It's been a busy last week in the land of web analytics software vendors.

Coremetrics' officially launched Coremetrics 2008 and Omniture announced Genesis 2.

As readers of Web Analytics Report know, Genesis is the "plug and play" partnership program Omniture has with 3rd-party online marketing vendors to extend SiteCatalyst data collection and reporting. Omniture announced the Genesis 2.0 platform now has over 70 partners. Nevertheless, if you license SiteCatalyst, or are considering purchasing it because of Genesis, make sure you understand the level of effort required to perform the data integration, develop the customized reporting, and the additional costs for 3rd-party services. While it's true that you can theoretically integrate with SiteCatalyst, customers and partners find that extensibility, implementation ease, and metrics availability all vary.

Coremetrics took a bit of a different approach in this latest release. As I wrote in last week's Coremetrics Jr. post, the company has focused on improving its data processing infrastructure. As a potential buyer, you should investigate whether the Coremetrics "all in one" pricing has any advantages over its competitors.

Instead of focusing new functionality on integrations with many external partners, Coremetrics concentrated on how to improve the relationship between analytics and its own "Precision Marketing Suite" offerings, LIVEmail and Intelligent Offer. As described in the Web Analytics Report, exporting data from Online Analytics to the "suitemate"" solutions was based primarily on lessons learned and methodology refinement, at extra cost and after potentially long professional services engagements.

The new release enables data integration directly from the UI through a segmentation selection wizard, specific data field export to LIVEmail, targeting of data exports to LIVEmail, Intelligent Offer and other campaign vehicles. The Intelligent Offer enhancement provides for UI based integration of the segmentation and setting of product recommendations with LIVEmail to more specifically target email marketing. LIVEmail now offers integration with 16 email partners, including Cheetahmail, eDialog, Exact Target, and Responsys.

If the Coremetrics 2008 release performs as promised, it will address some major pain points that have dogged this vendor over the last year. If enhanced marketing features are critical to your vendor selection and you're looking at Coremetrics, you'll want to demo it with your own data to make sure that it works as advertised.