Interesting, huh? Hard to believe that adding one person to a company can lead to a $14.5 million investment in less than six months.

But it can. In fact, if you talk to VCs, they'll tell you (almost to a person) that the most important aspect of every company they consider is the team — the executives running the show.

Naturally the technology is important, as is the marketplace and the competitive landscape and a whole bunch of other topics too numerous to name here. But No. 1 is always the team.

On the tech side, Omniture is viewed by most industry observers as having the top solution in its field — Web analytics.

Utilized mostly by larger firms, companies able to spend $100,000 or more for the service, Omniture's SiteCatalyst allows companies to get a real handle on how people use their Web sites.

For example, for an e-commerce company, SiteCatalyst tells the company where a visitor was on the Net just prior to entering their Web site. It then tracks that person throughout their entire visit, enabling companies to know what portions of their Web sites are working the best and which ones work poorly.

As Mellor explained it to me last week, "we help them drive their ROI (return on investment)."

In addition to serving three of the top five companies as ranked by Fortune magazine, Omniture currently counts among its corporate devotees companies such as eBay, Time Warner, Gannett, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Overstock.com, GM, Hewlett-Packard and VeriSign, just to name a few.

According to an article published earlier this year by Internet Retailer, Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com (Nasdaq: OSTK) decided to reduce the number of Web pages required for a customer to make a purchase through its online "checkout" process after analyzing reports provided it by SiteCatalyst.

The result? Checkout conversion rates (the number of people actually making a purchase after entering the checkout phase) soared above 70 percent on some days.

Why the difference? It turns out Overstock had previously inserted a page in the checkout process to verify each purchase, asking customers "Are you sure?" when they wanted to make a purchase.

By removing that one page, not only did conversion rates jump, but customer complaints dropped too — all because of SiteCatalyst.

Omniture sales topped $8 million in 2003 and are projected to hit $20 million in 2004.

So did Omniture need the money? Mellor says no.

But he did say he expects the company won't need to raise money prior to an "exit" for shareholders through an event such as a merger, acquisition or an initial public offering.

But when or if such an event might occur, he wouldn't speculate.

That's OK; I already did in my column two weeks ago.

In looking back I might have been a bit optimistic in suggesting an IPO window for Omniture within six to 12 months, but I still believe an exit is certainly possible for its shareholders within that time frame.

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David Politis leads Politis Communications, a strategic communications agency that helps maximize corporate value for high-tech and life science companies.

E-mail: dpolitis@politis.com.