Report reveals top CRM vendors

Retaining clients, maintaining good relationships and growing customer numbers is crucial to business. In working towards this, Datamonitor estimates global enterprise spend on CRM application licences will hit US$6.6 billion by year end 2012*. Clearly for vendors operating in this space, the stakes for the licence revenues alone are high.

“Although the CRM applications market is very competitive and there are plenty of players who can challenge the current leaders in specific circumstances, only two vendors, Oracle and SAP, can be considered as market leaders,” says Vuk Trifkovi, technology analyst at Datamonitor and author of the report.

CRM is a business methodology focusing on the interactions between a customer and an enterprise and a class of enterprise applications that support CRM processes. The CRM solution architecture typically consists of applications which support sales and marketing and/or service functions, with additional analytics, data management and communication capabilities included.

Clear leaders

Datamonitor has developed the Decision Matrix to help businesses select vendors based on their technology strength, reputation among customers, and impact in the market. Conclusions are based on a quantitative assessment of end-user sentiment, the capabilities of the business intelligence solutions on offer and technology features.

Datamonitor considers Oracle and SAP as the leading solution providers deserving the place on most procurement shortlists. According to Datamonitor, both vendors provide complete solutions replete with functionality, integrate CRM with new communication technologies and offer full flexibility of deployment options, from conventional on-premise, through to variations of hosted and on-demand solutions.

Nevertheless, Datamonitor believes Oracle should be considered as a clear leader in the CRM application market. Having augmented its CRM product line through the acquisition of Siebel and PeopleSoft, Oracle now commands an “incredible” portfolio of CRM solutions. Datamonitor's analysis reveals that Oracle Siebel CRM sets quality standards in terms of technology and execution, although Oracle E-Business Suite CRM and Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM may be more suitable, depending on the functional requirements, specific sector demands and the deployment environment required.

According to Datamonitor, if executed well, Oracle's ambitious maintenance and development roadmap should ensure a market leadership position. “Oracle's CRM offering will be improved both through incremental best-of-breed feature cross-fertilisation and its ambitious project of re-engineering completely new solution based on its Fusion platform,” says Trifkovi?.

Market challengers

Currently the principal challengers to the leaders, including Chordiant, Infor and Salesforce.com, all offer very good solutions but lack certain elements to compete consistently with the leading duo. More importantly, this group of the market will become more competitive if Microsoft's forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 release is a success or if vendors such as RightNow Technologies and Consona improve their standing.

“Given the increasing competitiveness in the second tier of the market and the advances of the market leaders, it is safe to assume that market leadership will continue with Oracle, and probably SAP,” says Trifkovi. The rest of the field will produce some very good alternatives, but not an outright market leader.

The evolving CRM strategies now demand CRM application solutions that can provide well-rounded suites covering all CRM modules, present a single analytical view of customers across multiple customer interaction channels and that can be rapidly deployed in a variety of deployment methods.

“CRM vendors, whose solutions can support a long-term strategic approach to customer relationship strategies based on nurturing relationships with the customer instead on focusing on the transaction itself, will be in a strong position” concludes Trifkovi.