November 2018

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a cloud computing web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides cloud object storage (COS) through a web services interface. When it is combined with UBX and the UBX Ecosystem, any number of business uses cases can be addressed. For example, you could store historical customer advertisement interactions in Amazon S3 and share that data through UBX to an analytics platform to gain insight on those interactions.

Amazon S3 & COS can consume data from different file formats like JSON, TSV, and CSV.

New IBM LIVEMail partners have joined the UBX ecosystem as Audience Consumers

When combined with UBX, these solutions will help activate audiences from Campaign & IBM Watson Campaign Automation.

• Sare Email Marketing
  • An email marketing system that for many years has been helping hundreds of customers maintain positive relations with recipients and conduct effective advertising campaigns.
• VerticalResponse
  • VerticalResponse provides all the tools you need to run a successful email marketing campaign. Create, send and track emails that look great on every device.
• Emarsys Marketing Solutions
  • Through their innovative and easy-to-use fully-integrated marketing platform, Emarsys enables brands around the world to deliver truly personal customer interactions across email, mobile, social, SMS, and web – at scale.
• Smart Focus Marketing Solutions
  • Deliver insight-based brand interactions to boost engagement and lifetime value of each customer.
• YesMail by Yes Marketing Interactive Solutions
  • YesMail by Yes Marketing Interactive helps marketers evolve customer interactions via technology, insights and services across email, mobile, web and social.
• Oracle Bronto Business Solutions
  • Oracle Bronto provides the tools marketers need to automate, streamline, and maximize their efforts.
• ClickM@iler
  • ClickM@iler is a mail delivery service that has flexible delivery functions and performance that meet corporate needs and analysis reporting functions that are geared towards a multifaceted viewpoint.
• Mapp Cloud (previously known as eCircle)
  • Mapp Cloud enables you to leverage all your data sources to understand your customers behavior like never before. Orchestrate customer engagement over email, mobile, social and web marketing with one simple dashboard and set of services to take you the extra mile. Start establishing a lasting relationship with your customers and improve your marketing results.
• Campaigner (previously known as Email Direct)
  • Campaigner's robust, fully-featured platform enables you to: Easily automate email campaigns for greater ROI, Integrate with Salesforce, Magento, other data systems, or 3rd party Campaigner partners, employ industry-leading features like workflows and purchase behavior for more effective campaign sending, use our detailed, big data reporting to determine campaign success.

New Event Publishers (IBM DDX Partners) have joined the UBX ecosystem

• Amobee's Turn Event Publisher
  • Amobee's Turn Marketing Platform is in the advertising technology sector and the recognized leader in platform-based mobile, video, display, TV, and social advertising.
• Sizmek Event Publisher
  • Sizmek is a leading global provider of digital advertising campaign management solutions to advertising agencies and advertisers. Sizmek provides media and creative agencies, advertisers and publishers with an integrated platform to manage campaigns across digital media channels and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display, and search.
• Quantcast Event Publisher
  • Quantcast specializes in AI-driven real-time advertising, audience insights, and measurement.

New Certified Audience Subscribers

• Kenshoo
  • Audience destination for IBM Campaign and Watson Campaign Automation audiences.
  • Activate audiences across multiple ad platforms such as Google, Facebook, Bing, Amazon Marketing Services, Pinterest, Snapchat, Yahoo, and more.
• Throtle
  • Audience destination for IBM Campaign and Watson Campaign Automation audiences.
  • Onboards audiences from UBX audience publishers across their paid media partner ecosystem including Adobe Audience Manager.

October 2018

UBX introduces an IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) Integration.

IBM COS is a cloud storage platform that makes it possible to store practically limitless amounts of data, simply, and cost effectively. As a UBX event publisher, COS enables multiple analytics and marketing uses cases across the UBX Ecosystem.

IBM UBX provides a new integration with MediaMath Terminal One.

Marketers can use this integration to gain deeper insights into their campaigns by leveraging the power of MediaMath and the versatility of the UBX Ecosystem. For example, a marketer could use this integration to share advertisement interaction data from MediaMath to a marketing automation solution to determine the effectiveness of website-based advertisements over an email marketing campaign. Now, you can share Impression and Attribute events with any application in the UBX Ecosystem.

UBX added six IBM Digital Data Exchange (DDX) vendors to the UBX Ecosystem.

