September 7, 2012
By Judith Aquino,

IBM Launches Cloud-Based Marketing Center

IBM has introduced the IBM Marketing Center, a multipurpose cloud-based suite that integrates campaign management, email targeting, and personalized offerings with marketing analytics.

An IBM Smarter Commerce offering, the Marketing Center is designed to eliminate the need for organizations to integrate various types of marketing software, and is directly pitted against several marketing software vendors, explained Yuchun Lee, vice president and general manager of the enterprise marketing management group at IBM.

"[With the Marketing Center] we are going after Marketo and Eloqua plus Omniture, plus ExactTarget, plus Silverpop, all in a single product," Lee told CRM magazine. "The alternative—buying from all those companies and integrating them—is a complex process."

The Marketing Center combines capabilities from several of its acquisitions: Coremetrics (a company acquired by IBM in 2010 that provides a commerce-focused Web analytics service), Unica (an online marketing software provider also acquired in 2010), as well as the recent DemandTec and TeaLeaf acquisitions. DemandTec provides pricing and promotion capabilities, while TeaLeaf contributes Web and mobile navigation-analysis features to the new offering.

IBM announced this new service at its Smarter Commerce Global Summit conference in Orlando, Fla. At the conference, the company also announced the release of the IBM Smarter Commerce Workbench, a collection of best practice implementations and tools aimed at helping project teams get the most from IBM's Smarter Commerce offerings.

The company also rolled out a new line of business process outsourcing (BPO) services from its Global Process Services group. The BPO service, which is called the Smarter Commerce Managed Services, is designed to help companies run their multichannel marketing efforts.