6 Months Since I Left Omniture

I started at Omniture in 2000 when it was named myComputer.com. Josh and John were younger, I remember seeing them enjoy a ride in John’s first Porsche. They built an engineering friendly culture and for the most part everyone enjoyed working there. Then came the bubble burst and I luckily found a more steady job in Utah Valley. MyComputer.com went down from 130+ employees to 30+ employees in less than a year. In 2003 the company, now rebranded Omniture, won a dark-horse race for the HP contract and I was hired on (kind of funny, now I work for HP). I was employee number 40 of the regrowth. I loved the Omniture Culture, I had come from a family-run business and was a bit tired of the nepotism and family politics. Omniture was highly innovative and innovation was explicitly expected from everyone that worked there.

Rather than working as an engineer, I came back to work as an implementation consultant. That is when I discovered my love for digital marketing and web-site optimization. And the next few years were a whirlwind of growth, new employees, and demanding clients. When the whirlwind started to settle I found myself working on the first Genesis integrations and passing those integrations on to engineering and consulting.

Over the years it soon became apparent the the engineering-driven culture was beginning to cease. The highly innovative culture became more organized and clanish. Organized because Omniture brought in more ”seasoned” management and more clanish because the “good-ol-boys” mentality seemed to increase as everyones’ pockets grew bigger and bigger. Not to mention that the CEOs balance from John Pestana was gone once Pestana left (think Jobs and Wozniak).

So, I was sad to see the culture change from highly innovative to organized-clanish. But a big thing that affected my decision to leave was the unsure future of web analytics. I hope Omniture wins the analytics game as I still have many friends that work there and it would be an overall benefit for Utah Valley if they are successful. As we start to see industry conversion in analytics I’m very interested to see who will come out on top.  If anything Omniture will definitely end up a successful consulting/agency group because of the knowledge they have gleaned over the years. And of all the vendors out there they have the best shot.

6 months later I must say that I do miss innovating at Omniture. There is still a lot of hope that Omniture will emerge victorious in this Petabyte Age, but only time will tell. If anything, they definitely have a shot. I feel they should probably fine tune their innovation rather than focusing on organization to increase their chances. All the best to my friends at Omniture.

-Ryan Ekins