The debate about the future of the marketing automation and management market, as a stand-alone sub segment of the entire customer relationship management (CRM) market, continues, partly owing to mixed signals coming from relevant point solutions providers. On one hand, recent demise and buyout of Xchange by Amdocs (see Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties) was the last in the array of less-fortunate point players. At the time prior to Xchange's assets auction, allegedly over 20 companies expressed interest in buying Xchange's assets, and in maintaining its products and supporting its customers, including much better-performing direct competitors Chordiant Software, DoubleClick, SAS and especially Unica Corporation. While the upbeat marketing management software vendor Unica (www.unicacorp.com) was initially marked as a very likely buyer of Xchange, the vendor however slightly surprisingly elected not to make a bid for the Xchange's assets. Rather, Unica has since announced a migration plan from Xchange's solutions to its Affinium platform, given it has already migrated approximately 15% of Xchange's customer base to Affinium, and the vendor touts that regardless of which company has taken ultimate ownership of Xchange's remaining assets, converting to Affinium will be the most attractive solution for Xchange customers.
Incidentally, on May 16, Unica, now a globally-present provider of solutions it refers to as Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM), announced it instead acquired Marketic, one of leading providers of campaign management software in Europe and a subsidiary of Groupe DDB in France, the second largest global communications group. As a result of the acquisition, Unica believes it has secured the leadership position in the French and Southern European markets as well as in some new industries like automotive. In addition, the deal should expand Unica's worldwide customer base to over 300, making it possibly the largest provider of marketing software globally.
Through the acquisition of Marketic, Unica also expects to bolster its strong position in sectors such as financial services, retail and telecommunications, since Marketic's customers include Disneyland Paris, Orange, Cr�dit Lyonnais, Groupe Cofinoga and Peugeot. In turn, Unica's respected customers include Lands' End, Medco Health Solutions, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, ABN AMRO, Cintas, Club Med, SNCF, EDF, Scotiabank, Choice Hotels International and AIG. Further, combined with its strong base of existing customers such as Marks & Spencer Financial Services, ARG Equation, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Vodafone, Unica now claims an installed customer base in 10 European countries. Building on its two-year presence in the UK and now in France, Unica also expects to benefit from Marketic's strong presence in the Benelux countries (i.e., Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Spain. From this strong base, Unica plans to further expand across Europe.
Unica pledges to continue to sell Marketic solutions, which include software for campaign management and loyalty marketing. In addition, Marketic's customers should benefit from the added capabilities available in Unica's Affinium Suite, such as predictive analysis, data mining, multi-channel campaign optimization, real-time event triggers and marketing content management. Based on an open, scalable architecture, Unica's Affinium Suite aims at enabling marketers to gather and analyze knowledge from multiple data sources; identify customer wants and needs; plan, execute and manage tailored programs for interactions through multiple touch points; and measure and optimize marketing effectiveness. The Affinium Suite is also fully internationalized with Unicode support and will reportedly be available in a localized version for the French market starting in June 2003.
A few days later, on May 19, Unica announced the addition of two new consulting services -- Affinium Operational Services (AOS) and Affinium Innovation Services (AIS) -- to its Unica Consulting Services portfolio. Introduced at Unica's Global Customer Conference 2003, these two new programs aim at enabling customers to maximize their Affinium investment through innovative strategies, techniques and recommendations, since they will be delivered by experienced and skilled Unica consultants and partners with deep product knowledge and extensive cross-industry marketing experience. For customers currently using Affinium, AOS offers both the services and resources to expand their use of Affinium within their organization. To that end, AOS programs include:
* Advanced Techniques Workshop � to offer expertise, tips and techniques on how to use the advanced customer-focused strategies and features of Affinium for specific business environments and to increase user productivity and marketing return on investment (ROI);
* Performance Optimization � to pinpoint opportunities to enhance performance and scalability to optimize and streamline campaigns;
* Post-Production Support � to provide staffing support, ranging from a few weeks to several months, to cover staffing or skill gaps and ensure the timely and successful completion of key projects.
