John Pestana, co-founder of Omniture (I wish Josh James could have come as well!) and now Co-founder and Chairman at ObservePoint illustrates a different sort of path. Omniture is, of course, the leading solution in the enterprise analytics space and has probably been the single most influential company in our industry. With ObservePoint, John has built a company and a service that extend and support that enterprise investment by addressing a key need for better infrastructure management and governance in the mid and enterprise tier of the market. This seems to me a perfectly logical and natural extension of his previous work.
Every individual is unique of course and the “readers digest” stories I’ve outlined here no more than hint at the richness of the personal histories and experiences involved. But I do believe that these four “Founders” are fascinatingly representative of some of the fundamental currents and shifts in our industry.
By giving them a chance to talk in a forum that is meant to be personal and reflective, I hope to shed a different sort of light on the state of web analytics. These four have seen the evolution of our industry. They’ve been caught up and whirled about by the changes in our market. They’ve also have a huge hand in shaping it.
I believe that by hearing them look back to where we’ve been; listening to them share their views on where we are; and pondering their own personal hopes for what’s ahead, that we will all come away with a deeper understanding of our industry and perhaps our own place in it.
That is what a great conference should really provide and what I think the Four Founders will help X Change achieve.
[Registration for X Change is now open and the Huddles have also been pretty much locked down – more on that next time – so take advantage of early registration now!]
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