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March 30, 2018
We use it to generate the majority of the marketing campaigns that my company sends out. Predominately through email but also through direct mail, web and social media.
- 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 system tables are too convoluted and there should be the ability to have a single view of contact history without having a drawing to have to be tabbed together.
- Utica is not a very efficient creator of SQL is very resource intensive.
- I would like to see more functionality in their marketing operations tool to allow more customization and easier creation of monitoring reports including KPI’s.
We have been using IBM Campaign as a campaign management tool for 5 years now. It is so powerful for us to know exactly what we send to our customers or non-customers and when they received it. For a call-center perspective it is extremely useful, but for a marketing perspective as well. We can build predictive models more powerful than before with these insights. In addition, the response tracking helps us to know which campaign has been more successful, based on their lift. So, in this case, it is easier to adapt our communications for our market.
I strongly recommend this application.
I strongly recommend this application.
- Contact History of our campaigns.
- Response History to know what kind of campaigns work well.
- Extremely powerful. If you have the right access to the database, the sky is the limit.
- Perfect for larger companies in telecommunications or banking.
- The version 8.6 was not user-friendly at all. This is not ergonomic compared to other applications.
- Complex to learn at the beginning.
- You can have some glitches and IBM is not the best for fixing this, unless you are one of their biggest clients. Better to have a good third party to help you like us.
May 07, 2015
We are Using Unica to find the right contacts from the huge database based on the requirements. It is being used to support company business and the media departments in the organization. Whenever the marketing team decides to contact their users based on necessity, they are able to generate the right contacts list by using different filters. That’s how they can filter the unnecessary contacts from the targeted list and the company can save on budget and can hold valuable customers. Indirectly it will increase the company revenue.
- IBM Unica offers more than one module as we can start from market planning and can end with analysis of post campaign results. Not required to work with different tools and can skip having the difficulties while integrating them for automation.
- Can design multi wave, multi touch, multi-channel automated campaigns in one place and incredible automation while setting up triggers and schedules to avoid more manual work in order to save resource time. Having valuable user guide to answer whenever we had questions while setup /design phase.
- Able to get output list without writing huge lines of SQL when there are multiple number of table joins as you can join as many tables as you want to the table catalogs to fetch the output data in seconds..
- Not suitable to small industries even if they really want to use. It would be great to have a lighter version to let any company use in order to make more customers.
- It would really great to have support team available whenever having the issues / difficulties with in the tool itself. At least able to respond asap.
We use IBM Unica to manage all of our email marketing campaigns and a large number of direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. We use the Distributed Marketing tool to allow our field employees to generate corporate compliant marketing emails to members and prospects.
- Campaign and eMessage have proven to be well integrated and reliable tools for managing email campaigns.
- Use of segments and templates in Campaign allows for easy use of recurring data selection processes.
- eMessage features, such as the document editor, Global Suppression, and activity tracking, have been relatively reliable and easy to use.
- Distributed Marketing tools is flexible in its application with lots of potential applications.
- Integration of Distributed Marketing and IBM Scheduler with Campaign and eMessage still needs work.
- Transporting projects betwen development, test, and production environments does not work well.
- Distributed Marketing tool still seems to be immature, particularly data security mechanisms (XML documents that, when refreshed, require JVMs to be restarted).
Unica is being used in our Marketing Department only. We use it to target email our members. Unica Predictive Insights helps us target the right members for specific products.
- Predictive Insights is a very successful tool for us. Out click rates and conversion are always high when we use this tool.
- Unica Web Analytics is what our Senior Management loves to see results and reporting from .
- Unica support is always fast and helpful.
- Unica UI isn't the best. It seems like its from the 90's.
- We have had a rough time using Web Analytics. Many issues arise. We went a full month of the daily import of our data not importing into Web Analytics. It took Unica a very long time to resolve it. We had senior management waiting for certain campaign results which we didn't have.
May 03, 2014
At Purple Square Consulting Ltd, we implement IBM EMM (also known by it's legacy name Unica) suite for many clients across Europe. We provide design services, aswell as implementation, configuration, training & troubleshooting.
- Marketing Automation - the scheduling capabilities are incredibly sophisticated.
- Multi-wave, multi-channel capabilities within single Marketing Campaigns.
- Highly advanced reusability. Every aspect of the users experience can be templates, allowing workflows & objects of every kind to be used again and again.
- 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.