With AIS, Affinium customers will be supported through each stage of the marketing life cycle. The four key programs include:
1. Enterprise Marketing Assessment � to identify where marketing processes can be optimized for greater efficiency and to help develop specific strategies to meet marketing objectives;
2. Incorporating Predictive Modeling � to use companies' current data to show how to create models, interpret the results, and then act on the information yielding positive, profitable and differentiated outcomes;
3. Enterprise Marketing Planning � to establish an optimal marketing planning process that provides real insight into the business and enhances decision-making; and
4. E-Marketing Review � to provide recommendations and a route map to assist companies in successfully addressing the issues surrounding online and real-time marketing.
In addition to providing the above services directly to customers, the AOS and AIS programs complement Unica's alliance partner program, given the vendor can deliver AOS and AIS to customers in cooperation with alliance partner teams and offers training to alliance partners on delivering these services.
The above moves follow on recent major product releases' delivery and impressive annual financial results. At the end of 2002, Unica announced the general availability of Affinium 5, only a half year after the release of Affinium 4 , which somewhat resembles the time apart between the recent Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions movie trilogy parts' releases. The Affinium 5 release aimed at delivering a marketing solution that provides one of the richest and most intuitive functionalities for managing and deriving increased value from the entire marketing process -- from strategic planning and budgeting to predictive analysis and cross-channel relationship optimization to campaign execution, resource management and closed-loop analytic reporting.
Featuring significant enhancements to its campaign management, e-marketing, resource management and optimization capabilities, Affinium aims at facilitating efficient cross-organization collaboration, workflow and the accessibility of marketing technology, while increasing organizational agility and customer-focused marketing aptitude. Additionally, Affinium is modular, so organizations can choose the functionality they need now and add capabilities over time. New functionality includes sophisticated relationship optimization; marketing content management; advanced real-time e-mail marketing capabilities; and new rapid start templates for planning and managing marketing initiatives such as marketing events and cross-channel acquisition campaigns.
With the shipment of Affinium 5 at the start of its new fiscal year, Unica believes to be well positioned to build on the strong momentum it has sustained over the past five years. In 2002, Unica reportedly grew by 27% and achieved record revenue, profitability and cash flow from operations. Unica closed the year with more than 250 customers in the financial services, retail, hospitality, health care, pharmaceutical, insurance, telecommunications, publishing and business-to-business services industries, many of which are Fortune 100 companies. Unica also continued its international expansion into Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific markets and entered into agreements with a number of technology and professional services partners worldwide including Epsilon, Harte-Hanks, Headstrong Japan, IBM Global Services, Premier Technologies and Sophron Partners.
Incidentally, on May 16, Unica, now a globally-present provider of solutions it refers to as Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM), announced it instead acquired Marketic, one of leading providers of campaign management software in Europe and a subsidiary of Groupe DDB in France, the second largest global communications group. As a result of the acquisition, Unica believes it has secured the leadership position in the French and Southern European markets as well as in some new industries like automotive. In addition, the deal should expand Unica's worldwide customer base to over 300, making it possibly the largest provider of marketing software globally.
Through the acquisition of Marketic, Unica also expects to bolster its strong position in sectors such as financial services, retail and telecommunications, since Marketic's customers include Disneyland Paris, Orange, Cr�dit Lyonnais, Groupe Cofinoga and Peugeot. In turn, Unica's respected customers include Lands' End, Medco Health Solutions, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, ABN AMRO, Cintas, Club Med, SNCF, EDF, Scotiabank, Choice Hotels International and AIG. Further, combined with its strong base of existing customers such as Marks & Spencer Financial Services, ARG Equation, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Vodafone, Unica now claims an installed customer base in 10 European countries. Building on its two-year presence in the UK and now in France, Unica also expects to benefit from Marketic's strong presence in the Benelux countries (i.e., Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Spain. From this strong base, Unica plans to further expand across Europe.
