McLean, Virginia-based Visual Sciences, which has around 40 employees and 40 customers, will now operate as new, wholly owned subsidiary of San Diego-based WebSideStory. The company’s co-founders Jim MacIntyre and David Scherer will head up the new business unit as CEO and CTO respectively.
While relatively unknown in the IT industry, Visual Sciences has garnered considerable attention in the Web analytics world for its innovative segmentation, multi-channel and real-time visualization capabilities provided through its Visual Site suite.
Like WebSideStory, it too has a strong on-demand services offering as well.
This transaction expands our addressable market by an estimated $1bn and creates significant cross-sell opportunities within our over 1,100 enterprise customers, said WebSideStory CEO Jeff Lunsford.
Lunsford is also already eyeing opportunities to leverage Visual Science’s other products – Visual Call, Visual Mail and Visual Document – as well as the company’s strengths in the government sector.
Its not clear how integration with WebSideStory’s Web analytics solution will run, though officials promise to eventually absorb Visual Science’s technology within all the modules of the WebSideStory Active Suite which includes its HBX and Search and Publish tools.
Visual Sciences is WebSideStory’s second major acquisition in a year. Last February it snapped up San Francisco-based Atomz for $4.3m to expand its footprint into commerce search and web content management space.
WebSideStory has already pulled Atomz’s hosted set of applications into its core HBX analytics product.
Separately WebSideStory announced its unaudited fourth quarter results, reporting a 79% increase in revenue to $11.7m (from $6.5m) and profits of $5m, compared to $761,000 reported in the same quarter a year ago.
Web analytics bookings also grew 47% year over year for the quarter, with the company picking up 129 new customers for various modules of its Active Marketing Suite.
Total revenue for the year rose 74% to $39.4m, from $22.6m a year ago. Net income for the same period also widened to $9.1m, from $1.7m a year ago.
