[Posted by Kristin Hambelton
Senior Director of Marketing, Neolane, Inc.]

In the “old” days, search engine optimization, or SEO, was all about figuring out which keywords to use and implementing them comprehensively on your website. There were far fewer web pages in existence at the time, so there was less competition. The strategic placement of keywords in title tags, page headings and body copy was often enough to move a website from page 5 to page 1 in the rankings over the space of a few months.

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[Posted by Stephane Dehoche,
President and Chief Executive Officer Neolane]

IBM’s acquisition of Unica has written another chapter in the still-ongoing story of marketing automation’s ‘industry consolidation.’ Depending on whom you ask, the move by IBM is a tipping point, the completion of a cycle, or, more cynically, just another buy by Big Blue to increase its presence in the analytic applications market after having for so long focused primarily on infrastructure software.

According to SiriusDecisions’ Jonathan Block, “…the combination of Unica/IBM technology along with IBM’s vast services groups could help accelerate marketing automation platform (MAP) adoption, certainly for larger organizations.”  However, he continues, “the implementation portion of adopting a MAP (whether on-demand or not) is something few marketing organizations have the stomach for.”

From our perspective, even with IBM”s services resources, large organizations are likely facing long and painful integrations with the combined IBM/Unica solution.  Integrating disparate technologies is always hard, and particularly so in this case due to the already-siloed and fractured technologies that exist within the Unica platform.  Layer on top of that IBM’s other priorities – adding SPSS, CoreMetrics, and Sterling Commerce to its analytics fold.

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