Unica pledges to continue to sell Marketic solutions, which include software for campaign management and loyalty marketing. In addition, Marketic's customers should benefit from the added capabilities available in Unica's Affinium Suite, such as predictive analysis, data mining, multi-channel campaign optimization, real-time event triggers and marketing content management. Based on an open, scalable architecture, Unica's Affinium Suite aims at enabling marketers to gather and analyze knowledge from multiple data sources; identify customer wants and needs; plan, execute and manage tailored programs for interactions through multiple touch points; and measure and optimize marketing effectiveness. The Affinium Suite is also fully internationalized with Unicode support and will reportedly be available in a localized version for the French market starting in June 2003.
A few days later, on May 19, Unica announced the addition of two new consulting services -- Affinium Operational Services (AOS) and Affinium Innovation Services (AIS) -- to its Unica Consulting Services portfolio. Introduced at Unica's Global Customer Conference 2003, these two new programs aim at enabling customers to maximize their Affinium investment through innovative strategies, techniques and recommendations, since they will be delivered by experienced and skilled Unica consultants and partners with deep product knowledge and extensive cross-industry marketing experience. For customers currently using Affinium, AOS offers both the services and resources to expand their use of Affinium within their organization. To that end, AOS programs include:
* Advanced Techniques Workshop � to offer expertise, tips and techniques on how to use the advanced customer-focused strategies and features of Affinium for specific business environments and to increase user productivity and marketing return on investment (ROI);
* Performance Optimization � to pinpoint opportunities to enhance performance and scalability to optimize and streamline campaigns;
* Post-Production Support � to provide staffing support, ranging from a few weeks to several months, to cover staffing or skill gaps and ensure the timely and successful completion of key projects.
With AIS, Affinium customers will be supported through each stage of the marketing life cycle. The four key programs include:
1. Enterprise Marketing Assessment � to identify where marketing processes can be optimized for greater efficiency and to help develop specific strategies to meet marketing objectives;
2. Incorporating Predictive Modeling � to use companies' current data to show how to create models, interpret the results, and then act on the information yielding positive, profitable and differentiated outcomes;
3. Enterprise Marketing Planning � to establish an optimal marketing planning process that provides real insight into the business and enhances decision-making; and
4. E-Marketing Review � to provide recommendations and a route map to assist companies in successfully addressing the issues surrounding online and real-time marketing.
In addition to providing the above services directly to customers, the AOS and AIS programs complement Unica's alliance partner program, given the vendor can deliver AOS and AIS to customers in cooperation with alliance partner teams and offers training to alliance partners on delivering these services.
The above moves follow on recent major product releases' delivery and impressive annual financial results. At the end of 2002, Unica announced the general availability of Affinium 5, only a half year after the release of Affinium 4 , which somewhat resembles the time apart between the recent Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions movie trilogy parts' releases. The Affinium 5 release aimed at delivering a marketing solution that provides one of the richest and most intuitive functionalities for managing and deriving increased value from the entire marketing process -- from strategic planning and budgeting to predictive analysis and cross-channel relationship optimization to campaign execution, resource management and closed-loop analytic reporting.
Featuring significant enhancements to its campaign management, e-marketing, resource management and optimization capabilities, Affinium aims at facilitating efficient cross-organization collaboration, workflow and the accessibility of marketing technology, while increasing organizational agility and customer-focused marketing aptitude. Additionally, Affinium is modular, so organizations can choose the functionality they need now and add capabilities over time. New functionality includes sophisticated relationship optimization; marketing content management; advanced real-time e-mail marketing capabilities; and new rapid start templates for planning and managing marketing initiatives such as marketing events and cross-channel acquisition campaigns.
With the shipment of Affinium 5 at the start of its new fiscal year, Unica believes to be well positioned to build on the strong momentum it has sustained over the past five years. In 2002, Unica reportedly grew by 27% and achieved record revenue, profitability and cash flow from operations. Unica closed the year with more than 250 customers in the financial services, retail, hospitality, health care, pharmaceutical, insurance, telecommunications, publishing and business-to-business services industries, many of which are Fortune 100 companies. Unica also continued its international expansion into Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific markets and entered into agreements with a number of technology and professional services partners worldwide including Epsilon, Harte-Hanks, Headstrong Japan, IBM Global Services, Premier Technologies and Sophron Partners.
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