Google and HCL Unica Collaborate to Bring Vital Enterprise Marketing Management to the Cloud

It is amazing to be part of how Unica is evolving. Expanding on the June 2020 HCL Commerce and Google Cloud partnership, HCL has announced that it has expanded the Google Cloud relationship to HCL’s Unica and DX solutions. This relationship is more than merely a cool–sounding announcement between our companies. Unica’s Cloud Native platform capabilities can now be deployed to Google within minutes, with more exciting Google capabilities coming in our next Unica V12.1 update.  

HCL Unica is now offered on Google Cloud and clients will have access to the wide-ranging solutions that are included in the Google Cloud Platform, whether running on-premise or cloud deployment supporting private, public or hybrid cloud with no change in application functionality.

For HCL Unica customers, this means they can maintain the investments they have made in the robust and proven Unica solutions while also taking advantage of the global reach, security, and elasticity of Google Cloud. Unica customers will gain insights into how customers are engaging and continue to encounter agile campaign and marketing execution combined with Google Cloud’s market-leading tools out of the box.  

Insight Behind the Login 

Together, Google Cloud and HCL provide robust, enterprise–grade solutions to global clients that are the heart of HCL customer experience solutions that include HCL Unica, HCL Commerce, and HCL Digital Experience. The power of these solutions comes together at the intersection of data, process, and applications behind the login – that is where the magic happens. 

This joint program with HCLSoftware and Google Cloud brings a wealth of capabilities that HCL Unica customers can take advantage of for prescriptive solutions powered by Google cloud innovation, starting with our support to run a Kubernetes deployment in GCP for clients that seek cloud deployments. With the release of Unica 12.1, an Integrated Cloud-Native Marketing Platform, combined with Google Cloud Platform, provides cloud–native enhancements and expanded open stack support. Through simple but important solutions like these, this combination makes a real difference, and the business benefits increase significantly.  

Beyond the obvious benefits that Google Cloud offers our enterprise customers, such as a solid and robust enterprise–class cloud solution with a reputation for reliability, scaling, and geographic coverage, Unica will also be offering integrations and support for other Google solutions and tools.  Our newest Unica V12.1 updates include integrated capabilities for Google AdTech, support for BigQuery cloud data warehouse, and a roadmap that includes support for open data model reporting on Google Looker and Google Cloud ML integration for audience modeling and scoring. Unica also features over 780 APIs, which can be used to further integrate with Google tools or leverage the flexibility and speed of Google Cloud to integrate to other solutions, applications, data, and enterprise Martech.  

Our Unica partners are very excited over a potential lower TCO model to help customers collapse Martech stacks and expand into new customers that need to start with a smaller Unica platform instance such as brand, marketing & advertising agencies.  

“The new capabilities and flexibility that HCL’s Unica Marketing platform will provide customers, highlighted by the ability to easily deploy to Google Cloud in minutes, answers the demands of organizations that need to collapse Martech infrastructure into a cloud model.  The expanded Google relationship also opens Unica up to many interesting opportunities leveraging and integrating to Google solutions. This is another example of Unica maturing at class–leading speed,” said Andrew Addison, Founder & CEO, Purple Square. 

Google’s Cloud, paired with Unica’s integrated cloud–native marketing platform, also provides a very appealing option for smaller companies to leverage all of Unica’s enterprise–class power at a lower–cost entry point. For those customers that need to match the Martech sophistication and flexibility of much larger competitors, the full Unica marketing platform can be deployed with just one Unica UPP (Unica Power Pack) pricing unit and deployed to Google Cloud at a price competitive to solutions with substantially fewer capabilities.  

“The Unica and Google Cloud partnership is removing yet another barrier for marketing and IT teams to quickly move existing Unica implementations to Cloud while broadening Unica cloud–agnostic installation options. The ease of deployment, scale, and cost-effective solutions Google Cloud offers Unica customers make Unica available to smaller customer bases and creative agencies beyond the support of Unica’s typical large enterprise–class customers. Smaller customers now have an option that allows cost–effective entry into a class–leading Martech solution without the infrastructure overhead typically associated with enterprise–class marketing solutions.  For partners, this is an excellent opportunity to build a large number of new Unica customers based on Google Cloud,” said Sean Barclay, VP Professional Services, Cleargoals. 

Insights into the customer’s experience and meeting their wants and needs, especially behind the login, is critical because real–life decisions must be made.  Powered by insights from Unica’s solutions combined with BigQuery AI/ML, clients can find deeper behavioral insights and localize last–mile personalization while executing omnichannel journey orchestration to create moments of wow. By partnering with Google Cloud, this continues to make Unica a solution that can act as a “good citizen” in the marketing automation tool-space by having open integration to their growing innovations in the cloud space. 

