HCL Unica

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.

The tool works and we've already invested a great deal of time into it.

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).

Use an experienced implementation partner, that has a good track record.

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

When we worked in SAS we used macros before to perform all the tasks in the selection process. When things changed on a global level we modified the macro programs, and all the campaigns written with the macros automatically changed. This is impossible in Unica. We use templates to create the campaigns, but if the templates change, the old campaigns still run the older versions. With about 500 campaigns a year, it is impossible the update all the running campaigns manually with the newer version of a template.

If there are changes in data sources, it is really difficult to find out with unica campaigns are affected, and very time consuming to make the changes.

In SAS we it was possible to automatically document all our programs, so that we could easily search that documentation for the use of variables, files, calculations and so on, in UNICA this is all done manually.

- 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.

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

I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.