Coremetrics' announcement of its SMB Solutions might have caught some by surprise, considering that this (hosted) Web Analytics solution is often thought of as one of the more complex and expensive web analytics options out there. However, the company says that roughly 35 percent of its clients are in the SMB market and they foresee plenty of growth in that area.

At one level, this makes sense for Coremetrics. As we noted in Web Analytics Report, Coremetrics' focus on specific verticals -- such as retail, finance, and travel -- makes for a more easily understood standard set of reports for novice or part-time analysts, such as web content managers and marketers. According to Coremetrics, 70 percent of their current SMB users fall into these categories.

From a business perspective, instead of competing primarily with Omniture, Coremetrics will now be competing with other mid-priced tools in the space, such as WebTrends, HBX, Fireclick, Nedstat, and IndexTools.

Let's look at it from a functional perspective. Specifically, will the SMB product carry a lighter feature set? The company says no, arguing that recent architectural re-factoring on the back-end of their service now allows them to compete on pricing and services in the SMB market. Prospective (and existing...) customers will want to monitor this carefully; going lower-market could mean many more customers working within a system that traditionally suffered from long waits for customized queries.

Coremetrics claims that moving significant amount of data processing away from their core database environment will address these bottlenecks. You'll want to test it.