These new integrations publish events such as cart, product, and other web-related events.

• CrowdTwist
  • CrowdTwist is an industry-leading provider of comprehensive multichannel loyalty and analytics solutions.
  • CrowdTwist is an event publisher and supports Content View & Video Played events.

• C3 Metrics
  • C3 Metrics is a global leader in cross-channel advertising measurement & accountability.
  • Only C3 Metrics has the Attribution Data Cloud. C3Metric event publisher supports Cart Purchase events.

UBX adds Audience Consumers

These new additions are audience destinations of UBX audiences.

September 2018

UBX introduces a data center support in India.

The new data center in Chennai, India is for users in India as well as Asia-Pacific countries. For new UBX user accounts that need to ensure that their data stays within India, UBX will process all event and audience sharing data within the India data center. Any identifiers stored in UBX will remain in the India data center.

Keeping data within a specific geographic region demands that all endpoints involved in the data exchange are supported by data centers that reside in the same region. Data might move outside the region if you syndicate data with a UBX ecosystem partner that does not support a data center in the same geographic region. For example, to keep event and audience data within India, all endpoints must be deployed on data centers within India.

UBX is growing; we've added several integrations to our ecosystem.

• Urban Airship
  • Audience destination for IBM Campaign and WCA audiences.
  • Drive customer engagement in mobile and in-app marketing programs.

• ExactTarget (now Salesforce Email Studio)
  • Audience destination of UBX audiences.

• Local Measure
  • Event publisher of location events (Enter Zone, Exit Zone).

Event support for Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics integrations just got better with UBX.

Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics can now take advantage of the UBX Searched Site and Page View events. By having access to these events, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics users can broaden the scope of analytic data they can collect and send to UBX.

UBX Capture

Session-based events are on the scene

UBX Capture now supports session-based or “sessionized” web event for all partnered offerings. This means that you can now capture events like cart abandonment across all supported applications in UBX Capture. For example, your analytics platform, such as Google Analytics, can capture cart abandonment data and send it to a messaging campaign platform like Watson Campaign Automation via UBX. This will enable you to re-target customers in real time as they browse.

List of session-based events:

Common Visitor ID

The Common Visitor ID enables offerings that support UBX Capture to align themselves to a Common Visitor Identifier. By utilizing the Common Visitor ID, the UBX Identity Service can resolve identities across any offering that publishes web events to UBX. This ensures greater accuracy for users as they analyze the various behaviors along a customer journey.

Enhanced support for IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics

UBX Capture give you the versatility to have multiple analytics vendors on a single site and to send the analytical data collected by each vendor to IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics via UBX. In this UBX Capture release, we’ve made enhancements to streamline how analytic data is sent to IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics so that it is more easily consumed.

August 2018

UBX Capture

The UBX Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics integrations just got a whole lot easier. Now, instead of having to download and configure UBX JavaScript and mapping files, you can copy and paste a UBX JavaScript snippet into your web page to facilitate the integration.

Salesforce

We've updated our CRM integration with Salesforce to stay GDPR compliant by enabling users to publish events with contact consent and minor consent values from Salesforce CRM to UBX. To implement this feature, you need to do two things. First, enable email opt out for your Salesforce account to allow for contact consent. Second, configure a custom object to configure a minor consent field since Salesforce does not support this field as a default feature.

Additionally, now you can indicate your value of choice for channel in this integration. Whether it's web, mobile, SMS, call center, or any of the other channels that we support, we've got you covered. Map the channel where the data is coming from to the channel value in the JSON payload that you send to UBX.

Endpoint registration enhancements

You can now edit the endpoint alias name and description from a contextual menu. You can choose whether the alias description or the default description should be displayed, or you can provide your own. You can edit the alias at the time of endpoint registration and/or in the endpoint details user interface.

UBX Google Analytics integration

The UBX Google Analytics integrations just got a whole lot easier. Now, instead of having to download and configure UBX JavaScript and mapping files, you can copy and paste a UBX JavaScript snippet into your web page to facilitate the integration.

UBX Adobe Analytics integration

The UBX Adobe Analytics integrations just got a whole lot easier. Now, instead of having to download and configure UBX JavaScript and mapping files, you can copy and paste a UBX JavaScript snippet into your web page to facilitate the integration.

