IBM Interact Adds Interactions to Enterprise Marketing Management

My continuing tour of real time interaction managers landed with the good folks at IBM two weeks ago, where I caught up with what’s now IBM Interact. The product was originally launched more than a decade ago by Unica as Affinium Interact.*

The concept of Interact has stayed quite consistent over the years, although the underlying technology has been overhauled several times. The general trend of the changes has been closer integration with other components of the IBM/Unica marketing suite. For example, the original Interact had its own flow chart interface, but the system now uses the same segmentation interface as IBM Campaign. The two modules can also share segment definitions, offers, and interaction history. There’s also some integration with other IBM marketing products, notably the Product Recommendation component inherited from IBM’s CoreMetrics acquisition.

Interact's concept is the same as other interaction managers: touchpoints send it data about a current interaction; the system uses rules, models and data to select one or more offers; and the offers are sent back to the touchpoint for delivery. The differences among these systems are matters of nuance: Interact stores its own permanent customer profiles, while some other systems must re-load data from external systems during each interaction.  Interact assigns fixed scores to offers within each segment definitions, while other systems use scoring formulas shared across segments (although Interact can do that too).  Interact can create self-training predictive models, not all competitors have this option.


A couple of other features seem more or less unique. Interact determines whether customers are eligible for an offer using either qualification rules or Campaign-generated “white lists” and “black lists”; other systems use rules alone. Interact can also assign offers at global, segment, or individual levels, while other systems don’t provide all those choices.

It’s unlikely that any of these differences make Interact significantly more powerful or easier to use than competitors. In practice, the system’s major appeal will be its close integration with Campaign and other IBM products. It is now part of the IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) group, which includes both Unica and Coremetrics, both acquired in 2010. This group supports IBM’s larger strategy of selling systems that use huge quantities of data to run all aspects of large organizations. The company has identified marketing organizations as a major potential market within this strategy and is spending aggressively to both develop that market and take advantage of it.

You might think that Interact plays a central role in IBM’s marketing ecosystem: after all, real-time interactions are the epitome of data-driven marketing. But just a tiny fraction of IBM’s 2,500 EMM customers use Interact (actual figures are confidential) and most deployments seem to be focused on specific -- dare I say tactical? -- applications in one or two channels. The company’s EMM focus seems to be more on analytics and outbound marketing: for example, its most recent EMM acquisitions were Tealeaf Technology (Web experience analysis)  and DemandTec (merchandising analysis) . But it does report increasing interest in Interact among its clients, and high hopes for future growth.



_________________________________________________________________________
*A year’s free AARP membership to everyone who remembers the Affinium brand and can sing the jingle.**

** Okay, just kidding.  There never was an Affinium jingle, so far as I know.

Read More

Teradata Buys Aprimo for $525 Million: More Marketing Automation Consolidation To Come

Summary: Teradata's acquisition of Aprimo takes the largest remaining independent marketing automation vendor off the market. The market will probably split between enterprise-wide suites and more limited marketing automation systems.

Teradata announced today that is acquiring marketing automation vendor Aprimo for a very hefty $525 million – even more than the $480 million that IBM paid for somewhat larger Unica in August.

Given the previous Unica deal. other recent marketing system acquisitions, and wide knowledge that Aprimo was eager to sell, no one is particularly surprised by this transaction. Teradata is a logical buyer, having a complementary campaign management system but lacking Aprimo’s marketing resource management, cloud-based technology and strong B2B client base (although Aprimo has stressed to me more than once that 60% of their revenue is from B2C clients).

This is obviously a huge decision for Teradata, a $1.7 billion company compared with IBM’s $100 billion in revenue. It stakes a claim to a piece of the emerging market for enterprise-wide marketing systems, the same turf targeted in recent deals by IBM, Oracle, Adobe and Infor (and SAS and SAP although they haven’t made major acquisitions).

This enterprise market is probably going to evolve into something distinct from traditional “marketing automation”. The difference: marketing automation is focused on batch and interactive campaign management but just touches slightly on advertising, marketing resource management and analytics. The enterprise market involves unified systems sold at the CEO, CFO, CIO and CMO levels, whereas marketing automation has been sold largely to email and Web marketers within marketing departments.

