Unica has just announced the planned acquisition of MarketingCentral, a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tool that has been popular for it’s on-demand ease-of-use. MRM allows marketers to easily manage and share digital assets used in campaigns, such as images, logos, documents and other working files. MRM typically includes file sharing, work flow and review, and asset management functionality, and is an essential tool for agencies and marketing organizations.

Unica already has an MRM solution, called Affinium Plan as part of its Affinium Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite. But Affinium Plan was built as an enterprise-class solution, targetting complex marketing organizations. MarketingCentral was built as a much simpler on-demand solution for agencies and small businesses to get up and running with MRM quickly. The acquisition will broaden Unica’s appeal to agencies and small businesses, providing an entry-point into EMM with significant scalability.

For MarketingCentral customers, which currently include New Balance, Philips Medical and Saatchi & Saatchi, the acquisition will mean access to a more sophisticated suite of marketing management tools. As agencies continue to expand their technology capabilities, this will become an important opportunity to grow marketing management services.

Unica acquired MarketingCentral for “$12.5 in cash and transaction-related costs”, meaning the actual valuation of MarketingCentral was somewhere south of $12.5 million.