IBM spending spree continues with Unica purchase

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has suddenly become like the girl in the Broadway musical, Oklahoma who just can't say no. Just a week after buying Datacap, IBM announced the purchase of Unica, a marketing and analytics company based in Waltham, MA. According to the company release, IBM paid $21 a share or a total of $480 million for Unica--chump change for a company like IBM.

With Unica, and its purchase of web analytics vendor Coremetrics this past June, IBM is making a concerted and clear effort to engage in web content management marketing. These two tools when combined with other IBM web content management products should logically lead to a coherent web content management for marketers strategy, but Jon Marks, writing in the Jon on Tech blog isn't so optimistic. He believes the products will simply get buried in the vast corporation, no longer marketed as stand-alone products. Notice that Marks uses a quote from Unica's own blog (prior to being purchased of course) to back up his assertions.

As you would expect, General Manager for IBM Industry Solutions Craig Hayman, was gushing about Unica's technology. "Unica was a clear choice for IBM based on its power to automate a broad set of marketing capabilities and its established reputation for delivering customer success in marketing to organizations around the world." 

Yet per usual, while the underlying technology is no doubt interesting to IBM, the real treasure here appears to be the customer list. Unica boasts more than 1500 customers including some big brands like Best Buy, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Disney, Dow Jones--to name but a few. That kind of customer list had to appeal to IBM, regardless of the obvious connections between this purchase and the Coremetrics one in June.

Whether IBM will push these two purchases and their well known brands hard, which would be the sensible thing, or bury them in the corporation, as Marks suggests, remains to be seen. It's clear that IBM has strengthened its web content management portfolio with these purchases. Whether it can capitalize on it is this open question.

For more information:
- see the Unica press release

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