HCL Software is excited to announce that Unica has been shortlisted for Constellation ShortList report along with Salesforce, Adobe & others.

The most efficient, flexible, and future-proofed marketing systems are cloud native. This architecture provides significant economic and operational advantages over on-premise or conventional SaaS solutions. However, many early adopters of marketing solutions deployed on-premise and SaaS solutions because they were considered best of breed at the time, and cloud-native solutions and IT organizations hadn't matured to the point of mission-critical readiness. Companies that adopted on-premise or SaaS solutions now find themselves lagging in their ability to quickly upgrade and enhance their systems and adapt to the new demands of a highly personalized, digital-first, omnichannel world. Today, your MarTech infrastructure is your brand, and if you compete against companies with systems that provide greater resiliency, adaptability, and efficiency, you are at an increasingly significant disadvantage.  When cloud first emerged, it was a difficult proposition to "lift and shift" conventional applications environments. It could take years of planning, testing, and parallel operations to make the change. However, legacy applications that have been "lifted and shifted" lack the agility, performance, and ease of use marketers need, while hosted SaaS applications lack customizability and control. For example, when Netflix first moved to the cloud it took approximately eight years. Today, that time has been reduced to a matter of days and weeks due to the evolution of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the migration processes and tooling, and the skills needed to operate in the cloud. Taking this a step further, HCL Unica has accelerated this cycle with its cloud-native foundation that is all about fast and flexible deployments. With HCL's Solution Factory (SoFy), new cloud-native deployments of HCL solutions, including Unica, can be provisioned in a matter of minutes and deployed on premises, or via public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. If the full set of skilled resources is lacking, HCL...

  HCL Commerce is thrilled to be positioned in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. The timing of the last Magic Quadrant in 2020 meant that we were unable to participate but received an honorable mention. We viewed our recognition in the 2021 Magic Quadrant as a two-step process. First getting recognized again in the quadrant and setting a base line for our vision and ability to execute. In the next Magic Quadrant, we hope to be positioned higher and further on the ability to execute and completeness of vision axes based on the investments we are making in the platform and the new logos we are winning. We feel, the Gartner Digital Commerce Magic Quadrant may be the gold-standard when it comes to positioning reports for eCommerce. However, Gartner recommends that you should read the report (including the Critical Capabilities report) before you select a short-list of vendors as no one solution fits all. We recommend you do that and then give Gartner a call to ask about us! We are confident they will say we are trending in the right direction for the last 2 years. At HCL we spent a lot of time to identify our strengths and where we needed to improve. That gave us our ‘swim-lane’ or where we would be the best fit for a company – and in our view that comes out in Gartner’s writeup nicely. We believe our strengths place us in a unique group – not many commerce vendors can manage all the requirements of Enterprise B2B and B2C Commerce. There are 2 great comments about HCL Commerce in the Gartner reports - Since I am not allowed to share what Gartner wrote about us, go read the report!!! They say a picture paints a thousand words but,...

There is a situation where enterprise decides to move away from one database vendor and adopt another database vendor as their preferred choice for applications they are using enterprise-wide. We came across one such situation where one customer in North America decided to move away from IBM DB2 and adopt MS SQL server as their preferred choice for all enterprise applications across their organization; they can then use the procedure mentioned in this blog which involves a system database migration using Campaign flowcharts. The Goal Migrated Unica Platform/Campaign system database from one DB type to another using Campaign flowchart execution from the source environment. (Here, the goal is to migrate the Unica Campaign system DB IBM DB2 to MS SQL Server) Challenge The customer did not have the financial budget to purchase a license for database migration tools available in the market. Solution Module We have used our DB migration methodology for Unica Platform and Campaign modules. But the same method can be used for the rest of the Unica suite. Platform module is used for creating and storing the security policies required for the Unica application. The Platform module stores the configuration settings of different Unica modules/applications in the suite. Unica Campaign is the advanced campaign management solution that delivers customer targeting at scale with powerful segmentation capabilities for outbound, multi-channel, multi-wave batch campaign execution and tracking. Key Feature The key feature of this methodology is to showcase how Campaign flowchart execution can be used to migrate Unica Platform and Campaign system tables from the existing IBM DB 2 database to the MS SQL server database. STEP-BY-STEP SOLUTION 1. Overview of Unica System DB Migration We have implemented Unica System DB Migration from IBM DB2 to MS SQL Server using Unica Campaign flowcharts in this POC. The below diagram depicts...

