With last year’s successful IPO and two recent acquisitions,Unica has positioned itself to ride the next wave of marketing automation technology development: the emergence — finally — of enterprise marketing management.
Analyst firms such as Gartner, AMR Research and Forrester have been predicting that vendors and customers would begin integrating related but separate marketing technologies into a suite environment for some time.
It has not yet happened. Gartner, for one, says that enterprise marketing management is only 1 percent penetrated, according to Carol Meyers, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Unica.
“A lot of marketers still are buying technology in bits and pieces,” she told CRM Buyer. “The idea of bringing everything together in one suite is still a fairly new concept.”
A Bigger Shift
The landscape is changing though — buyers, vendors and even analysts are feeling the earth move. Gartner will be putting out its first analysis of the enterprise marketing space in the near future, Meyers said. In February, Forrester released its first report.
These are all signs of a large shift occurring in the industry, Meyers believes.
Unica is also undergoing change. “Before the acquisitions, we offered a broad range of marketing functionality,” she noted, adding that the acquisitions were made to fill in certain gaps or enhance existing functionality in order to provide marketers with a comprehensive set of technologies.
Through the MarketSoft acquisition, Unica added or enhanced technology for event detection, customer alerting, and lead and referral management. The company just announced availability of Affinium Detect for event-based marketing, along with resulting enhancements to its Affinium Leads Referral and Affinium Leads Contact products.
Unica already had this functionality. What MarketSoft brought to the table, Meyers explained, was a more sophisticated level of event detection that is easier for the customer to implement.
“Other applications require changes to the database, which we don’t,” she explained. “This application keeps track of each customer’s interactions every day” and flags what might be a significant event for the firm.
Next Focus of Web Analytics
Unica will leverage Sane’s technology in a similar fashion to deliver products that analyze online customer behavior and Web traffic. Its flagship product, NetTracker, differs from other solutions with its open architecture, flexible data collection and reporting, and on-premise as well as hosted deployment models, the company said.
“The Web has become a hub of marketing activity — much of what marketers do now is designed to drive customers to their Web site,” Meyers pointed out.
However, these new and upcoming modules are just pieces of a whole that Unica would like customers to see when they examine its products, she added.
Increasingly, there is recognition that marketing data — much like customer data — exists in a silo. “We are starting to provide a platform that will allow organizations to bring those disparate pieces together,” Meyers claimed.
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