HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
The Salesforce application can handle simple campaigns but I wasn’t convinced that I could handle medium to more complex campaigns that involved detailed changing data.
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 …
IBM Campaign is much more advanced and powerful than IBM Eloqua providing many features to play and manipulate the data for Marketers. The good thing about IBM Campaign is that is does not try to solve every problem because it's not a complete marketing automation software like …
Adobe is a tough competitor, and it's fair to say that you can get the same quality of service from Adobe. Speaking as an Adobe fanboy, it's easy to say that I'm biased – however, from a price standpoint, IBM is cheaper, and you get the same results. I will say that IBM doesn't …
Unica compares very well against other tools such as SAS CM and Teradata. It is easier to use. However, SAS CM has more built in value added components and Teradata supports highly complex segmentation and campaigns rapid execution a little better. Alterian does not support …
We haven't had a chance to review other products. I went to a conference in Las Vegas where there were many other products that say Unica is old school. Some of the things I saw those companies do, I wish we could do in Unica.
Verified User
Technician
Chose HCL Unica
The consultants of UNICA where very good at their job, fast and efficient. They always had a very convincing answer to our questions.
Against all the other applications, IBM EMM stands head and shoulders above the others, in terms of sophistication & diverse capabilities - with Neolane being the closest.
Verified User
Employee
Chose HCL Unica
Alterian is limited on the database side and can limit the amount of reporting and analysis that can be done. Because Unica can support a variety of platforms, this limitation does not exist.
Most recently Senior Client Services Manager & Client Services Team Leader
Chose HCL Unica
It's been a market leader within this space for over 10 years, it has a high ability to execute time and time again. Against it's competitors it has been tried and proven to been robust but flexible within reason to allow adaptations that will not break the system. Can be …
Verified User
Professional
Chose HCL Unica
Adobe is more advanced. I would choose an Adobe product if I needed to purchase one.
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
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.
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.