 |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
By Shawn Hannon According to analyst firm Gartner, the enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software market grew 23.1% in 2007 to $8.1 billion. Not all the news is good as CRM software failures continue to be a problem, but failure rates are at least declining. ERP software giant SAP earned the CRM software market share leader position with a decisive 25.4% market share achievement. While SAP's market share actually declined from 25.6% in 2006, it still retained a comfortable margin over runner-up Oracle CRM which achieved 16.3% market share in 2007 (an increase from 15.5% in 2006). To add to arch rival Oracle's dismay, in a separate Gartner report analyzing the enterprise resource planning software market, SAP’s also usurped competitor Oracle with a 27.5% to 13.9% market share victory.
Source: Gartner. All revenue figures in US Dollars, expressed in Millions. The CRM software market share report continues to illustrate the market defragmentation as the top five vendors summed together hold only a slight majority of the overall market. The largest market share gainers outside the Big 5 were several on-demand CRM software solutions. The Gartner CRM report noted that overall SAP performed well during a year in which Oracle may have been challenged with integrating its prior acquisitions such as Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. According to Mertz, “Oracle didn’t do well in 2006, since it closed the Siebel acquisition in January of that year.” Integrating acquired software companies is a notoriously difficult process and it did not help that the Oracle acquisitions possessed different technologies and different company cultures. In contrast, SAP extended its organic growth with the continued success of Business Objects 2007 acquisition. “SAP did well both organically and from the Business Objects line,” Mertz says. “Usually you slow down after an acquisition, but both were strong.” SAP has been criticized for overly aggressive product pre-announcements and multiple product delays (the product is still not generally available) associated with its on-demand Business ByDesign, the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP offering, however, Mertz says SAP is wise to take it slow with the software as a service (SaaS) ERP solution, in order to “focus on making sure it’s robust, with top quality and high profitability." Gartner noted that CRM software revenue and market share continued to consolidate among the top vendors in 2007. Among the top-five CRM manufacturers, Oracle grew at 29.8%, Salesforce.com grew at 49.8%, Microsoft grew an impressive 88.6%, SAP’s grew at 22% and while Amdocs was the only top-five CRM vendor to lose actual market share position, the company did still grow at 15.1%. Gartner suggests that CRM 2.0 and social media may play a role in predicting growth and market share jockeying in the year ahead. “Looking forward, social networking, collaborative technologies, and social software are producing a major impact on the CRM market,” comments Sharon Mertz, research director for Gartner CRM. “Enterprises face increasing challenges to determine how best to harness these trends and technologies for growth, both internally and in their customer service strategies.”
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