July 2018

Login and password requirement changes

UBX has changed the login password requirements. If your password does not meet these requirements following this release, you will need to change your password the next time you log in.

Your password must be at least 8 characters and it must contain at least one number, lowercase character, uppercase character, and a symbol (!@#$%^&*).

Introducing the UBX Adobe Analytics JavaScript integration v2.0

In this version of the JavaScript integration, we've some new features and automation that we hope you'll love. We've made our integration smarter by giving it the ability to detect and map identifiers and attributes out of the box. That way you can spend less time configuring, and more time doing what's important. The integration now automatically detects whether a session takes place on web or mobile.

June 2018

Data plans

Two new partners have joined the UBX partner ecosystem

Segment

Register Segment as an event publisher endpoint. Segment can publish events from any of their source integrations.

Learn more at https://segment.com/integrations/ibm-ubx

Tealium

Register Tealium as an event publisher endpoint. Tealium can publish events from nearly 1000 Tealium UDH integrations.

Learn more at https://community.tealiumiq.com/t5/Universal-Data-Hub/IBM-UBX-Events-Connector-Setup-Guide/ta-p/20408

Introducing the UBX Google Analytics JavaScript integration v2.0

In this version of the JavaScript integration, we've added some new features and automation that we hope you'll love. We've made our integration smarter by giving it the ability to detect and map identifiers and attributes out of the box. That way, you can spend less time configuring and more time doing what's important. But that's not all. The integration now automatically detects whether a session takes place on web or mobile.

May 2018

GDPR

UBX is ready for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and we want to make sure that you are too. In this release, we're offering a technical preview of the UBX GDPR REST APIs, which will be officially available in production on May 25, 2018. This includes:

• Viewing stored identifiers
• Identity process restriction
• Erasure of identifiers

For more information see What do I need to know about Acoustic Exchange and General Data Protection Regulation?.

March 2018

Introducing UBX Capture

UBX Capture is a tool that lets UBX users enable web page tags and SDKs for Watson Customer Engagement offerings. UBX Capture supports IBM Digital Analytics, IBM Tealeaf CX on Cloud, and UBX. Additionally, UBX Capture improves Watson Customer Experience Analytics reporting by enabling a common session ID between Digital Analytics and Tealeaf. To enable UBX Capture, simply copy and paste the UBX Capture code snippet in the HTML of your web pages and you can start tracking and analyzing events on your applications. You can access UBX Capture through the Tools menu. For more information about UBX Capture, see the UBX Capture developerWorks documentation.

February 2018

Users no longer need to manually submit Digital Analytics provisioning checklists. The Digital Analytics endpoint can be registered in minutes rather than days.

UBX now supports IBMid as a single sign-on cloud service. IBMid provides users with identity, authentication, and account management services powered by an IBM Security back-end engine.

November 2017

We’ve enhanced customer privacy for identity matching with hashed identifiers

IBM Business Partners who need to protect customer privacy during identity matching when they publish events can now hash email addresses that they use as personal identifiers. The Acoustic Exchange identity service can translate the identifiers it receives as hashed identifiers into a non-hashed format. The ability to translate hashed to non-hashed identifiers is especially important in cases where audiences are published to a destination endpoint with a plain or hashed email.

For example, marketers can define syndications between publishers that hash the personal identifier and destination endpoints that can accept only non-hashed identifiers.

Now partners can publish events with the Acoustic Exchange X1id

The Acoustic Exchange Identity Service tracks customer identifiers with a unique value called an X1id. Acoustic Exchange now supports using the X1id for cases where only an anonymous identifier can be published to Acoustic Exchange for online and offline customer conversion attribution. When an event source endpoint publishes events with an X1id as the user identifier, Acoustic Exchange now recognizes the X1id and uses it to match with other known identifiers in the identity store.

We’re making it easier to view audience history

In the Acoustic Exchange Audience tab, the audience sharing history is now limited to displaying audience sharing over the previous 30 days. This is a more concise view of audience sharing history than was available before this release. The new view eliminates clutter, is easier to review, and improves response time.

September 2017

We are giving you control over your event syndications! Now you can define rules to manage which events to process and which to skip.

The rules that you create will specify which event attributes and values must be present in order to send the event data. Do you want to see only abandoned cart events for a specific product? Now you can.

