The company’s Affinium software covers the areas of marketing and customer analytics, demand generation and marketing resource management. With analysts at Gartner estimating that Global 1000 enterprises spend nearly $1 trillion annually on marketing, Unica sees an opportunity because most businesses have not automated their marketing functions. Instead, Unica said they typically continue to rely on manual processes, internally developed software programs, and desktop office productivity software such as graphics packages, word processing, and spreadsheets, to conduct marketing activities.
It said EMM software can help a business manage the complexities and processes of marketing. It quoted an IDC report as saying that the market for marketing automation software will increase from $1.4bn in 2003 to $2.1bn in 2008.
Unica has a three-year record of profitable growth to underline its potential. In the year to September 30, net income rose 39.8% to $3.5m on revenue 39.6% higher at $24m.
Waltham, Massachusetts-based Unica sees competition coming from companies offering software products addressing a portion of the EMM market, vendors of CRM and other enterprise application software, and providers of infrastructure software.
Unica has a worldwide installed base of approximately 300 companies in a wide range of industries, but it acknowledges that the market for EMM software is relatively new and still evolving, and its success depends on the willingness of businesses to implement EMM software.
The company was set up in 1992 and initially focused on data-mining and analytics before turning to the emerging EMM market in 1998, and produced its first campaign management software product the following year.
