Unica Corp Introduces New Affinium 2

Unica Corporation introduced Affinium 2, the latest version of its analytical CRM and real-time marketing suite. The new software includes Customer Value Maximization, which features the industry's first Multi-Level Audience Processing and Management (MAP) capabilities. Enabling advanced audience segmentation and analysis -- without complex programming -- the new software is especially valuable for financial services and retail companies where real-time interaction is important. Shipping for the first time as part of the suite is Affinium Interact, the industry's first analytical context server for real-time, cross-channel, intelligent personalization. Unica demonstrated the new Affinium 2 at the DCI Customer Relationship Management Conference, February 14-15, in booth # 1923.

Designed to allow companies to take advantage of rapidly increasing amounts of customer data, Affinium 2 enables marketers to create campaigns that easily switch between individual and household -- or account -- attributes when selecting customers. It also allows them to implement dynamic householding rules. Most CRM products require rigid customer models that operate on only one level of abstraction and require significant database programming to incorporate householding.

Unica's new MAP capabilities simplify cross-level customer analysis. Through Affinium's graphical interface marketers easily manage information such as opt-out, credit status, product affinities, and spending patterns at both a household and individual level. This allows unprecedented ability to implement one-to-one communications, accede to customer privacy requests, and meet privacy compliance requirements.

The system opens up a broad variety of creative tactics for marketers allowing them, for example, to suppress offers to prospects whose companies are past due on invoices or to target offers to households based on the interests of individuals within the household - all without complex programming or inflexible data models.

Highly scalable, Affinium 2 can be used in production environments with up to 250,000,000 records - about three times what most products currently handle. In a recent test, Affinium showed improvements in campaign processing speeds of approximately 380%. (For example, a campaign previously requiring 28 days to implement was completed in less than nine hours.)

Affinium 2 also includes Unica's new analytical context server, Affinium Interact, for implementing sophisticated personalization across real-time channels. Affinium Interact's break-through technology leverages customer information, gathered from multiple data sources, to create a complete and predictive view of customer behavior. The product delivers 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. Because Affinium Interact is able to leverage and share predictive customer information with all real-time channels, companies can create and implement effective personalization strategies across their operations, rather than creating personalization silos on the Web or in the contact center. Affinium Interact supports a variety of APIs, and is easily integrated with a broad array of customer touchpoint systems, such as Siebel, Broadvision, ATG, and Kana.

Other enhancements to the suite include more advanced reporting and analysis capabilities for Affinium Report made possible through an agreement with Business Objects, as well as enhancements to Affinium Model (predictive modeling and data mining software), Affinium Campaign (multi-channel customer interaction and campaign management software), and Affinium eMessage (software for personalizing, optimizing and tracking email marketing).

Affinium's strong marketing capabilities result in tangible benefits and ROI. Using these capabilities, one communications services company, plagued with high levels of customer turnover, recognized a $10 million monthly revenue boost by being able to identify at-risk customers and deploying timely attrition-prevention measures. Other Unica Affinium customers report 50% reductions in direct marketing costs and increases in campaign performance on the order of 25% or more, for incremental revenue gains of $5 million.

"The ability to build customer interaction campaigns that operate on various levels of customer data enables a company to precisely target consumer communications and lowers overall marketing costs. More importantly, it builds a richer understanding of customers resulting in more accurate predictions of customer behavior," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Unica Corporation. "Affinium 2 helps companies maximize the value of each customer interaction, increases ROI, and makes customer behavior meaningful - and accessible - to a broad range of corporate decision makers."

Affinium 2 leverages Unica's unique Universal Dynamic Interconnect (UDI) technology, which eases technology integration and empowers marketers to maximize customer value within their dynamic and rapidly evolving environment. With UDI, marketers can simultaneously access multiple data stores such as data marts, warehouses, Web logs and even flat files, giving them the ability to adapt quickly to rapidly evolving data infrastructures and to create a panoramic view of each customer. With UDI, marketers can achieve new levels in their marketing management such as confirming a product's availability, in real-time, before offering it - all without having to tie up additional IT staff. Affinium 2, with its new MAP capabilities, is immediately available.

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 Carol Meyers, Unica Corporation, 781-259-5900, cmeyers@unicacorp.com or Rich Adler, 617-241-8000, KHJ Public Relations, radler@khj.com.