Access this new capability through the Events tab in your UBX account. In the event details for each event, we’ve added a syndication rule builder in the new Manage syndications tab. For example, in the Table view, go to the Actions menu and select Manage syndication. Then, use the visual rule builder to quickly define how to control your event syndications.

New audience sharing options Now you can send audience data from Customer Experience Analytics to UBX

With this UBX release, Customer Experience Analytics (CXA) users can now activate audiences in destination endpoints that are registered with UBX. This means that CXA users can convert more customers in more channels with timely and targeted offers based on insights derived from a CXA journey analysis.

More integrations in UBX for more market options Great news for UBX users! Three new partners have joined the UBX club.

Check out the new endpoints:

• Salesforce CRM

  Two ways to add Salesforce to your UBX account:

  • Legacy Silverpop and Salesforce CRMi users can register Salesforce as subscriber of Watson Campaign Automation (Engage) events.
  • Non CRMi users can register Salesforce as a subscriber or publisher of standard events.

• Affinity Solutions

  Register Affinity Solutions as an audience source endpoint and as an audience destination so that you can publish audiences enhanced with propensity scores through UBX.

• Drawbridge

  Add Drawbridge as an audience destination endpoint in UBX so that you can reach and measure audiences across all of your connected devices.

New ways to discover UBX There’s a new way to get started with UBX. Starting with this release, you can take guided tours to discover UBX features so that you can get up and running quickly.

For starters, we’re giving you a tour that shows you how to register endpoints, the first step for any UBX account. We’re also highlighting the enhanced navigation menu that helps you access UBX features from anywhere in the application.

We’re not done. Stay tuned as we continue to add more tours and resources in the future.

Access the tours from the Getting started link in the Help menu.

July 2017

UBX has a fresh new look This release of UBX introduces updates to the user interface throughout the application.

The new interface includes an enhanced main navigation menu that simplifies navigation and establishes a single point of access for all UBX features.

If you use other Watson Customer Engagement products, you will recognize many of the advanced interface elements that UBX now shares with the rest of the product family.

Now you can control audience sharing performance When you share audience data through UBX, you can now improve data exchange rates and reduce latency by controlling when UBX attempts to augment user identifiers.

Previously, for each member of the shared audience, UBX always attempted to match the current user identifiers to identifiers that UBX had observed previously for the same individual. Although the identifier matching resulted in an expanded view of the individual, it also increased demand on system resources and the time required to share the audience.

Now, if the source and destination audiences specify identifiers of the same type, UBX bypasses identifier augmentation by default. Doing so can reduce the amount of time required to share the audience. However, if you still want all available identifier data, you can override the default setting with an option in the user interface.

You have new database options for sharing with Watson Campaign Automation This release introduces support for email keyed databases in Watson Campaign Automation.

Previously, the IBM Engage endpoint in UBX supported only flexible databases. This continues to be the preferred approach for omni-channel use case scenarios.

However, UBX now allows you to register IBM Engage endpoints that are configured with a keyed database to provide an option for situations where transition from a keyed database to a flexible database is not possible.

We’ve enhanced the UBX Subscription API

This release enhances the UBX Subscription API to allow endpoints to receive the endpoint name in the payload. This change allows subscriber endpoints to identify the source endpoint as part of the event subscription.

May 2017

UBX introduces data center support for European users UBX can now support UBX users in Europe who need to ensure that event notifications and shared audience data does not leave the European region.

IBM can now provide this enhanced support thanks to an expansion of UBX operations to the IBM data center in Frankfurt, Germany.

For new UBX user accounts that need to ensure that their data stays within Europe, UBX will process all event and audience sharing activities within the Frankfurt data center. Any identifiers stored in UBX will remain in the Frankfurt data center.

Keeping data within a specific geographic region demands that all endpoints involved in the data exchange are supported by data centers that reside in the same region. Data might move outside the region if you syndicate data with a UBX ecosystem partner that does not support a data center in the same geographic region. For example, to keep event and audience data within Europe, all endpoints must be deployed on data centers within Europe, such as the IBM data center in Frankfurt.

Streamlined audience sharing for Watson Campaign Automation users When you register IBM Engage (part of Watson Campaign Automation) as a UBX endpoint, you associate the endpoint with a single Engage database. The designated database is the only one that can provide audience data to UBX.

