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Home > Computers and Information Technology > IT Administration & Services > General Services
Customer Relationship Management Market Assessment 2006
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In 2005, there was a resurgence of interest in customer relationship management (CRM), with commentators, as they had in the late 1990s, reiterating that CRM is about more than technology — it is about putting the customer at the heart of the business. However, a new phrase has entered the CRM lexicon — customer experience management (CEM) — in order to describe the strategy, as opposed to the technology that facilitates the execution of the strategy.
This Market Assessment report is concerned with the technology; technology providers have moved on, have been developing their products to embrace the demands of the marketplace. Those demands include: technology that can link the core CRM applications of customer service, sales and marketing with other applications at play in the organisation; technology that can reduce costs; and technology that can be accessed over the Internet.
The largest surge has been towards the technology that can be accessed via the Internet, with pioneers in this field, such as salesforce.com, being joined by other major vendors (such as Siebel and SAP) taking advantage of the wider availability of broadband, with their own online offerings. The terminology has changed in the past few years too, from application service provider (ASP), which referred to systems hosted on vendors’ own servers rather than those installed within the client company, to Software as a Service (SaaS), or hosted solutions, which means the same thing.
Hosted solutions are ideal for smaller companies; rather than incurring enormous set-up, installation, training and maintenance costs — as well as having to pay licence fees for each user — they simply pay for access to a system designed for them but hosted elsewhere.
These advances mean that the profile of the marketplace has changed. The distinctions between those offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and those offering CRM applications have blurred, as developers in each field have extended their offerings. With all major vendors also making forays into the hosted arena, the distinctions are continually made less clear.
There are fewer competitors in the market than previously. Barriers to entry are high and, of the plethora of CRM vendors that emerged in the early part of the century, many have either been swallowed up by larger players or have gone into administration.
The market is consolidating: Siebel Systems — for so long the CRM touchstone — was acquired by Oracle early in 2006; other major vendors have also lost their independence to global corporations.
The emergence of new markets — in China especially — is one of the key drivers of the mergers discussed in this report. Consolidation strengthens the market, and merged companies can perform better in a global market.
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