BJ's Wholesale Club Selects Unica Corporation and IBM for Enterprise Marketing Management and Consumer-Centric Retailing

Joint Solution Enables Leading Retailer to Optimize Member Experiences and Improve Marketing Initiatives Across Channels

Waltham, Mass. and White Plains, NY - January 12, 2004 -IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Unica Corporation today announced that BJ's Wholesale Club has selected IBM's Consumer-Centric Retailing solution, featuring Unica Corporation's Affinium Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite, to personalize and optimize multi-channel interactions with BJ's Members.

This powerful new marketing platform will enable BJ's Wholesale Club to create more satisfying and member-friendly experiences. The new solution combines the power of Unica's Affinium with a complete analytical data environment and supporting services from IBM.

Business intelligence is a fast-growing and strategic area in the retail industry and other industries. To bring the benefits of business intelligence to its customers, IBM combines an array of products, services and expertise, including servers, R&D, industry sectors and business and technical consulting - with information management products such as DB2 Universal Database at its heart. According to IDC, the market for business intelligence software is already worth more than $7 billion worldwide and could double by 2006.

"The Unica and IBM Consumer-Centric Retailing solution will allow us to determine the best communications strategy for more valuable, interactive dialogs with our members," said Kerry Hamilton, senior vice president of marketing at BJ's Wholesale Club. "We chose Unica and IBM because together they offer robust analytical and marketing functionality with ease-of-use and demonstrated retail expertise. This scaleable solution gives us the ability to conduct member-centric marketing campaigns across all channels."

"Leading retailers are striving for more personalized and customer-focused marketing," said Ming Tsai, global retail industry leader for IBM Global Services. "Every day millions of retail customers transact business through an expanding number of touchpoints: from the store, to the web, to call centers, and catalogs. In keeping with IBM's on-demand strategy, this joint solution enables retailers to be more flexible and responsive and enables them to make more effective, analytic-driven decisions to optimize their interactions with customers across all channels."

"To maximize customer value and loyalty at each interaction and over time, retailers must engage in personalized, right-time communication with customers. With Affinium and IBM's Consumer-Centric Retailing solution, we deliver actionable customer intelligence to every channel, enabling retail marketers to deliver a consistent experience wherever and whenever customers want to buy," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Unica, a worldwide provider of Enterprise Marketing Management solutions.

With the Consumer-Centric Retailing program, IBM and Unica offer retailers a complete end-to-end solution, which consists of the award-winning Affinium application, IBM's highly scalable infrastructure technology, a complete set of integration services, and experienced business process reengineering and change management services to affect the three elements of success: people, process and technology.

Working together, IBM and Unica have more than 25 joint customers in a variety of industries across North America, Asia, and Europe. Joint customers in the retail segment include Lands' End and L.L. Bean, in addition to BJ's Wholesale Club.

About BJ's Wholesale Club

Headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts, BJ's Wholesale Club, Inc. is a leading operator of warehouse clubs in the eastern United States. The Company currently operates 150 clubs and 78 gas stations in sixteen states. For more information about BJ's, please visit www.bjs.com.

About IBM

IBM, the world's largest information technology company, is the leader in providing the Retail Industry with a full range of e-business solutions, including: point-of-sale systems, other hardware and software technology, consulting focused on business transformation, IT strategy and planning, store operations improvement, and supply chain optimization, and with services, such as outsourcing, managed operations, systems integration, and application development and design. IBM has a list of retail customers in 100 countries worldwide that reads like a "Who's Who" of retailing. For more information on IBM Retail Solutions, please visit http://www.ibm.com/industries/retail.

About Unica

Unica Corporation's enterprise marketing management software, Affinium, powers marketing innovation for more than 300 companies worldwide. With Affinium's planning, campaign management and customer analysis software, leading companies deliver customer-focused marketing at lower cost, faster and with improved results. Affinium provides a complete platform to support the entire marketing process- from budgeting and planning, to project management and workflow, to real-time execution, to closed-loop reporting - for brand, product, direct and event marketing. Affinium delivers results using existing data sources and applications without modifications to IT infrastructure or data models. Its patented analytics unlock deep customer understanding and enrich returns. Customers include Lands' End, Medco Health Solutions, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, ABN AMRO, Cintas, Peugeot, Club Med, SNCF, EDF, Scotiabank, Choice Hotels and AIG. Unica delivers customer success through offices across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia and a network of world-class partners. For more information, call 781-839-8000 or visit www.unica.com.

Carol MeyersUnica Corporation781.839.8000

cmeyers@unica.com

Greg ThompsonIBM404-238-5052

gregoryt@us.ibm.com

http://www.unica.com/news/BJs_Selects_Unica_and_IB...