Up to now, when you shared an audience from Engage, UBX displayed audiences from all of your databases in Engage, not only the single database that you designated for audience sharing. Depending on the number of other databases available in your Engage account, the UBX audience sharing interface could become cluttered with unusable audience listings.

UBX has solved this audience sharing problem by displaying only the audiences that are contained in the database that you associate with the Engage endpoint in UBX. Audience names from your other Engage databases are now filtered out.

New webinar series for learning how to onboard to UBX UBX introduces a series of recurring webinars to give new UBX users the general knowledge and getting started tips they need to apply UBX to their business uses cases quickly.

Discussion topics include a UBX overview, demonstrations of important UBX user actions, and deep dives on common UBX use case scenarios.

IBM sends webinar invitations by email to newly provisioned UBX users. Each invitation provides detailed instructions for how to sign up to attend the webinars.

March 2017

Improved error messages for audience sharing Error messages have been updated to provide better information to marketers when they share data in UBX.

• Better description of failed audience sharing due to invalid endpoint authentication credentials
• Error messages now provide reasons for destination endpoint rejection
• Error messages identify empty audiences, null fields, or invalid formats

Expanded support for audience publishing use cases UBX is now able to support audiences published from endpoints that classify their audiences with a string identifier.

This will expand future UBX integration opportunities and immediately improve the Google Analytics integration by allowing audience syndication of custom segments along with the already supported Google Analytics built-in segments.

January 2017

Our first release of the year. Look at what we're introducing!

Improved identity matching Marketers can now accelerate identity matching in their UBX account through bulk upload of identity data.

Marketers can now quickly expand their UBX Identity Store to improve the match results for identifiers published in an event or audience. In this release, UBX has enhanced the audience sharing workflow to enable marketers to upload identifiers to UBX from registered audience publisher endpoints.

New way to discover event publishers and destinations UBX introduces the Dynamic Event Library to simplify discovery of supported event types.

Previously, UBX defined supported event types in the UBX Event Catalog in IBM Knowledge Center. In this release, UBX introduces an interactive interface called the UBX Dynamic Event Library that marketers can use to view events that are supported by UBX and UBX partners.

Improved audience sharing options UBX has enhanced the audience sharing user interface so that marketers can share audiences more easily and with better results.

• UBX now allows marketers to select one or more identifiers in the source audience that can be used to look up an audience destination identifier.
• Marketers can include any of the specified audience source identifiers as attributes to be shared with an audience destination.
• Marketers can now map any attribute available in a source audience to multiple audience attributes in the destination.

New information structure in IBM Knowledge Center We've reorganized IBM Knowledge Center for UBX. Same content. Same URLs (so your bookmarks should still work). Just a little bit of reordering to give you an information experience that is consistent with other IBM Watson Customer Engagement products.

We've reorganized IBM Knowledge Center for UBX. Same content. Same URLs (so your bookmarks should still work). Just a little bit of reordering to give you an information experience that is consistent with other IBM Watson Customer Engagement products.

As part of the change, we are no longer publishing PDF versions of content for marketers and UBX partners as the UBX User's Guide or UBX Integration Guide. However, you can print any topic from within Knowledge Center.

UBX introduces the Dynamic Event Library to simplify discovery of supported event types and event attributes

Previously, UBX defined supported event types in the UBX Event Catalog in IBM Knowledge Center. In some cases, documentation updates did not keep pace with changes in event type support. In this release, UBX introduces an interactive interface called the UBX Dynamic Event Library. It provides partners with an updated view of the latest events and event attributes that are supported by UBX and UBX partners.

Partners that are integrating with UBX can use the Dynamic Event Library to find events within various event categories, or search by event name, and then view details and attributes for specific event types. Partners can also view a list of other currently integrated event publishers and subscribers and the various event types and attributes that they support.

Enhanced support for removing obsolete deployments in Integration Manager

UBX has enhanced the Integration Manager with an option for integration partners that need a better way to remove an application deployment. The new option gives endpoint application developers a way to indicate that a specific application deployment must be hidden from new UBX users that try to register the endpoint in UBX.

This new option enables partners to sunset obsolete deployments of their applications without disrupting existing clients that must be allowed to continue using the endpoint deployment.