NetIQ, Quadstone Pair Offerings

Network analytics firm NetIQ is teaming up with Scottish database marketer Quadstone to roll out an “all-in-one” offering for tracking and understanding visitors to a company’s Web site.

The product, which fuses San Jose, Calif.-based NetIQ’s popular WebTrends product with Quadstone’s eponymous offering, is dubbed, logically enough, “Quadstone for WebTrends.” With it, users of WebTrends’ site traffic analysis tools can augment their data with behavioral modeling. As a result, the combined product can be used to segment groups of consumers, to predict their actions and to figure out how best to market to them.

Just as importantly for many enterprises, Edinburgh-based Quadstone’s software adds data integration capabilities, allowing for customer models to be integrated into the marketer’s other tools — like online ad campaigns, site personalization and CRM systems, and offline consumer models, as well.

“Quadstone for WebTrends helps solve another piece of the e-business puzzle — determining trends in future purchasing behavior, enabling our clients to interact more profitably with their customers,” said Rand Schulman, senior director of WebTrends product management at NetIQ. “By partnering with Quadstone, we can offer organizations a unique way to take action on the Web customer data collected by WebTrends Intelligence Suite.”

The partnership plants NetIQ now more than ever firmly in the realm of marketing applications, a sector for which the company (along with WebTrends, an independent entity before its purchase by NetIQ) has been angling for some time.

It’s not the only one doing so, however. Rival WebSideStory originated with traffic analysis products and since has made significant inroads into the marketing community with its client-side system. Though it doesn’t have a statistical modeling partner, WebSideStory does offer ways to export traffic data into other applications.

Consequently, NetIQ’s new partnership could further heat up the two firms’ long-standing rivalry, which in 1999 peaked in a temporary restraining order filed against WebTrends over charges of intellectual property violations. (The spat ultimately was settled in San Diego, Calif.-based WebSideStory’s favor, for undisclosed terms.)

The field of site analytics also is growing to accommodate a host of new players, many of whom are new to site traffic-tracking, including panel-based Web researcher Jupiter Media Metrix and interactive shop Agency.com.

Despite the competition, the new partners said they’re confident the packaged solution will put them in good stead with marketers — especially those looking to consolidate information from multiple channels.

“As more and more businesses extend their outreach to the Web, they must measure both their Web and offline systems to build a full customer view,” said Quadstone president and co-founder Mark Smith. “No one understands the unique challenges of Web analytics better than WebTrends, and no one but Quadstone offers such a business-focused solution for customer segmentation, data mining, visualization, and data integration.”