The existence of C-level buyers for marketing systems is not yet proven, and I remain a bit of a skeptic. But many smart people are betting a lot of money that it will appear, and will spend more money to make it happen. Aprimo is probably the vendor best positioned to benefit because its MRM systems inherently work across an entire marketing department (although I’m sure many Aprimo deployments are more limited). So, in that sense at least, Teradata has positioned itself particularly well to take advantage of the new trend. And if IBM and Oracle want to invest in developing that market so that Teradata can benefit, so much the better for Teradata.

That said, there's still some question whether Teradata can really benefit if this market takes off. Aprimo adds a great deal of capability, but the combined company still lacks the strong Web analytics and BI applications of its main competitors. A closer alliance with SAS might fill that gap nicely...and acquisition or merger between the two firms is perfectly conceivable, at least superficially. Lack of professional services is perhaps less an issue since it makes Teradata a more attractive partner to the large consulting firms (Accenture, CapGemini, etc.) who already use its tools and must be increasingly nervous about competition from IBM’s services group.

The other group closely watching these deals are the remaining marketing automation vendors themselves. Many would no doubt be delighted to sell at such prices. But, as Eloqua’s Joe Payne points out in his own comment on the Aprimo deal, the remaining vendors are all much smaller: while Unica and Aprimo each had around $100 million revenue, Eloqua and Alterian are around $50 million, Neolane and SmartFocus are $20-$30 million, and Marketo said recently it expects nearly $15 million in 2010. I doubt any of the others reach $10 million. (This excludes email companies like ExactTarget, Responsys and Silverpop [which does have a marketing automation component].) Moreoever, the existing firms skew heavily to B2B clients and smaller companies, which are not the primary clients targeted by big enterprise systems vendors.

That said, I do expect continued acquisitions within this space. I’d be surprised to see the 4-5x revenue price levels of the Unica and Aprimo deals, but even lower valuations would be attractive to owners and investors facing increasingly cut-throat competition. As I’ve written many times before, the long-term trend will be for larger CRM and Web marketing suites to incorporate marketing automation functions, making stand-alone marketing automation less competitive. Survivors will offer features for particular industries or specialized functions that justify purchase outside of the corporate standard. And the real money will be made by service vendors who can help marketers fully benefit from these systems.

Read More

IBM Buys Unica: Will Acquisitions Now Shift to B2B Marketing Automation?

IBM announced this morning that it was purchasing enterprise marketing automation leader Unica for $480 million, more than double the company’s current stock market valuation. This is wholly unsurprising: as the last and only big independent left in its space, Unica was obvious acquisition bait. It was also a motivated seller, since it faced an increasingly impossible struggle to fund the product enhancements necessary to compete with the likes of SAS, Teradata and Siebel / Oracle. Conversely, IBM is on a customer intelligence acquisition spree that has already included Coremetrics Web analytics, Sterling Commerce B2B integration and Cognos and SPSS business analytics.

There’s been some comment (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Block of SiriusDecisions) relating the IBM/Unica deal to consolidation with the B2B marketing automation industry. Sorry, but I don’t see a connection. As I discussed in my own post on industry consolidation, Unica belongs to the class of marketing systems that serve consumer marketers. Its acquisition is basically the completion of the consolidation of that space, not the start of consolidation among B2B marketing automation vendors. (I’m overstating a bit: there are a couple of B2C vendors left including Neolane, Alterian and SmartFocus, although the latter two use proprietary database engines that would make them difficult to integrate into a larger enterprise suite. Probably the most prominent survivor is Aprimo, but they’re more B2B.)

If there’s any connection at all, it’s that this acquisition may spur Web content management vendors to accelerate their own acquisition of marketing automation capabilities. I discussed this a bit in my post on Adobe’s acquisition of Day Software and in the industry consolidation post. Given that there are so few B2C marketing automation vendors left, the Web content management players are almost forced to consider buying a B2B marketing automation system. (The other option would be email vendors like ExactTarget and Responsys.)

This isn’t really a bad thing: the B2B marketing automation products have pretty much all the capabilities of the B2C systems and then some. On the other hand, most B2B systems are designed for smaller data volumes and have less flexible data structures.

The bottom line is probably that the upper tier B2B marketing automation vendors (Eloqua, Silverpop, Aprimo, possibly Marketbright) are next in line to be bought. But you already knew that.

