Unica Launches Industry's First Context Server

Unica Corporation (Lincoln, MA), a provider of award-winning analytical CRM and marketing automation solutions, introduced the industry's first platform for serving analytically-based, context-sensitive customer information to real-time marketing channels. Affinium Interact leverages customer information gathered from multiple data sources to create a complete and predictive view of customer behavior and to deliver highly-personalized, up-to-the-minute recommendations for interacting with individuals via Web, contact center, wireless, or other real-time channels. Affinium Interact increases a company's ability to maximize the value of interactions with both known and anonymous visitors. The product, which is being demonstrated for the first time in Unica's booth at the NCDM Conference, makes use of advanced technology to assure ultra-fast response times.

Affinium Interact creates and leverages four key types of information to provide the right level of personalization to drive dialogue with a customer:

• Historical information such as the service level, transactions, recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) values of past purchases;
• Predictive analysis that defines the potential value and cross-sell/up-sell affinities for a particular customer;
• Context of the current customer interaction, for example, current Web page or interest expressed by the customer, items in shopping cart, or time online;
• Predefined business rules and objectives that outline the treatment or service levels that should be offered or that indicate the specific content to be shown on the Web site.

Affinium Interact uniquely combines this information to develop personalization profiles which can trigger, in real time, specific content, offers, treatment or events, ranging from instant offer buttons on a Web site to cross-sell opportunities at a call center. The product can handle up to 1,000 requests per second per server - personalizing interactions for approximately four million visitors per server per day. Multiple servers can be deployed for increased capacity.

"Affinium Interact allows companies to share customer insight and synchronize data across all real-time channels. This enables your customer touchpoints to present consistent personalization and unique offers for each customer interaction," said Carl Touchie, director, Decision Support Services at Bank of Montreal.

"Companies wanting to optimize customer interactions across multiple touchpoints are limited by their technology solutions. Most solutions focus on only one channel, like the Web, and lack the analytical depth needed for effective personalization. Additionally, many require significant IT support and custom coding, diminishing a company's ability to rapidly update personalization strategies in response to changes in business conditions or results," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Unica. "Affinium Interact addresses these limitations. It turns customer information into customer insight, allowing companies to anticipate customer needs and wants and respond in real time with highly effective marketing or service interactions."

The product's open and extensible architecture is compatible with popular content management, e-commerce and contact center platforms. Its open XML architecture supports HTTP, Java, J2EE, EJB, C++, COM/DCOM, Visual Basic, and CORBA interfaces to ensure compatibility across systems and applications.

Affinium Interact is currently set for beta testing with several customers. "We continue to be impressed by Unica's product technology and are excited about the opportunity to participate in the beta program for Affinium Interact," said John Machado, senior manager, data warehousing management group at Bank of Montreal. "Unica's Affinium Interact is a cutting-edge product that solves the real-time marketing challenge that all marketers are currently facing. Affinium Interact will enable us to deliver personalized offers as well as the most effective offers to our customers in real-time."

The product will be supported not only by Unica but also by key integration partners, such as Braun Consulting, a leading Internet professional services firm. "Clients today are interested in a solution that offers more than campaign management. They are looking for real-time, multi-channel support for customer recommendations based on statistical models," said Larry Goldman, vice president, Braun Consulting. "As Braun continues to help clients design and implement effective solutions for creating personalized customer interactions, Affinium Interact offers a new benchmark for increasing the performance and effectiveness of personalization initiatives and mapping these initiatives to overall marketing strategies."

Affinium Interact will be commercially available in February 2001.

About Unica

Unica, a provider of award-winning analytical CRM and marketing automation solutions, helps leading businesses implement one-to-one customer interaction strategies that communicate the right message to the right person at the right time - whatever the channel. Affinium, Unica's modular, cross-channel marketing suite, delivers deep functionality for data mining and predictive modeling, customer interaction and campaign management, reporting, and real-time personalization. Hundreds of businesses worldwide rely on Unica's software, services, and expertise to build profitable customer relationships and achieve marketing success. Headquartered in Lincoln, Mass., Unica is privately held with offices throughout the U.S. and a network of distribution partners in Europe, South Africa, and South America. Its customers include Lands' End, Bank of Montreal, Fingerhut, ABN AMRO, United Parcel Service, Marriott, Scotiabank, and AOL-AAdvantage. For more information, call 781-259-5900 or visit www.unicacorp.com.

Contact Karen Seaman, KHJ Public Relations, 617-241-8000, kseaman@khj.com.