Today's marketers have more available channels than ever before when it comes to connecting with customers. Unfortunately, they also have more obstacles to overcome -- like regulation compliance, shrinking budgets and minimal resources. The evolution from product-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing has required many marketing automation vendors to rethink their technology from the ground up.

With that in mind, the prestigious Gold Award went to Unica's Affinium 6 in our marketing automation category. Our judges gave Affinium 6 the highest possible score in four (of seven) categories, including performance, ease of integration, functionality and value. The innovative release features new lead management capabilities and significant enhancements to its campaign management, e-marketing, real-time, planning, optimization and analytic capabilities.

Affinium 6 comprises four main modules:

• Affinium Model (data mining and predictive modeling software)
• Affinium Plan (marketing resource management)
• Affinium Leads (lead management)
• Affinium Campaign (campaign management)

Our judges note that users are impressed by Unica's UDI (Universal Dynamic Interconnect) capability, which enables simultaneous access to multiple data sources located in various locations throughout the company.

Pricing for Affinium 6 is based on several factors, including size of client's database, number of servers, number of client seats, etc. The average price to purchase all modules of the Affinium Suite is $500,000.

Learn more about marketing technology in our Learning Guide for Marketing Effectiveness