Read More

Unica 8.0 Offers New, More Unified Interface

Summary: Unica's new release has few functional enhancements but offers better integration of previously separate components.

Unica on Monday officially launched the 8.0 version of its enterprise marketing suite. The main thrust of the new release was visual – a new company Web site and graphics and, more important, a new interface that finally unified the various components the vendor has built and purchased over the years.

I can’t get too excited about the new visuals, which stress the “U” in Unica in phrases like “Discover the U in business”. The unified interface is better news, although it corrects a problem that I feel should have been solved long ago.

The new release does provide some substantive improvements. The most important is a central offer repository linked to cell-level campaign planning. This makes it easier to track the use and performance of standard offers. The planning is also now integrated with actual campaign designs, saving marketers some work as they move from one stage to the next. That’s good, although I think it’s fair to note that it's been two years since Unica purchased its MarketingCentral planning system.

The other major news involves improvements in the company’s eMessage email system. These include a central content repository, conditional text within system-built emails, better response tracking, and deliverability monitoring services from Pivotal Veracity. Integration is still a bit of an issue here – the email content repository is separate from the central offer repository, the conditional text rules engine is separate from the campaign rules builder, and conditional text rules cannot be shared across documents.

On the other hand, Unica has tightly coupled email execution to its campaign suite: in fact, the only way users can send emails via anyone except Unica is to export a file. Previous versions of the system allowed tighter integration with external email services. Unica sees this as simplifying the lives of its clients, although I suspect some may prefer to choose their own provider. The company said that 50 to 100 of its 500-600 campaign clients currently use its email delivery service. The balance will have to convert when they upgrade to Unica 8.0, or resort to the afore-mentioned file exports.

Pricing remains largely the same as previous Unica releases: clients pay for individual modules based primarily on database size. The one substantial change is the email services will now be based on email volume.

Read More

Unica Strategy Stays the Course

I recently caught up with Unica Vice President Andrew Hally as part of my review of developments at the major marketing automation vendors. It’s been a good year for Unica, which will break $100 million in annual revenue for the first time. On the product front, they continue their long-time strategy of offering all the software a marketing department would need. This has mostly meant incremental development of existing components, including continued assimilation of past years’ acquisitions in Web analytics, email, marketing planning, lead management, and event detection. The one major acquisition in 2007 was Marketing Central, which provides hosted marketing resource management. This was well within Unica’s traditional scope, although the “hosted” part is a bit of a change. It will help Unica serve smaller companies in addition to its traditional enterprise clients. But since Unica must penetrate this segment to continue growing, this is less a detour from the company’s primary strategy than a logical extension of it.

Hally did say that Unica still sees substantial growth potential among large enterprises. He said the company still frequently finds itself replacing home-grown systems at big companies, not just earlier generations of purchased campaign management systems. This surprises me a bit, although I suppose many firms never saw the need to replace systems that were already working. I do wonder how many of the holdouts will change their minds each year. If the number is small, then Unica and its competitors will be mostly selling into a replacement market, which can’t be very large. On the other hand, continued demand for new capabilities in Web and mobile marketing should lead companies to replace even relatively new systems. So perhaps the replacement market will be bigger than it seems. Certainly Unica has added features for email and Web analytics. But it still has gaps in ad serving, keyword management, and mobile. Acquisitions in those areas would not be surprising.

Probably the most interesting development Hally reported was a sharp rise in sales for Unica’s Affinium Detect, an event-detection system based on the Elity software acquired with MarketSoft in 2005. Hally said Detect is now Unica’s third-best-selling product, with one to two dozen installations. This compares with the handful that Elity had sold when it was independent. He attributed the growth both to increased demand and to the reduced risk marketers see in buying from Unica. He also reported the product has been sold for telecommunication and credit card applications, in addition to the traditional retail banking.

While at NCDM, I also took a look at Unica’s newest module, an ad hoc reporting package called Affinium Insight. This provides some basic visualization and analysis capabilities for non-technical users. It is designed to free up marketing analysts for more demanding work by giving business users a simple graphical interface linked to data marts assembled with standard Unica technology. The interface resembles the NetTracker Web analytics system Unica acquired with Sane Solutions in 2006.

Read More