Top 5 On-Demand CRM Software Systems

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On-demand CRM Software Leaders by Market Segment

For additional perspectives, the below summary points illustrate how the Top 5 CRM hosted solutions best line up with customer market segments.

Small Business CRM Leaders Entellium and Salesforce.com Team Edition and Professional Edition are strong small business solutions and have been adamant competitors in this market space. While Salesforce.com is the dominating small business leader, Entellium carefully selects its deals and wins the majority of the competitions it selects. Microsoft CRM Live, also known as Titan, is the new software as a service kid on the block. While the CRM hosted solution lacks functionality and maturity, it offers multiple hosted distribution options and has a ready made Microsoft user community willing to sacrifice some expectations in order to take advantage of the Microsoft stack and close Outlook integration.

Middle Market CRM Leaders Aplicor boasts an average SaaS implementation of over 200 users per client. While this may be somewhat skewed as the company has a few very large clients, the solution is undeniably designed for companies desiring deeper functionality and greater business process automation. Salesforce.com is all over the map when it comes to identifying a market sweet spot. Despite the company's all-things-to-all-people marketing message and near schizophrenic identity crisis, the application works well for mid-market organizations and if and when Apex and AppExchange mature a bit they may present compelling solutions.

Fortune 2000 / Enterprise CRM Leaders Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition command a high percentage of the enterprise hosted market. Despite a hefty subscription fee ($199 USD per user), the Salesforce.com Unlimited Edition is becoming the flagship product for the company. Aplicor trails Salesforce.com in large (multi-thousand) user accounts, however, is the only Top 5 hosted CRM application which also offers integrated back-office and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. The addition of financial, distribution, human resources and/or manufacturing applications (at no additional cost) is a very compelling advantage for companies looking for enterprise-wide hosted business systems.

Top Market Share Leader With over 35,000 customers, a proprietary platform as a service, a vibrant AppExchange partner community and a marketing budget that knows no ends, Salesforce.com is the clear hosted Software as a Service CRM market share leader. This year's Gartner CRM analysis reveals that Salesforce.com is the third largest CRM solution overall (behind number 1 SAP and number 2 Oracle).

Top Global Hosted CRM Solution With CRM (and ERP) users located in 91 countries and every time zone except one, Aplicor is the clear global CRM winner. Aplicor is also the only Top 5 on-demand vendor with redundant globally diverse data centers and hosted delivery from more than one country. Aplicor operates synchronized data centers in the US, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Global data center performance is online at the company's web site.

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Software as a Service Customer Relationship Management

On-Demand is In Demand
There is no question whatsoever that the most dramatic CRM software industry growth is being experienced by the software as a service (SaaS) CRM software solutions - and most of that growth is occurring with the above Top 5 On-Demand CRM software vendors. There is near endless speculation as to how long this growth will continue and what is the eventual SaaS plateau in terms of market percentage using SaaS and on-premise solutions. Identifying the customers currently subscribing to SaaS solutions from a Crossing the Chasm perspective, we believe this hosting industry is departing the Early Adopters phase and barely beginning the Early Majority phase - which suggests that the most significant growth is yet to come.

On-Premise Responses to On-Demand Software
There is also little doubt that the majority of CRM SaaS growth is achieved at the expense of the more traditional on-premise CRM software solutions. We see no reversing of this clear trend and no recovery for the on-premise software manufacturers. However, what we do see are two clearly defined reactions and business strategies implemented by on-premise software manufacturers in response to the SaaS market growth. The first response executed by many of these vendors is to attempt to vigorously protect their large up front licensing cash cow business models by simply battling SaaS. Their battle strategies normally include introducing FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) or chastising their much smaller competitors. These attempts are becoming less and less effective. A second strategy we see repeatedly executed is for the on-premise software manufacturer to launch an additional product line SaaS solution. While at the surface, this can be a complimentary and valid go to market strategy, this approach is often executed as a defensive tactic whereby the SaaS solution is an inherently weak product that is given little more than lip service and is used in order to attract market demand that can then be shifted to the more strategic on-premise software product. While this strategy would appear obviously ill-advised, its popularity by some of the largest and most recognized CRM and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software manufacturers suggests that it will linger for the foreseeable future.

CRM Software Evaluation Criteria
The CRM software analysis process consists of a two step review procedure. In step one, the business software systems must excel in several key areas to be viable in the on-demand CRM software competition.

• First, their product offerings must include impressive releases for each of the three pillars of CRM - Sales Force Automation (SFA), Marketing and Customer Service.
• Second, the solution must offer a truly thin-client hosted delivery that permits good browser performance and an enjoyable user experience. Several hosted solutions are now offering a zero footprint client and leveraging AJAX technology which truly maximize user speed and interactivity.
• Third, the product must have unique capabilities that drive business value.
• Fourth, since these are hosted CRM solutions, the hosting vendors must be able to demonstrate comprehensive information security, continuous uptime and iron clad Service Level Agreements (SLA). To gauge vendors capabilities for uninterrupted hosting software delivery, we focused on data center redundancy, operations resiliency, disaster recovery, business continuity and uptime/downtime history.
• Lastly, the software manufacturer behind the software solution must show viability, longevity and impressive customer support.

In step two, we apply the Sales Force Automation (SFA), Marketing and Customer Support criteria (which are included in the RFP Kit available for download) in order to achieve a relative and weighted comparison for each of the CRM applications.

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