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Analyze This: IBM Buys Unica

Deep Blue Would be Proud... and Broke!

Monday, August 16, 2010 | Posted by Aaron Goldman

Posted In: Digital Marketing / Press / Press Mentions

On Friday, the big news in digital marketing was the IBM Unica acquisition for $480 million. See WSJ coverage. Unica provides what it calls Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) or Marketing Resource Management (MRM) services. Here's a quick excerpt from Unica's corporate brochure:

"Offering the only EMM solution to cover the entire marketing cycle – from analyzing and planning to designing, producing, executing, and measuring – Unica's Affinium software suite provides an unprecedented level of integration, unmatched functionality, and extensive marketing automation capabilities."

Sounds pretty good, right? Who wouldn't want something unprecedented, unmatched, and extensive?? 

Below is a schematic that speaks to Unica's interactive marketing solution (part of its larger Affinium platform):

Clearly, managing a holistic multi-channel marketing program is no small task and tools like Unica that can centralize, automate, and measure parts of the process are immensely valuable. $480 million valuable, though? Who knows. But it certainly gives IBM another arrow in the quiver.

One can't help but wonder if the plan is to keep Unica as a standalone product or integrate with IBM's other assets. Speaking of which, if Unica already offers a full EMM suite, doesn't that make all of IBM's other acquisitions (eg, Coremetrics) redunant?!?

Here's the POV I shared for MediaPost's writeup of the deal:

"As marketing becomes more and more data-driven, technology takes on a bigger role. Having the right tools for cross-channel reporting and analytics is essential," says Aaron Goldman, principal at Connectual. "It makes sense that a company like IBM, which has a strong client and product portfolio around business software solutions, would want to have Unica in the mix. It's basically a share of wallet play, giving IBM another tool to help grow their customer's businesses."