IBM and the analytical Cloud.

July 20, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from BusinessCloud9.  Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

IBM has combined two of its e-commerce offerings into a single online analytics package.  The IBM Coremetrics Digital Marketing Optimization Suite is the result of the merger of its Coremetrics Web analytics software with its Unica digital marketing package.

IBM acquired both firms last year to be part of IBM’s recently launched Smarter Commerce practice. It purchased Unica in August for $480 million and Coremetrics in June for an undisclosed amount. IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative is focused on helping companies more effectively market, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of social networking and mobile computing.

The firm says the combined Coremetrics and Unica software enables companies to better understand their customers’ buying preferences and patterns across all digital media, including Websites, social media networks, mobile phones and tablets. Coremetrics offers online analytics, such as the ability to summarize the response that an e-mail, texting or Facebook campaign gets. Unica provides tools for managing digital marketing campaigns and customer information, such as customers’ e-mail addresses and preferences.

Yuchun Lee, former co-founder of Unica and now vice president and general manager of enterprise marketing management at IBM, commented:   

“We’re seeing increasing client demand for a single source of truth in understanding customer online behaviour and buying trends as businesses strive to identify and seize new revenue streams. We are defining a powerful, integrated and data-driven approach to marketing, one that drives higher-margin sales while using analytics to place the customer’s needs squarely at the centre of all campaigns and promotions.”
 

Lee claimed the new offering gives IBM a significant competitive advantage over rivals: 

“We’re pretty confident this platform will be better than anything else out there. Most Web analytics software, such as Adobe’s Omniture and Google Analytics, can track response rate, but no off-the-shelf software or services combine these results with customer behaviour data into a single presentation. I think we’re finally at the point where we can clean all this up with this release.”
 

IBM’s focus on the Cloud is paying dividends according to Mark Loughridge, IBM’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Finance and Enterprise Transformation:   

“Cloud Computing, we’ve done as much work in cloud in the first half of this year as we did all of last year…In Cloud, we had over 2,000 wins year-to-date. In private Cloud, our average transaction size has tripled from a year ago. In the first half of 2011, Cloud revenue has already exceeded our full year 2010 results, keeping us on track to double our cloud revenue for the year.”
 
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