Report Ranks Top 10 CRM Vendors
A new AMR Research report breaks down leading CRM vendors SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com and others by 2007 revenues and software growth rates in the $14 billion market.
Oracle "managed to get back on its feet following a lackluster 2006 when the vendor slowed down to digest the acquisition of Siebel," notes the report. And the gap between Oracle and SAP did lessen in 2007.
For its part, SAP posted another "strong year" for customer management, retaining a commanding 19 percent overall market share, notes the report. At the same time, Salesforce.com surpassed a million customers and "continues its quest to $1 billion by posting an impressive 51 percent organic growth rate." (For more on SaaS, see "Five Best Practices for Implementing SaaS CRM.")
Though it's not a household name like Oracle or even SAP, the report states that Cegidim Dendrite moved into fourth place after merging midway through the year. "Verint shot up the list after acquiring Witness Systems," write the analysts, "demonstrating that even more mature segments such as contact center applications are not immune to continued consolidation."
In addition, the report notes enterprise software vendors' growing interest in CRM and customer experience management applications, "a trend which will likely accelerate with the world's biggest software companies putting heavy emphasis on their CRM suites" in the future, notes the report.
New and enhanced products were everywhere in 2007: SAP launched SAP CRM 2007 "with a completely revamped user interface and new functionality designed to appeal to some of its largest customers in the consumer products industry," write the analysts.
Oracle launched Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0, which the report notes is one of the largest development efforts in the history of the Siebel product line. And Microsoft launched its Dynamics CRM 4.0 suite, "adding an entirely new multitenancy architecture to enable software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments," write the AMR analysts. Microsoft continues to accelerate 1,000-plus seat deals, "indicating Microsoft is succeeding in pushing CRM into the enterprise as well as the small and midsize business (SMB) segment."
"So perhaps it comes as no surprise," write the AMR analysts, "that the software giants SAP, Oracle and Microsoft recorded 20 percent, 39 percent and 39 percent customer management growth rates, respectively."
