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HCL Unica

HCL Unica

Overview

What is HCL Unica?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Versatile Selection Process: Users have found the selection process in the software to be versatile, allowing for both simple merge/purge …
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IBM Unica

7 out of 10
February 25, 2015
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 …
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Unica old shool

7 out of 10
February 04, 2015
Unica is being used in our Marketing Department only. We use it to target email our members. Unica Predictive Insights helps us target the …
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IBM Unica Campaign Rocks!

10 out of 10
March 28, 2014
IBM Unica is used as a marketing platform for full service and self service clients. We build and support our client's marketing databases …
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Overall A Great Tool

8 out of 10
March 25, 2014
We use Unica Campaign to build list pulls for email campaigns. It is easy to do segmentation, schedule runs and transfer files to vendors …
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Out of Date. Better Options Exist.

3 out of 10
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 …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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What is HCL Unica?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/us…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is monday.com?

monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.

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Product Demos

HCL Unica Discover - B2C Cart Abandonment Demo Pack

YouTube
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Product Details

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 Features

  • Supported: End-to-end campaign management
  • Supported: Campaign measurement and reporting
  • Supported: Deeper customer relationships

HCL Unica Screenshots

Screenshot of End-to-end campaign managementScreenshot of Faster campaign creation

HCL Unica Video

Learn more about UNICA: https://hclsw.co/unica-page Personalization, customer journeys and delivering messages in any channel are top of mind for CMOs today. In this video, we show how Unica is tackling CMO's biggest marketing challenges. #UNICA #UNICAIsBack

HCL Unica Integrations

  • Aprimo
  • Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite (discontinued)

HCL Unica Competitors

HCL Unica Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Adobe Marketing Cloud, Aprimo, and Uptempo are common alternatives for HCL Unica.

The most common users of HCL Unica are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(54)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Versatile Selection Process: Users have found the selection process in the software to be versatile, allowing for both simple merge/purge processes and the use of raw SQL queries. This flexibility has been appreciated by multiple reviewers.

Efficient Campaign Flowchart: The campaign flowchart feature has been highly praised by users for its efficiency in managing multiple channels and campaigns within a single flowchart. This capability has been mentioned by several reviewers as a standout feature of the software.

Contact History Management: The Contact History feature has received positive feedback from users as it facilitates effective management of contact points with customers or prospects. It also allows for providing compliance information or responding to complaints. Multiple reviewers have expressed appreciation for this valuable functionality.

Lack of Data Visualization: Some users have mentioned that IBM Campaign lacks data visualization within its module, making it difficult to interpret and analyze campaign data efficiently. This limitation can hinder their ability to make informed decisions based on the data.

Limited Integration with Outbound Channels: Several reviewers have expressed the need for greater integration of real-time capabilities with outbound channels like email, SMS, Facebook Fanpage, and Twitter DM broadcasts. They feel that this lack of integration limits their ability to effectively engage with customers across multiple channels in a timely manner.

Complexity in Transporting Projects: Users have reported difficulties in transporting projects between development, test, and production environments. This can lead to inconsistencies and errors during the campaign management process. Simplifying the process of transferring projects between environments would greatly improve efficiency and reduce potential issues.

Based on user reviews, the following recommendations are commonly given for using Unica:

  1. Seek help from IBM or an approved consultant for training and migration to ensure a smoother transition.

  2. Ensure proper data gathering and training before moving into UAT and go-live to maximize the potential of Unica.

  3. Prepare for growing pains with training and implementation by investing in appropriate resources and consultants if needed.

These recommendations highlight the importance of seeking professional assistance, data accuracy, thorough training, and being prepared for challenges when using Unica as a marketing automation tool.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
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Eric Bahme | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
September 01, 2017

IBM Campaign is Powerful

Gabriel Racine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
February 25, 2015

IBM Unica

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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).
February 04, 2015

Unica old shool

Justin Russell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Tim Biddiscombe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Brent Banning | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
March 25, 2014

Overall A Great Tool

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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
November 08, 2013

IBM Unica Review

Bill Shaughnessy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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!
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