Management Update: Predicts 2006: Market Consolidation Headlines Developments Among Top CRM Software Vendors (Gartner)

Oracle's acquisition of Siebel Systems and its battle with SAP for customer relationship management (CRM) market leadership will make headlines in 2006. The real news will be that growth rates in spending on Microsoft, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com will far outstrip SAP and Oracle, and Open Source CRM will emerge.

Predicts 2006: Market Consolidation Headlines Developments Among Top CRM Software Vendors

Oracle's acquisition of Siebel Systems and its battle with SAP for market leadership will make headlines in 2006. The real news will be that growth rates in spending on Microsoft, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com will far outstrip SAP and Oracle, and Open Source CRM will emerge.

New Hosted CRM Portal Application Set to Shake Up Market (PRWeb)

In November, US based iport4business.com Inc release their new hosted CRM portal applications iportinstant. The new solution is aimed squarely at the small to medium sized enterprise (SME) and is aggressively priced at only $10 per user per month. The portal solution includes fully functioning sales opportunity management, customer service management, project management and document management applications as well as a news and discussion forum function.

Don't Blame CRM (Line56)

For years enterprises have tried to combat customer service issues with technology. For example, often organizations do not have a central location to keep all of a customer's data. The customer's e-mail requests are stored in one location while records of phone conversations are located someplace else. When this happens the call center manager approaches the IT manager and says, "We need a database". The IT manager then researches the latest in knowledge-bases and buys the technology that will best fit the current architecture. read

Surviving CRM (Line56)

Ariba has just gone on demand, and says that it has some customers who have gone from perpetual licensing to on demand. That got me thinking about customer relationship management (CRM), in which we saw Worldspan take the same approach with Siebel. That, in turn, led me to think about the perennial CRM "problem" and how hosting is one approach to it. In researching that issue, I found this 2001 article from Line56 Magazine that still has a lot of business value in guiding companies through the CRM process (which remains remarkably similar, although technologies have advanced).