HCL Unica

It’s fantastic for a list-based generation. I’ve been in a number of fortune 500-row class organizations using the tool and for the most part, there’s very little and can’t do.

You can produce every type of multichannel campaign. With a good dedicated team for this application (guys from IT, marketing and/or finance) you can do whatever you want. With this application, we were able to leverage our knowledge of our competitors with some geo-marketing campaigns. As we do Email, Door to Door, Outbound Telemarketing, Inbound, Unadressed Mail, Unsold and Direct Mail campaigns, IBM Campaign is a really good choice for our company. Otherwise, for small player, maybe it is too complex.

If the organization has tons of data to segment, IBM Campaign is more powerful than many other products. The availability of mDue to zero coding approach, developers are not required to learn any programming language in particular manipulation tools and advanced functions in IBM Campaign is unmatched. I believe the users must have knowledge of SQL to get the most out of the tools. Typical business users using Eloqua would find it tough to migrate into IBM Campaign.

IBM Campaign helps you target your audience, so if you're into digital marketing and want to find the defining line (i.e., what drives the most 'clicks', what content drives the most traffic) this will be a very useful tool. It's great for big businesses/websites...may be inappropriate for smaller businesses and websites with less than 100,000 unique visitors everyday, but that's just me speaking from experience.

It supports multi-wave campaigns, external command line triggers and automated scheduled functionality. Scheduling functionality is useful for ad-hoc and multi touch campaigns. Platform independent scheduler can schedule regular / irregular intervals.

But it’s not compatible for non-enterprise organizations.

Key questions: 1. What can you afford? 2. What do you really need? 3. Do you need something that runs superfast like Alterian? or something that is slower but much more sophisticted and robust like Unica? 4. How complicated is your datamart? How many customer rows? How much transactional data etc. 5. How quickly and how often do you have to incorporate new data? suppression files; zip files etc.

Well-suited for email campaigns. Requires a decent investment of resources to install and develop user processes. Works relatively well for projects with short turnaround times in an environment where data is pulled from multiple sources.

Predictive Insights is the main reason we enjoy Unica. After our contract ends in a year, we are going to see what other Marketing Solution companies are out there. To update to a new version is a huge project and is a big con for us.

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

I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.

Extremely well integrated in the TelCos and Financial Services areas. Retail & Online Gaming are the next big sectors. Real Time capabilities via IBM Interact are starting to come to the fore as marketers start to understand the necessity for true reactive CRM. Additional functionality using IBM Distributed Marketing is also another very powerful area for the future, allowing regional marketers to fill out web based forms, which initiate and run flowcharts & email delivery automatically.

I personally like the tool as it is so flexible and robust. IN ten years of use, I have never had a campaign that could not be coded using this tool.

The more data you have, the more likely I would recommend IBM Campaign over the other tools in the market. It is truly an Enterprise Marketing Management solution, that can be built on as you mature your marketing requirements from traditional channels to the evolving channels under the digital banner. There are over 10 modules within the full suite of IBM EMM from Campaign through to Marketing Operations, Opportunity Detection and email campaign execution (IBM eMessage).

It is well suited when you build ongoing email promotions and do not need to do a lot of post analysis of these campaigns. Unica is good at picking audience but not good at retaining their criteria qualifications. When you need to do post analysis based on customers' pre behavior, the flowchart is complex in order to keep all the fields you need in your post analysis.

Best suited for understanding standard KPIs.

Although this tool was probably advanced in its heyday, it is far out of date.

Get as much training as possible.