Unlike the other three leading Eco Systems vendors Microsoft , Oracle and SAP , IBM is not a player in the applications market. Its absence from this market is based on strategy which does not include ERP , CRM and other applications as one of its target markets. So why is I BM going to acquire a small CRM vendor named Unica? In order to answer this question I am going to describe the first time the name Unica was mentioned to me. It was a strategic CRM consulting project I was participating in. The large customer was using Siebel . I joined a CRM expert with vast knowledge and experience of the customer's implementation as well as other CRM projects. My role was to analyze the CRM market and its trends focusing on implications relevant to that client. I choose to focus on Siebel and the other three market leaders of that time: SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft and two other unique products which may supplement them (Unica and Kana ). Two days before we gave the cli...
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