March 28, 2014
IBM Unica Campaign (IBM Campaign) is hosted on behalf of clients, to provide access a customer and prospect data for the purpose of marketing and service campaigns. Generally the tool is used by either analytics team who have a core understanding of data OR marketers who are using pre-built pre-defined campaign segments. IBM Campaign can be used for very simple data selections or complex data selections that require numerous requirements to be met, this includes splitting 'contacts' by channel based on customer preferences (opt outs) or data that is available (presence of data or not, based on a requirement for a contact channel - telephone contact obviously requires a telephone number).
- Allows for complex selection to be made using both simple process of 'merge/purge' processes and also the ability to use raw SQL within a selection process.
- One campaign flowchart can cover off multiple channels for an individual campaign, along with multiple campaigns within one flowchart (can defeat the purpose but it is an option)
- Contact History - Allows good management of contact points with a individual be it a customer or a prospective customer, allows you to provide compliance information when required to appropriate authorities or respond to a customer/prospect complaint.
- Automation using scripts outside of the actual application environment to call an IBM Campaign object (such as a flowchart), to trigger a campaign post another process such as a data load into a table within the defined application schema.
- A user can schedule a flowchart to run on a set schedule and an output file delivered to a specific location on an going basis (set and forget).
- IBM Campaign is a tool for enterprise organisations with large and complex data content, with the introduction of IBM Marketing Cloud (dubbed Unica Lite) this will allow access to the power of this tool to smaller organisations. To use a previous reviewers comment "It's VERY involved. Hire a an integrator and educator!" - this is an involved integration process and the right training can make it very easy to use.
- IBM Campaign by itself lacks data visualisation within it's module, additional modules within IBM's EMM suite does allow data visualisation but as within any additional module it does come with the IBM price tag.
IBM Campaign is used across whole organization at our company. We started with one division but later scaled to other divisions. It is used for outbound and inbound segmentation of audience. Later it sends the list to eMessage for email delivery or uses IBM Interact to display dynamic personalized banners on website.
- Campaign canvas is very powerful and rich functionalities
- Strong integration with eMessage
- Strong integration with IBM Campaign
- Supports Hadoop Database
- UI is a little clumsy
- Integration with IBM Marketing Operations is not that great
- Huge Temp files auto-generate when flowchart runs and cause issues
April 18, 2017

IBM Campaign provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface that supports the direct marketing process of selecting, suppressing, segmenting, sampling, and creating output lists of customer IDs. It really helps put everything all into one place, and it streamlines everybody's workload. IBM's UDI data communication layer lets you to seamlessly access and manipulate data from all of your data sources.
- Campaign treats a marketing campaign as a discrete entity that is made up of one or more flowcharts, which are in turn comprised of one or more processes.
- IBM Campaign performs actual data manipulation live.
- Users do not need to know SQL to design campaigns.
- May be a little confusing to pick up if this is the first time you're managing a campaign.
- Some of the commands are a little slow to response.
- Live data can sometimes be misconstrued.
- The ability to track, manage and update a project quickly and efficiently. It allows both project owners and contributors to interact, add and edit documents, approve and coment on projects and keep everyone aware of the projects status.
- It is a very detail oriented software capable of keeping complex projects with various elements on time and keeps all the players and stakeholders in the know.
- It's a long-term commitment but well worth it!
- The editing section should be more user friendly and more intuitive. A lot of time can be taken up just navigating through the document editing sections and the scheduling section.
- It's VERY involved. Hire a an integrator and educator!
April 11, 2015

The implementations I supported were primarily used by my clients' Marketing departments. IBM EMM (aka Unica) for these clients is primarily used for the very granular segmentation of customers for multi-channel marketing such as Direct Mail, eMail and Social. The solution (the application and underlying datarmart) allows the client to efficiently create segments and campaigns; capture promotion history and assign responses.
- The application has very robust and flexible functionality while maintaining a relatively high ease of use. Relatively complicated segmentation logic can be created for a campaign by a knowledgeable user and the application design supports efficient execution.
- The application supports the logical "storage" of campaigns in support of a multi-faceted marketing organization: multiple divisions; field marketing; different channels etc.
- The application allows SQL to be hand coded and inserted into the segmentation process.
- The application supports exit points for custom code to be executed instream.
- I don't see a lot of areas for improvement in the actual application software - I see a lot of areas where you need to have someone that really knows what they are doing do the implementaton; configuration and tuning.
