HCL Unica is available as a cloud or on-premise solution that provides fully integrated marketing automation software for enterprise. It includes enterprise marketing automation tools that optimize marketing activities, to ensure excellent customer experiences and data privacy.
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MarcomCentral
Score 8.8 out of 10
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MarcomCentral is a marketing & brand asset management platform developed by the company formerly known as PTI Marketing Technologies, now MarcomCentral. The company is supported by Ricoh since December 2014.
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
Pros: I like that we can easily add products and how simple it is for our static products. It's easy to add users, products and cost centers. The approval process for products is easy and intuitive. It's a localized resource that our users can use. Cons: The back end of the product is fairly slow. It takes a long time to add products because of how slow it is at times. The reporting for the portal could be better. I know the Business Intelligence feature was created to solve reporting. Also sometimes we experience difficulty with customizable products. I feel like there's more options to build this out more based on the users needs. Overall: It's a localized place where users can find collateral and promotional items.
Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
The best part of MarcomCentral is its flexibility to solve many unique problems for our customers. It gives us the ability to build solutions that truly allow our customers to operate more efficiently.
The best admin feature that I use all day, every day, is the Bulk Operations feature. This allows me to manage entire portals through spreadsheets allowing me to create and manage massive amounts of products, users, and images very efficiently.
The reporting feature is second to none as well. Our most successful customers are paying close attention to the ordering history of their products. This allows them to fight obsolescence and focus on the products that their teams or customers are truly using.
Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
We chose this program to test it out and decided to keep it. It helped in many ways and improved the quality of our marketing and digital marketing work essentially. We noticed not only that our ads and content became better, but we also noticed that our know-how improved by adding valuable insights to our news.
Fully robust tool to help manage our internal assets, ability to customize digital assets or send them to print, a way to share assets across the entire enterprise in simple, easy user interface.
Marcom's print-on-demand functionality is fantastic. There are so many possibilities that we are just beginning to explore. There are some integration hiccups but mostly on our end, and Marcom has worked to help us through those as best as they can. Also, they have been very open in discussing improvements that we are looking for and keeping us up to date on the progress of those updates within their own development schedule. The depth of this software is extensive and their customer support personnel are always very friendly and helpful.
Very customizable and a lot of things you can accomplish in Marcom Central. They are always willing to help us work out any need we come up with and make it work in the system.
