An Open Letter to Omniture

Dear Omniture,

Congratulations on expanding your client list.  The wall in the entry way of your Orem office just got all the more impressive.  In fact you might need to let it spill over onto a new wall.  Luckily, it does not appear that new walls will be hard to come by.

As you dismantle a company with equally good products (this is a gross over implication, but lets call it better for some worse for others), backed by significantly less successful salesmen and ineffective management please consider retaining at least one piece.  HBX Report Builder is better than SiteCatalyst’s Excel Client, no if ands or buts about it. 

With Report Builder I have more formatting flexibility so it is easier to make my reports come out looking the way I (and Semphonic’s clients) want them to.  Report Builder also has fewer bugs.  Although I occasionally lose my data requests with Report Builder, never populates incorrect data or words instead of data or fails to populate new data altogether.

Report Builder also has cooler features.  It lets me copy and paste requests with respect to absolute or relative reference cells.  This feature combined with proper planning when setting up my requests saves me hours a week.  The ability to group and mass edit requests by account, date range and granularity also has saved me incalculable hours.  Matching and trending in Report Builder is very nice for building one request off another.  And Report Builder makes it so easy to include Active Segment data, which is invaluable (I realize this isn’t really an issue with the report building tools more of an AS vs. ASI, but I will still miss the capability).

And most importantly of all when I’m using Report Builder I produce reports fast, much faster than in Excel Client.  So fast in fact I almost always pull up Report Builder instead of HBX when I’m grabbing data.  In contrast I’m only using Excel Client when I absolutely have to be.  As an analyst the amount of time it takes to get large volumes of data counts in front of me counts for a lot.  If gives me all that much more time in my day to make the numbers meaningful.

Report builder is simply more linear, intuitive and moves faster from one step to the next.  If you do end up integrating the best features of the two tools it would be a mistake to integrate them into Excel Client.  Pride aside, make the right business decision and use the technology you just bough. 

Thanks and I look forward to working with you a lot in the near and distant future.

Regards,
Jesse

Comments

[benry]

Here, here! Without a doubt Report Builder is king.

[June Dershewitz]

Jesse, you are both sarcastic and facetious, two of my favorite personal qualities. :) You make a good point about HBX Report Builder. We can only hope that Omniture follows your recommendation.

[Josh Katinger]

Yet another HUGE here, here on Report Builder. I can't live without it and I'm petrified that Omniture is going to break it.

Josh Katinger
Accession Media

[Maigari]

Jesse,

I replied back to your comment on my blog, but I wanted to do it here also. What separates you from Eric, Manoj, and everyone else is that you actually watched a Georgetown game with me at a bar in the Salt Lake City Airport. Random!

Maigari

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