CRM Software

What’s new with CRM? Forrester Research (News - Alert) recently took a stab by issuing a new report, “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise CRM Suites, Q1 2007” by company analyst William Band (among others).

 

But first, let me point out a very useful detail from the report. It starts by actually defining CRM.

 

Surprised? To the best of my knowledge, few people have been brave enough to do so. According to the report, Forrester defines CRM as follows:

 

“CRM applications are the business software that enables customer-facing business processes such as lead generation and cross-sell (marketing), opportunity management, forecasting and quoting (sales), customer support and repair (service), collaborative channel management (partner channel management and e-commerce), customer data analytics and customer data management.”

 

Forrester forecasts that worldwide revenues for CRM solution providers reached $8.4 billion in 2006 and will grow to $10.9 billion by 2010.

 

Some of the most important factors that will affect CRM today and in the near future have been identified by Forrester as follows:

 

CRM vendors that have traditionally served midmarket organizations are leveraging modern architectures and swimming upmarket to offer new deployment options to gain a stronger foothold with enterprise-class organizations. Examples include Onyx — which offers a flexible, business process-centric architecture — and salesforce.com, which is pioneering CRM SaaS deployment.

 

At the same time, Microsoft is trying to exploit its desktop applications hegemony advantage in large enterprises and promote its now more robust business applications to this sector.

The report points out thatalthough midmarket CRM vendors are pushing up into the enterprise market, all vendors are giving more attention to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The SMB segment, organizations with less than 1,000 employees, accounts for about one-third of the total CRM market now, and many tech vendors view it as an area of growth in an otherwise mature IT market. Forrester expects that the SMB share of vendor revenues will expand to 38 percent of the total market by 2010, reaching $4.2 billion.

 

As result, vendors such as SAP, by improving user interfaces, and Oracle, through its Siebel CRM Professional Edition and Siebel On Demand products, are tailoring their products to better meet the needs of smaller organizations.

 

According to Forrester’s report, notwithstanding the trend toward consolidation of CRM vendors into suite solutions, specialty players continue to innovate by offering new functionality for special requirements — for example, BlueRoads offers partner channel management through the SaaS deployment model. Additionally, in the contact center/e-service sector, eGain Communications, KANA Software and Talisma offer unique capabilities.