Just found a note to myself from last month. It said "If you don't write up the event review immediately, you will never do it." So here we go, no bad consciousness this month.
As usually a colorful band of web analyst as sympathizers met up at Club Camp for a merry get together. This time we had the honor to host a presentation by Song Jie, CEO of Banru a local web analytics vendor. They position their product Web -IA as a direct competitor as direct competitor to the likes of WebTrends and Omniture, so this promised to be an interesting presentation.

Presentation on Web-IA
This summary will necessary a bit limited since your truly is not as good in Chinese as he should be. What you read here is often only possible through the kind support of WAW attended who help with the translation.

• Web IA started as early as 2001 to provide basic analytics solutions.
• Multiple versions of their products compete is several market segments from medium to high end. In the high end Song Jie believed their feature set outstrips Omniture. While I believe this to be a very aggressive claim, their impressive client list seems an evidence of their local success. Song Jie especially highlighed their partnership with Microsofts service operation, who implemented Web-IA at several corporate clients.
  
• While none of the attendees was a user of the product, we could agree that have a strong engineering team in town is a strong competitive advantage. Song Jie commented that their tech support team is able to provide custom reports within 24h after a client request.
• Web IA is based on a web interface, and does sport direct data warehouse access, for custom reports their rely on their tech support and engineering team.
• Web IA can be integrated with various BI tools. While it lacks standard API's, their engineering team has several standard implementations that can be customized to client needs.
  

Attendees
With about 19 attendees the event size is stabilizing. Interestingly enough the attendees rotate quite a lot. We have a core group of 7 - 9 people who are there every time and some 25 - 30 people who join once in a while. Another interesting trend is the growth of attendees that are not web analysts but advertisers. I see this as an encouraging trend, although the discussion are more detailed with fellow analysts

Discussion
This time discussion were a bit short, due to the late start of the event. After some brainstorming we agreed to change the format a bit. Instead of a formal dinner set up, we will sent the food up in a buffet arrangement, so we walk around and talk to each other. That should facilitate communication and discussion.

Please use the comment section for detailed feedback and idea what we can do better. If you want to join our illustrious line up of speakers, please also drop me a not. We are very interested in case studies and sample analytics reports. Vendors are also welcome to present their products.

So long and until next month.
Florian