Marketing Automation: Coming of Age Slowly
P.J. Jakovljevic - May 15, 2004

Introduction

The debate about the future of the marketing automation and management market, as a stand-alone sub segment of the entire customer relationship management (CRM) market, continues, partly owing to mixed signals coming from relevant point solutions providers. On one hand, recent demise, and buyout of Xchange by Amdocs (see Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties) was the last in the array of less-fortunate point players. At the time prior to Xchange's assets auction, allegedly over twenty companies expressed interest in buying Xchange's assets, and in maintaining its products and supporting its customers, including much better-performing direct competitors Chordiant Software, DoubleClick, SAS, and especially Unica Corporation. While the upbeat marketing management software vendor Unica (www.unicacorp.com) was initially marked as a very likely buyer of Xchange, the vendor, however, slightly surprisingly elected not to make a bid for the Xchange's assets. Rather, Unica has since announced a migration plan from Xchange's solutions to its Affinium platform, given it has already migrated approximately 15 percent of Xchange's customer base to Affinium, and the vendor touts that regardless of which company has taken ultimate ownership of Xchange's remaining assets, converting to Affinium will be the most attractive solution for Xchange customers...