Financial Watch:

AmeriMark Direct LLC Selects Unica's Affinium

Unica Corporation, a worldwide provider of award-winning enterprise marketing management solutions, announced that AmeriMark Direct LLC has selected Unica's Affinium software to develop more profitable, customer-focused marketing strategies across multiple channels. AmeriMark, a leading direct marketer of women's apparel, brand-name cosmetics and fragrances, jewelry, watches and accessories and health-related merchandise, will leverage Affinium's predictive modeling and data mining capabilities to better understand its customer base, enabling it to create more targeted marketing initiatives and identify incremental revenue growth opportunities among its customers and catalog advertisers.

Affinium's profiling and segmentation capabilities will enable AmeriMark marketers to target its merchandise and publications to the value conscious, over-fifty segment of the population with special promotions, while leveraging upsell and cross-sell opportunities within their family of catalogs. AmeriMark attributes its historical success and profitability to its loyal customer base, efficient operations and foresight in reading and reacting to its customers' desires. Through targeted, multi-channel initiatives (i.e., email, catalogs, Web), AmeriMark intends to expand the circulation of its five catalogs, encourage customers to purchase from multiple catalogs, including Anthony Richards, Complements, Beauty Boutique, Windsor Collection, Healthy Living, Print Media and E-Commerce activities, while maintaining a consistent presence across all of its marketing efforts.

"To improve the effectiveness of our marketing, we needed a powerful tool for analyzing, segmenting and predicting customer behavior that is both easy to use and integrates with our existing marketing infrastructure," said Diane Huzar, executive vice president of marketing and advertising at AmeriMark. "The sophisticated predictive modeling capabilities of Unica's Affinium software will enable us to target specific customer groups with upsell and cross-sell campaigns. With Affinium, we anticipate a five to 10 percent increase in revenues, as well as cost savings, through our ability to conduct more direct, personalized marketing programs across catalog and new Web-based channels."

After reviewing offerings from several vendors, AmeriMark selected Affinium for its robust functionality, ability to integrate with its existing systems and ease-of-use. Another key factor in Affinium's favor is that it's been developed specifically for customer analysis and marketing with ease-of-use and productivity tools to reduce the time to create models, perform analysis and achieve greater return on marketing investments.

"AmeriMark's adoption of Affinium over other offerings once again demonstrates that Unica is leading the way as the best-of-breed provider of analytic and enterprise marketing management solutions," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder, Unica. "Marketers like AmeriMark are finding that the maintenance of existing customer relationships requires personalized communications across multiple channels. Affinium enables AmeriMark to better understand and anticipate customer behaviors and preferences and maximize sales from an existing customer base by bundling and cross-selling products through the right channels at the right time."

About AmeriMark Direct LLC

AmeriMark Direct LLC (formerly TransAmerica Holdings) is a leading direct marketer of women's apparel, name brand cosmetics and fragrances, jewelry, watches and accessories, and health related merchandise. AmeriMark sells its merchandise through five distinctive catalogs: Anthony Richards, Beauty Boutique, Complements, Healthy Living and the Windsor Collection. In business for over 33 years, AmeriMark ships millions of packages to its satisfied customers each year.

About Unica

Unica Corporation provides award-winning enterprise marketing management solutions for innovative companies that want to optimize customer acquisition and relationship management, streamline processes, and empower strategic planning for added profitability and marketing success. Based on an open, scalable architecture, Unica's Affinium Suite enables marketers to gather and analyze knowledge from multiple data sources; identify customer wants and needs; plan, execute and manage tailored programs for interactions through multiple touchpoints; and measure and optimize marketing effectiveness. Hundreds of businesses worldwide rely on Unica's software and services. Customers include Lands' End, Merck-Medco, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, ABN AMRO, Cintas, Scotiabank, Choice Hotels and Nationwide. Unica is a privately held, global company with offices in the U.S., London and Singapore, and a network of world-class partners, including Acxiom, Compaq Computer, Braun Consulting, IBM and PeopleSoft. For more information, call 781-259-5900 or visit www.unicacorp.com.

Contact Unica Corporation, Beth Sulak, 781-259-5900, bsulak@unicacorp.com.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Chooses Selectica

Selectica Inc announced that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the state's largest health care benefits company, has chosen Selectica's eInsurance suite to automate its rating business.

The quoting, enrollment and analysis capabilities of Selectica's eInsurance suite will be used to automate new and renewal business rating and quoting across the company. The system will be accessible via any Web browser to approximately 4,000 internal sales representatives, independent insurance agents and managing agents.

With 4.8 million members, Detroit-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan is one of the nation's largest Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. The company operates an affiliated HMO, Blue Care Network of Michigan.

"When we began our search to find a software package that would meet our requirements, we were very surprised to find that Selectica's solution fit so well with what we were attempting to do," said J. Paul Austin, senior vice president for Michigan sales and service at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. "In addition, it is very refreshing to deal with the people at Selectica. They listened extremely well to our needs and have been very adept at documenting our requirements."

"Through this project, we will be able to enhance our rating, quoting and experience analysis systems, as well as make changes to these systems much faster and in a far less costly way."

"We look forward to partnering with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to rapidly deploy a state-of-the-art, Web-centric front-office that can deliver significant value to their business," said Raj Jaswa, president and chief executive officer of Selectica. "Our eInsurance suite is a powerful, highly scalable platform, and thanks to our experience with some of the nation's largest insurers, we've been able to incorporate a wide range of industry best practices into our applications."

The three solutions that make up Selectica's eInsurance suite -- eQuoting, eEnrollment and eAnalysis -- work seamlessly to create a fully integrated pricing, sales and information management environment for health insurance carriers. Selectica's suite provides a number of key benefits, including standardized quoting and rating, guided plan selection and automated experience rating.

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association -- the trade association for the independent, local Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans across the country -- last year designated Selectica as a preferred vendor of online selling solutions for the nation's 43 Blues Plans, which collectively administer health care benefits to more than 82 million Americans. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan joins Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida and Blue Shield of California as the third Blues health plan to standardize its front-office operations on the Selectica eInsurance platform.

About Selectica Inc

Selectica Inc is a leading provider of Interactive Selling Systems (ISS) that transform the way companies sell, service and compete. Selectica's ISS platform provides robust capabilities to power industry-specific guided selling applications that streamline and accelerate the process of configuring, pricing and purchasing complex products and services. Businesses that deploy ISS are able to empower business managers to quickly and easily modify product, service and price information enterprise-wide to ensure proper margins and to stay ahead of changing market conditions. Across a wide range of industries, Selectica's ISS has demonstrated an ability to increase productivity, improve order accuracy, boost return on investment and establish and maintain a competitive advantage.

Selectica's customers include leaders across an array of vertical industries. In manufacturing: Cooper Cameron, Invacare, Rockwell Automation; Insurance: Aetna, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Blue Shield of California, Humana; Networking: Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Redback Networks; Automotive: BMW of North America, High-tech: Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi; Telecom: British Telecom, Fujitsu, Mitel, Tellabs. Selectica is headquartered in San Jose, CA. The company's Web site is www.selectica.com.

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is a nonprofit health care company that provides or administers health care coverage to more than 4.8 million members through a variety of health care options -- Traditional Blue Cross Blue Shield, Blue Preferred and Community Blue PPOs, Blue Choice Point of Service and Blue Care Network of Michigan HMO. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Blue Care Network of Michigan are independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.