Cloud–Native for Maximum Flexibility and Choice 

Google Cloud now joins Amazon EKS and Microsoft Azure as strategic cloud platforms for HCL Unica, providing global, secure, and elastic infrastructure to power businesses’ enterprise marketing management deployments. Our focus is to deliver constant innovation to our Unica platform providing capabilities our customers need to support multiple business models. Unlike our competition, our cloud–native approach is about client choice and adoption of our software capabilities instead of dictating which clouds our clients run on or what data platforms they have to use.  Adding support for Google Cloud gives clients more than just a choice for cloud workload; it gives them the option to take advantage of an ever-expanding set of Google Cloud services regardless of whether they run the platform on-premise or in the cloud.  

Trusted for Business-Critical Customer Experience Platforms 

HCL has been building this partnership with Google Cloud for several years. In 2019, HCL and Google Cloud announced the launch of HCL’s Google Cloud Business Unit to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption worldwide. To support customers, HCL established three dedicated Google Cloud Native Labs in New York, London, and the New Delhi area. These labs provide business-focused design workshops to engage customers and develop IP and MVPs on Google Cloud across industries effectively and efficiently. With the announcement, all three HCL customer experience solutions will employ Google Cloud as a primary cloud platform.  

HCL Unica is a leading, cloud-native platform used by innovative businesses across multiple industries worldwide. This latest announcement from HCL and Google Cloud expands on a deep partnership between the two companies to help digitally transform organizations. HCLSoftware is committed to continuing an aggressive product roadmap and driving relentless innovation through the integrated cloud–native Unica Marketing Platform. This announcement with Google Cloud is another way that Unica is evolving Martech.  

All three HCL CX products are cloud–native & can be deployed directly to a cloud of choice via HCL’s Sofy cloud deployment solution in minutes. You can choose to deploy single HCLSoftware solutions or the complete set of Commerce, DX, and Unica solutions to Google Cloud. HCL’s Sofy provides UI–based container management tools with the deployment packages making deployment, management, and monitoring simple. Unica 12.1 augments this collaboration by providing platform monitoring through Unica Deliver and platform support for HCL OneDB, a new Cloud-native database with the multi-model capability and automated management functions.  

Customers focused on experienced–based sales & marketing will appreciate the ease of deployment to Google Cloud, combined with easy integrations and expansive APIs that HCL has made available across these three solutions. Bottom line, this collaboration results in deployments that are faster, more robust, more secure, and have a lower total cost of ownership. 

Q&A ON THE NEW GOOGLE/HCL RELATIONSHIP 

Q – As a Unica customer, will I be required to use Google Cloud?
A – Absolutely not. We do not dictate which cloud environment you use. Unica will continue with a cloud–native and cloud–agnostic product roadmap strategy supporting any Kubernetes–based on-prem, hybrid, or cloud provider implementations.  If customers have a specific enterprise cloud provider or on-prem container hosting environments, Unica can install in any Kubernetes–based cloud environment as required by companies. For customers that are cloud agnostic, HCL’s recommendation will be to leverage Google Cloud. The Google Cloud team welcomes you as a customer, even if you are sandboxing or testing applications at this point.  

Q – If I have a current Unica entitlement, can I test/sandbox a development or test environment in Google Cloud?
A – For customers with current entitlement for Unica V12.1 or later update releases, authenticated customers can download the full V12.1.x Unica Marketing Platform in Helm enabled containers within about 15 minutes and then upload to your GCP or other cloud environments.  

Q – Will I need to use Google Cloud to leverage any Unica integrations to Google products?
A – You can use any cloud you like. Unica is premises agnostic, and the integrations with Google will work from any implementation. Google does encourage Unica customers to leverage Unica’s Link point and click integration framework and 780+ APIs for simple integration to any of Google’s multitude of tools, data, and services. 

Q – What is the Unica roadmap to integrate into other Google tools?
A – Google has several key tools that are valuable to marketers and supporting data analysis and technology teams, including our available Google Looker and AdTech integrations. We will be announcing many new exciting integrations with Google solutions. Google’s Cloud ML AI services open up numerous options for marketers as well. 

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-kopelic/
• Email: marketing.info@unica.com

For more information, please register for our “HCL Unica and Google Cloud Partnership” webinar on Thursday, March 25th. Join us for a special workshop on how you can optimize Google Cloud for your business regardless of where you want to run your enterprise marketing engagement platform. 

For more information, CLICK HERE to schedule a demo with us