Unica, Oracle Siebel Top Latest Forrester Survey

A recent Forrester Research report recognizes Unica's overall excellence and cites Oracle's Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite as having the strongest product offering in the latest Forrester Wave Evaluation: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2006.

Here's something else the research found: In December 2005, Forrester surveyed 300 marketers about their technology adoption plans and approach to purchasing technology. "More than three-quarters of our respondents said that they want a more comprehensive, integrated application suite to boost effectiveness," report author Elana Anderson writes.

Forrester refers to this broader suite as the Marketing Technology Backbone and the application layer is the Enterprise Marketing Platform.

Overall, the report liked Unica: "The only vendor to fall into the Leader category in this evaluation, Unica is tops because of its strong campaign management and usability," Anderson says. "Unica also has the strongest strategic vision in the market and is focused on building out its marketing suite to support relationship marketing, Internet marketing, and brand marketing."

She notes that Unica is not best-of-breed across its complete offering: "Its reporting, security, and user administration functionality needs improvement, and it is still evolving its planning and resource management, interaction management, and lead management capabilities."

But because its solutions are all "well integrated," and because it has "a proven track record of continual improvement," Unica is "a no-brainer for direct-to-consumer firms that want an integrated suite that will grow with them over time," the report concludes.

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite was rated "Strong Performer" and was ranked first in the current offering in the Forrester Waves for B2C and B2B Marketing platforms. Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite was also ranked first or second in Marketing Planning and Resource Management, Campaign Management, Lead Management, Analytics and Reporting, Architecture and other vertical capabilities, including Loyalty Management and Trade Promotions Management products.

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite also scored well for Application Usability and Interaction Management.

"Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite provides the broadest functionality in the market and is the best product for B2B marketers," reported Forrester Analyst Elena Anderson. "Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite offers top-notch analysis tools and very strong campaign design and segmentation tools."

To assess the state of the enterprise marketing platform market, Forrester analyzed strengths and weaknesses of the top enterprise eight CRM vendors across 168 criteria that incorporated current offering, strategy and market presence.

The complete Forrester Enterprise Marketing Wave report is available online.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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