CRM Software

Gartner’s  CRM software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) vendor market guide has just listed smartFOCUS, a global provider of multi-channel marketing software, the company announced early this week.

A comprehensive list of vendors that offer CRM software as a deployment option is presented in the Gartner (News - Alert) CRM SaaS vendor market guide. The report, titled ‘Gartner CRM Vendor Market Guide for Software as a Service, 2011,’ by Robert P. Desisto, Michael Maoz and Kimberly Collins, was published on March 30, 2011 and is available to Gartner subscribers.

The report notes that, “The number of CRM vendors that provide software as a service continues to grow.” It further states that “Subsegments [of CRM software vendors], such as sales force automation, have many vendor alternatives, while other segments, such as campaign management, have few.”

In the report Gartner analysts state that “SaaS continues to penetrate the CRM market, accounting for nearly 24 percent of total CRM software market revenue.”

smartFOCUS did a complete revision of smartFOCUS’s core analytic and campaign management applications, and in March, unveiled its latest SaaS offering code named Arjuna. Arjuna was designed to build on smartFOCUS’ experience in SaaS solutions with features such as integrated workflow management and flexible data loading capabilities. The company says Arjuna has been developed to be more scalable and efficient than previously available multi-channel marketing solutions.

The interim CEO of smartFOCUS, Curt Bloom, said the market demands have changed since the company began marketing its customer relationship management solutions. He said, “When smartFOCUS sold its first marketing software solution, the technology and the market [were] focused on in-house solutions.”

Nevertheless, Bloom stated, “Over the years our investment in R&D has kept us ahead of user demands by bringing solutions to market that meet the needs of marketers, and address any constraints: finite resources, speed to start up, high-level data security, lightning-fast response and analysis times.” He indicated that he believes, “SaaS meets many of these factors head on.”

To emphasize his point, Bloom added, “Today, out of the 750 businesses and 150 news media organizations that rely on our software, more than half are SaaS-based. Once we launch Arjuna, I expect that figure to grow again.”

The company is betting that growth will happen because it says the new web-based SaaS offering saves marketers and those concerned with CRM from having to manage the peripheral data and application infrastructure associated with traditional analysis and campaign management engines.

In other news, TMCnet reported, Trillium Software, a business of Harte-Hanks, and a provider of Total Data Quality solutions, has announced an alliance with Microsoft (News - Alert) for improved data quality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM environments.