Analytics firm Omniture has agreed to acquire certain assets of Mercado, a provider of search and merchandising solutions for ecommerce websites. According to a blog post last week that summarized a report in the Israeli "The Marker" newspaper, Mercado's move to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model resulted in more clients - but led to cash-flow problems, since payments by clients were not made up-front.

According to the Mercado website, its "highly scalable in-house and hosted SaaS solutions power billions of dollars in online revenue each year for many of the industry's leading brands."

An Omniture press release said the Mercado solution is already integrated with its SiteCatalyst offering through Omniture Genesis. "It has been one of the most popular Genesis integrations because it can improve conversion by automatically increasing the relevance of site search results based on business analytics such as product popularity, affinity and revenue."

Omniture sent an email to customers on Tuesday, and wrote, "The acquisition will be highly complementary with our Omniture SiteSearch product. SiteSearch customers should know there will be no impact on the current Omniture product offering. In the future, however, we anticipate bringing together the best features of both so we can continue to provide the most comprehensive site search and merchandising solution available in the market."

Upon closing of the transaction, Omniture will acquire certain of Mercado's intellectual property and business assets for approximately $6.5 million cash and the assumption of certain related operating liabilities. The closing of the transaction is subject to governmental approvals in Israel and is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Omniture does not expect the transaction to have a material impact to its 2008 operating results.

http://www.mercado.com/company/pressreleases/2008/press_release_20081013.html