Factors such as rising digitalization and increased spending capabilities have dramatically changed the meaning of customer experience. Product features and prices are no longer the primary consideration in the digital age, as customer experience is becoming the primary differentiating factor. Customers expect brand owners to provide a personalized experience across touchpoints and interaction channels, ensuring a seamless digital commerce experience. According to multiple studies conducted by Quadrant, customers are ready to pay a premium price for better and personalized services. The retailers and brand owners focusing on delivering exceptional and personalized customer experiences are increasingly becoming more profitable and are winning over the competition. A customer-centric approach helps organizations drive improvements in customer loyalty, brand image, messaging consistency, and revenue growth. The majority of retailers have transformed their digital commerce and CX-specific technology landscape by adopting cloud-based applications and services. However, traditionally architected cloud-based applications lack the necessary agility, speed, and performance required to adapt to the growing business complexities, demanding customers, and ever-increasing competition. In a fast-paced digital-savvy economy, retailers are required to transform their digital commerce operations to drive a culture of innovation and gain the necessary business agility to ensure long-term and sustainable success. Therefore, cloud-native architecture is increasingly becoming the current industry norm, enabling organizations to future-proof their technology investment and drive a culture of continuous improvements. Cloud-native is an approach to designing and building applications based on microservices-based architecture running on containers and dynamic orchestration platforms. Unlike traditional monolithic architecture, cloud-native applications are automatically optimized for optimum performance across any cloud environment with container infrastructure, including private, public, on-premises, hybrid clouds, or edge locations. The cloud-native approach follows agile development and DevOps principles, supporting continuous integrations and continuous delivery (CI/CD) along with continuous deployment. The applications are designed, developed, and delivered collaboratively by development, IT...

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run across organizations. Containers provide a modern way to encapsulate processes and package dependencies, making it easier to use DevOps practices and follow cloud native patterns for Windows applications. Along with the benefits of Docker, like reducing hardware resource costs, ease-of-use, portability, scalability, and modularity of deployments, Kubernetes provides container-orchestration capabilities for automating application deployment (rollout and rollbacks), workload scaling, and high availability. Helm charts leverage Kubernetes packages to streamline the installation and management of applications deployed on Kubernetes. Why Helm Charts based installations When building and deploying applications, Helm Charts provide the ability to leverage Kubernetes packages through the click of a button or single CLI command.  Kubernetes is a powerful tool. However, several challenges can hamper its adoption – e.g., deployment complexity, steep learning curve, etc. Helm charts help reduce the complexity of deployments. Helm Charts can be shared within an organization or across organizations to avoid effort duplication and achieve higher efficiency with completely automated and configuration-driven installation & deployment. How to Deploy Unica Discover Cloud Native Solution Unica Discover, as we know quickly helps in identifying sessions that experienced user struggle and diagnose pain points, by capturing the user experience so you can then mitigate negative user experience and identify and proactively retarget users through marketing or recovery campaigns. Let's understand a little about the deployments for Unica Discover. With the launch of SoFy you can now run Discover and other Unica Products in Kubernetes. This all can be accomplished in three easy steps: Explore the Catalog, Create a Solution, and Release to the Cloud. With Unica Discover launch on HCL Now (Powered by HCL Solution Factory (SoFy)) you do not need anyone else to host or Manage the Discover Platform for you, you can do it...