- Different datamart mappings should be created for different groups of users or types of campaigns. I see a lot of implementations where the team was pretty lazy and just mapped everything and left it up to the user to sort it out. This slows down the creation and execution (running) of the campaigns as well as causing a longer learning curve for new users.
- It would be nice to have more tracking on the components that are added to the templates section so that users know when it was last updated and by whom. I see a lot of companies set up templates and then either never use them (instead just copy/paste last months campaign) or worse - not maintain them and therefore potentially introduce errors.
May 07, 2014

It is used by 2 departements.
It is used to "program" campaigns. 2/3 of the campaigns are one shot, 1/3 is recurrent. 1/2 are commercial campaigns, 1/2 are administrative campaigns to inform clients of p.e. changes in interest rates and so on.
It is used to "program" campaigns. 2/3 of the campaigns are one shot, 1/3 is recurrent. 1/2 are commercial campaigns, 1/2 are administrative campaigns to inform clients of p.e. changes in interest rates and so on.
- The most powerful in Unica are the audience swaps. They are very helpful for cleaning up audiences like households, if one of the members of a household has a product, you can easily exclude the whole audience.
- When working with segments in a flow, this goes really fast.
- The use of templates is easy and helps to standardise the working process.
- The mappings of tables can be different in every campaign
- Logging is not easy to read and is incomplete. It has a lot of information i'm not interested in, but the queries that really interest me, p.e. the queries used for calculation of derived fields are missing. I also miss the queries that add the result of the derived field to the final selection.
- Difficult to document a flow in a good manner.
- No way to search in a flow. and over all the flows where something is calculated.
- No way to have a good overview of what is happening in a flow or a process in a flow.
- The calculation of derived fields is far too slow.
- You can not make decisions in a flow based on data.
- You have to promote flows by copying them manually from a test environment to a production environment.
- This might lead to inconsistence over the environments.
IBM Unica is used as a marketing platform for full service and self service clients. We build and support our client's marketing databases and this is a product that we use for clients across many different industries for delivery of thier marketing campaigns.
- Flexibility
- Robust functionality
- Ease of Use
- The new version 9.1 eliminated some functionality that was present in earlier versions and I would like to see that functionality restored. For example: the ability to maximize process box windows; Single click on drop downs;
- The Audience box needs to be enhanced to accommodate the ability to select one per household after multiple levels of segmentation criteria is applied without losing the ability to apply that criteria to the audience being deduped. Currently, the product will randomly select an individual regardless of whether they met the criteria in segmentation. There are ways around this, but would be nice if IBM would resolve this issue.
- Would like to see performance enhanced when processing Unica macros and derived fields.
We use Unica Campaign to build list pulls for email campaigns. It is easy to do segmentation, schedule runs and transfer files to vendors in Unica.
- The segmentation process is very helpful. You can segment by field value or query. It also shows the counts for each segment.
- The merge process can combine multiple groups together when you choose "Merge/Purge". It also can pick the overlap group if you choose "Match" in the configuration.
- The Snapshot process can save a copy of your customer along with their qualifications into a file or a table, which is helpful when you need to do post analysis.
- Hope there can be more format options when output data to a file. I can only do fixed width and some vendors do not like this format.
February 07, 2014

NetInsight is used by a number of people in the organization for web analytics. We use it to see how many site visitors there are, to monitor campaigns, and view trends. However, due to limitations within the tool, it is not nearly advanced as some others that are available.
- Easily export data
- Access past reports that have run
- Nice visitor retention graph
- Speed of loading reports
- Filters! More filtering options with the ability to do and/or arguements
- Making geographic and other such data not something that developers have to turn on/ off
Used across the organization for marketing key performance indicators.
- Quantity of dimensions and measurements available.
- Data visualization.
HCL Unica Scorecard Summary
What is HCL Unica?
HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management (EMM) software that include marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, along with budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management. Unica Campaign, Unica Marketing Operations, and Unica Interact are the foremost products in the suite.
The product is geared towards large B2C customers, and is available as either a Saas or an on-premise offering.
HCL Unica Screenshots
HCL Unica Integrations
Aprimo, Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite (discontinued)
HCL Unica Competitors
Adobe Marketing Cloud, Aprimo, BrandMaker, Infor Marketing Resource Management, SAS Marketing Operations Management, Alterian Real-Time CX Platform (Chameleon)
HCL Unica Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?Optional
HCL Unica Technical Details
Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application: | No |