Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Here’s What Marketers Should Do at Dreamforce

Posted by Mark Smith on Aug 29, 2011 10:03:25 AM

The largest cloud computing conference, Dreamforce 2011, operated by Salesforce.com, is now upon us. This year attendance is estimated to be over 40,000, and there will be more technology- and developer-focused attendees and dialogue than marketing material. Unlike past years, I expect marketing professionals to be a small percentage of attendees, so I thought I would offer them a guide through the circus of activities at the conference.

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Topics: Salesforce.com, Social Media, ExactTarget, HubSpot, Manticore Technology, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Marketing Planning, Marketo, Operational Performance Management (OPM), Pardot, Revenue Performance, Sales Force Automation, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, IBM, Business Performance Management (BPM), CFO, CMO, CRM, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Demand Generation, Eloqua, Financial Performance Management (FPM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), SFA, Unica, Digital Technology

IBM Antes Up for Marketing Applications by Acquiring Unica

Posted by Mark Smith on Nov 28, 2010 2:52:07 PM

In a second move indicating its seriousness about competing in the market for marketing software, IBM announced its offer to acquire publicly traded Unica Corp. Unica is one of the larger providers in this space, with more than $100 million in annual revenue and 1,500 customers worldwide. Its success in very large marketing organizations, including brand-name customers Best Buy, Marriott and IBM itself, enabled it to be one of the few that has continued to grow in the challenging economic environment. It provides enterprise marketing automation and analytics software in both on-premises and on-demand forms. Unica had grown significantly in sales to business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, competing against EloquaSAS Institute and Infor’s CRM product, which was derived from its acquisition of Epiphany and has advanced since then (See:  “Infor Launches Innovative E-mail Management“).

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Topics: Marketing Automation, Operational Performance Management (OPM), CRM, Sales Performance Management (SPM), Unica