New analytics software specifically targets software developers, beta testers

Web developers have access to all sorts of information about the visitors to their sites: IP address, operating system, browser type, and so forth. With solutions like Omniture's SiteCatalyst, for example, developers have access to an even greater depth of information about visitor behavior that they can use to improve their product.

For desktop software developers, however, these kind of analytics are not as readily available, and are frequently limited to crash reports for the purpose of fixing bugs.

Last month, Utah-based software company Concerity launched its own Analytics Platform, directed toward software developers. The toolkit provides software vendors with a more granular look at how their software is being used by embedding an analytics runtime into it. The end user can opt in to anonymously share his information with the developer, and then the developer can see how the software is being used, what type of machines it's being used on, see which features are the highest priority, and so forth.

Today Betanews proudly announces that our Fileforum is the exclusive host of Concerity Analytics Free, the freeware version targeted at independent software vendors. The beta of version 1.0 is available now.

Implementing the tracker in your software only takes a couple of lines of code, and then information coming from users is sent to the cloud-based Concerity Analytics Results Dashboard, where the data are available as graphs, charts, and tag clouds.

What can users of the free version expect to track in their software? Concerity Analytics Free grabs a profile of the user which includes his CPU, graphics processor, RAM, storage, operating system, and screen resolution, where he is geographically located, when the application is used, and whether it was closed nicely by the user or it crashed.

Matt Cupal, CEO of Concerity shared some of the inspiration behind the product: "One year ago, I ran a company called Sorenson Media, which makes desktop video compression apps. When we'd try to come up with new feature sets, we'd get pretty frustrated. We'd do surveys of customers and sales guys, then we'd do a traditional beta model where 300 people would test the new version. But we weren't getting tons of useful feedback, we needed more analytic information to base feature sets upon."

"Beta testing is certainly different today than it was in the past," Cupal continued. "There's better recognition, and users are more open to supplying their information. Ten years ago, it would be a hard issue to fly because of privacy concerns. People would be more likely to say 'Of course you can't see what I'm doing!' But now, we do it a lot more because the products improve more when you share more data."

We spoke yesterday with one of Concerity Analytics' beta testers, 3D machining software company FeatureCAM. Vice President of Engineering, Tom McCollough.

"Like a lot of other software companies, we release an annual version of our product and support it with monthly updates. Since the annual versions have the most changes, they also invariably have the most crashes," McCollough told us. "We're using Concerity as a way to measure the reliability of each version, and we're shooting to have crashes go down with each service pack release."

Pricing for the final release of Concerity Analytics will be made available when the product is generally released next month. A beta of the commercial edition, released last month, is available from Concerity's Web site.

[FULL SEC DISCLOSURE: Betanews operates Fileforum, which is the exclusive host of Concerity Analytics Free software.]