(through its acquisitions of Omniture and Offermatica) and U.K.-based Autonomy. While Cambridge-based HubSpot might be seen as somewhat competitive with its recent purchase of Performable (which started out doing A/B testing), Hansen says it’s “not at all” a competitor to SiteSpect. And right now, he says, the firm’s growth is constrained mainly by recruiting. Hansen declined to give any specifics except to say the 40-person company, which moved into a new Boston office last week, has been profitable every year except 2007.
It’s still fairly early days for Yottaa, which raised $4 million from Stata Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners and released its beta product for monitoring website performance last year. Yottaa then rolled out an “optimizer” product this spring that it says can double the speed of your website with “just a few clicks.” The 30-person startup also has an interesting cultural challenge: 25 of its employees are based in Beijing, and the rest are in Cambridge, MA.
“We have to do everything different,” Wei says. Software development approaches such as “agile” and “waterfall” don’t work with such a big time difference and geographical spread, he says. But the company has managed to learn “how to run a team on a global scale,” he says.
So SiteSpect and Yottaa are at quite different stages, but how they fare could go a long way towards determining the future of Web performance and business analytics. That’s because both firms—and presumably many others—are figuring out how to merge website optimization with helping businesses track sales and customer behavior.
“We’re approaching performance not only from the perspective of speed, but from the perspective of business metrics,” Hansen says. “What we see from our customer base is the CFO cares out of an interest in speed, but they get paid to be interested in money.”
