We couldn't really comment on this in any detail but it's probably fair to say that Omniture are Coremetrics' biggest rival / competitor and also worth pointing out that Coremetrics have recently raised $60million in funding so they're not exactly short of cash / ambition.

WebTrends, another big name in web analytics, also has big ambitions and recently appointed an ex Google Exec as their new CEO to push things forward.

What with Google Analytics (formerly Urchin), IndexTools (acquired by Yahoo!),  Microsoft's yet-to-be-released analytics tool (based on their DeepMetrix acquisition) there are a number of pretty good free tools out there now.

So we'd expect to see further polarisation between the free tools and the paid for ones which will also layer on a lot more in the way of service, and not just tools.

Coremetrics, WebTrends and Omniture are the most obvious global "Big 3" who are competing in the higher end space. Although I suspect that their game plans must be to get bought in turn - probably by a big business intelligence player like SAS or SPSS or by a big consulting / IT outfit like IBM (though they've already acquired web analtyics technology in the past).

Some good stuff on all this in our recent Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2008

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com