The changes at WebTrends continue.

A Friday afternoon email from the company explained that CMO Tim Kopp would be leaving at the end of this year. This follows the Halloween Day exits of CEO Greg Drew and 3 other managers and promotion of ClickShift co-founders John Rodkin and Leo Chang to engineering and hosted operations management. They served as co-founders of ClickShift which was acquired by WebTrends in 2006, providing the foundation for the WebTrends Dynamic Search product.

How does this affect you if you're a WebTrends' customer? Let's consider 3 areas of potential concern:

• Technical Support: There's been a change of management for hosted services. WebTrends' has many licensed customers that it would like to move to the hosted services model. If you are a licensed customer, I suggest you speak to your account manager regularly to stay current on potential service changes meant to "encourage" you to switch to the hosted model.
• Product Development: If you are considering the purchase of Score or Visitor Intelligence, get a clear understanding regarding pricing, support and the product development path. The management who left the company were key figures in bringing these deeper analytics solutions to market. It's not clear at this point what the new CEO and CMO will want to do with these offerings. Given the promotion of Rodkin and Chang, it seems logical that WebTrends will focus on doing more to sell WebTrends Analytics and Dynamic Search.
• Customer Commitment: If you are an enterprise customer of WebTrends, and have a significant investment in using their solutions, speak with the new CEO and understand the company's commitment to your organization going forward. It may be the best way to understand Francisco Partners' longterm strategy for WebTrends.

While there's no way to predict what will happen with WebTrends, I doubt they'll be acquired Omniture.

Are you a WebTrends customer? I'd love to get your thoughts on the current changes. Drop me a line at [email protected]