IBM Spends 480 Million Dollars To Purchase Unica
IBM the world’s biggest computer services provider has finally agreed a buy the Unica Corp. The deal is said to be worth $480 million for Unica and is one of many new acquisitions IBM has made in recent months.
In recent years IBM has bought over 13 business based out of Massachusetts, these include Guardium Inc.,Ounce Labs Inc. and data storage businesses FilesX Inc. and Diligent Technologies.
Unica is based in Waltham Massachusetts. The firm will look at organisations customers analyse their behaviour then produce marketing software that will try and predict the customer’s future preferences.
For example if a company wanted to produce a targeted offline marketing campaign Unica would analyse their data and identify different target market groups then help build a plan of how to target these different groups.
Unica has grown steadily and now has around 1,500 regular customers; these include major companies like EBay and Best Buy Co. The company has over 500 workers and is now led by its chief officer Yuchun Lee. He is a respected name in the business world and was happy to announce that share holders in his company will receive around $21 per share.
There was some major worries within the company that there was going to be major job redundancies however not long after the deal was announced IBM spokeswoman Karen Lilla clarified the issue and said they had no plans to make any workers redundant.
Craig Hayman one of IBM’s managers said his company will use its global influence and resources to grow Unica. Its technology will be especially useful in developing countries where consumer needs are not quite so clear.
IBM has spent around 20 billion dollars on acquisitions since Sam Palmisano became Chief Officer eight years ago. The software unit which is IBM most profitable arm has benefited most from these new purchases with almost 60 new companies joining the unit since 2003.
The good news for IBM shareholders is the companies they have bought seem solid and profitable. IBM have developed a good system of integration to get the best use out of these companies and it looks like there will be many more deals like this one for IBM over the coming years.
