For those who find great meaning in such things, Gartner's “Magic Quadrant” report lists a lot of CRM companies and says some good things and some bad things about them.
Oh, and in a shocking finding, it concludes that Siebel is a notable entry in the CRM field.
“Products built around business process management are reshaping customer service and support software for the contact center,” the report’s Web site says. Rounding out the sum total of information given out to anyone who doesn’t fork over $495 for the seven-page report – seven pages for five hundred bucks, mind you – they note that “Market instability is boosting SAP and Siebel Systems, but all products will continue to have significant functionality gaps.”
Erika Morphy, who evidently did have five hundred bucks, writes that i n “Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service and Support Applications, 2005,” Gartner estimates that $600 million – 45 percent – of Siebel’s 2004 revenue was derived from deals with CSS organizations.
Epiphany, Inc., a provider of customer relationship management products for consumer-oriented businesses, cares enough to issue a press release announcing that it was listed in the "Visionary" quadrant of the report. Not to be outdone, Mercury Interactive Corporation, a provider of business technology optimization products, rushed out a press release announcing that it has been listed in the leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for J2EE Application Server Management.
The main challenger, Gartner found, is Amdocs, but only in the communications space, since that has become Amdocs’ concentration. Following Amdocs are custom-built applications. To remain the top provider in this space, Gartner concludes, Siebel will have to expand its focus on self service dramatically by 2006.
Indeed, the Gartner findings dovetail with a Yankee Group study conducted late last year, which found that contact centers are investing more in self-service than any in other technology. The consulting firm queried small contact center operations, asking about upcoming investment priorities for all their contact center channels.
Out of all the categories -- which also include Web self-service, IVR, the traditional live phone call with customer service rep, Web chat and e-mail -- the contact centers indicated they intended to invest more in the self-service channel than any other contact center channel.
David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.
To discover how contact centers can save money and increase productivity by making the switch to IP Telephony, be sure to attend TMC's IP Contact Center Summit May 24-26, 2005, in Dallas, Texas.
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