IBM to Purchase Unica for $480 Million

IBM today announced its intention to acquire Unica Corporation for $480 Million. The move aims to accelerate IBM's efforts to help organizations analyze and predict customer preferences and develop more targeted marketing campaigns.

Unica's software helps organizations streamline and automate the entire marketing processes from relationship marketing, online marketing, and marketing operations to improve their brand presence and better reach consumers.

More than 1,500 clients rely on Unica for marketing and brand campaigns across a wide range of industries including financial services, insurance, retail telecommunications, travel and hospitality, including Aramark, Best Buy, eBay, Starwood and US Cellular.

"IBM understands the demands on today's organizations to transform core business processes in functions such as marketing with intelligence and automation," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Industry Solutions. "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."

"Unica's focus is to help our customers deliver marketing messages so relevant that they are perceived as a service to our clients' customers," said Yuchun Lee, CEO, Unica Corp. "Together with IBM, we will bring our leading enterprise marketing management solutions to a wider set of customers worldwide and with a much broader, more comprehensive portfolio."

Unica's 500 employees will be integrated into IBM's Software Solutions Group, which includes a range of industry-focused offerings. Unica software will complement the capabilities of IBM's Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization - a team of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers, backed by an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years.

The merger represents another step in IBM's renewed software acquisition strategy, which includes the recent acquisitions of Coremetrics and Sterling Commerce. This expanding portfolio, combined with IBM's WebSphere Commerce software aims to help companies automate, manage and accelerate core business processes across marketing, demand generation, sales, order processing and fulfillment.

IBM recently stated it would spend $20 billion on acquisitions over the next five years and that the focus in this area would remain on software companies, given its higher margins. Software is IBM's most profitable business. Since 2003, IBM has acquired more than 65 software companies. IBM has projected its software business would become almost half of IBM's profits by 2015.