Item: HCL Unica
Rating: 10
Author: Tim Biddiscombe

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Unica

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Marketing automation & reusable functionality allows for extremely sophisticated & reactive marketing campaigns to cover every aspect of consumer journeys with a minimal headcount.
Improved ROI. Better targeted campaigns reduce broadcast costs while increasing uptake, especially if you can link a web analytics datasource into Campaign, e.g. for abandoned basket campaigns.
Through realtime capabilities, highly personalised versions of the web site for each individual customer, based on their marketing data (what we know), and information from the website (what they are doing right now).

Alternatives Considered

Faststats,Alterian Engagement Management and Analytics,quickcounts,Adobe Neolane,SAS Analytics

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.

Likelihood to Renew

Purple Square have a very successful relationship working with IBM and it's many business partners, and have a strong track record of successful product implementations - something we don't plan to change!

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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Waqas Raja
commented 10 years ago
Hi Tim, the post is really useful. Just wondering whether IBM Campaign supports Exasol User table database? As I understand it's not officially supported, and hence no datasource template is available. But if it can be done, have you experienced it? And how does it work with Campaign? Thanks, Waqas
Tim Biddiscombe
commented 10 years ago
Hi Waqas, It's not officially supported, but where there is a will there is a way. I have tested Exasol database using Netezza database type connection and with some exceptions (I believe around temp tables and data calculations) it does work. Use caution though when attempting something like this, as it wouldn't be supported by IBM - meaning if your client experienced an issue with Campaign accessing their marketing DB that you wanted to raise as a PMR, you'd be asked to replicate it on a supported stack before IBM would support you. Tim
Waqas Raja
commented 10 years ago
Thanks Tim for the heads up on this. I did a PoC using MySQL template in Unica v8.6 and that worked with Exasol. But unfortunately when I tried to work on Unica v9.1.2 it has failed when trying to map User tables. The Exasol datasource in application server tested successfully and tables also show in the mappings drop down, But somehow it's not showing column data types and hence its not alllowing to map any user tables from Exasol, not sure whether new Unica version has some changes which is not allowing this. Which Unica version did you tried? Appreciate if you can provide some steps on what needs to be done if I use Netezza DB type and test this with Unica v9.1.2. Thanks, Waqas
- Tim Biddiscombe
  commented 10 years ago
  Hi Waqas, Our tests were against Campaign v8.5. Unfortunately I'm unable to provide detailed steps regarding the Netezza datasource, this would count as consultancy - but feel free to reach out if you'd like to engage us formally. Tim
- Waqas Raja
  commented 10 years ago
  Hi Tim, Thanks TIm and yes I can understand your point of view here. I'll speak with my team here and would be happy to contact you in case we need your formal engagement here. Cheers

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