Companies are increasingly adopting software-as-a-service or “cloud”-based CRM solutions, as they continue to discover the many advantages today’s cloud-based systems have over on-premises systems.

According to a November report from Gartner (News - Alert), the migration to SaaS or cloud-based CRM solutions won’t be abating anytime soon: The firm’s report, “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2008-2013, Update,” estimates that the global software-as-a-service revenue will reach $7.5 billion in 2009, a 17.7 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion. The report predicts the SaaS (News - Alert) market will show consistent growth through 2013, when worldwide SaaS revenue will total more than $14 billion for the enterprise application markets.
 
The report finds that the CRM solutions market had the second largest amount of SaaS revenue across market segments, generating $2.3 billion in 2009, up from $1.9 billion in 2008. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market also saw impressive growth, considering the recession, reaching 1.2 billion in 2009, up from $1.1 billion in 2008.

“SaaS has continued to represent a key driver of growth in the CRM market for the past four years, climbing from less than $500 million in 2005 and over 8 percent of the CRM market to over 20 percent of the market in 2008, with nearly $1.9 billion in revenue,” the report states. “Gartner expects growth to continue, with SaaS representing almost 24 percent of the CRM market’s total software revenue in 2009.”

NetSuite (News - Alert) is a leading provider of cloud-based CRM solutions – in fact the company’s platform and application suite is so comprehensive that in most cases it is more appropriate to simply refer to it as “business software,” since it covers everything from customer relationship management to enterprise resource planning to e-commerce to accounting to warehouse to fulfillment to retail and more. Thousands of companies around the globe use NetSuite’s cloud-based solutions to gain new efficiencies and boost the bottom line. Thanks to its cloud architecture plus its ability to automate various business processes across multiple locations, the software is ideal for companies with international offices.

 

Last week NetSuite announced that its cloud-based business software platform, NetSuite OneWorld, beat SAP’s (News - Alert) Business ByDesign solution in a “shoot-out” held during the Sapience 2009 conference, which took place Dec. 8-9 in Cambridge, Ma.

 

During the event – which was sponsored by NetSuite – a panel of industry analysts reportedly compared the two solutions side-by-side in a mock “test” that was designed to reflect real-world business scenarios. Specifically the solutions were compared in terms of CRM process (from lead to opportunity to order), production and fulfillment process (from work order to purchasing to goods assembly to shipping) and global financial management process (from invoicing to payment to financial reporting, including multi-subsidiary/multi-company consolidation). The analysts’ conclusion was that NetSuite OneWorld outperformed SAP Business ByDesign in all phases of the test.