The 2013 CRM Market Leaders [Customer Relationship Management]
| By Anonymous | |
| Proquest LLC |
CRM VENDORS are making some pretty bold moves to incorporate newer technologies into their existing solutions. Whether it's through acquisitions, partnerships, or innovations, the companies represented in this year's CRM Market Leader awards are betting big on technologies such as social media, mobile solutions, analytics, the cloud, and big data. Read on to see how their investments over the past year have paid off, and how they might affect your customer experience initiatives.
Enterprise CRM Suite
The Market
The market for enterprise CRM is exploding. Worldwide CRM software revenue was approximately
This was a year of consolidation, as vendors continued to acquire companies and add marketing, analytics, lead quality, multichannel, mobile, and social capabilities to their core products. "With corporate cash at all-time highs, many vendors are willing to pay high premiums to acquire specific technologies and expertise in an increasingly dynamic and competitive CRM market environment," said
The Leaders
SAP made it onto the leaderboard for wowing analysts with the mobile and user interface advancements it made this year. Last year's score of 3.9 for depth of functionality rose to 4.2 this year. "I am impressed with the continuously significant progress SAP has made to its solution portfolio," comments
The Winners
one to watch
Mid Market CRN Suite
The Market
This year, midmarket companies prioritized a few key areas in their business strategies-improving sales and earnings and expanding their business footprints. To do so, small to midsized businesses (SMBs) are eyeing ways to become more efficient through the use of technology, specifically mobile applications and social media tools, according to the business research and forecasting service the Economic Intelligence Unit.
A number of CRM vendors are looking to meet the needs of the midmarket through two key selling points-attractive pricing options and simple administration-according to "The Forrester Wave: CRM Suites for Midsize Organizations 2012." Vendors continued to add deeper social, mobile, and analytical capabilities to product offerings, cloud deployments, and improved support for business process management in multichannel interactions, the report indicated.
The Leaders
functionality for the price, a key quality for midmarket success. "
The winners
This year brought the Salesforce Touch platform, which lets companies develop and deploy native, HTML5, or hybrid apps to any mobile device. Further padding its mobile capabilities,
one to watch
BPMonline is recognized as our One to Watch this year for its ability to blend business process management with CRM capabilities. "One of the regular complaints you hear about CRM (or any processoriented software) is you have to adjust how you do business to make them work effectively within your firm's work flow," King says. 'This is not true for [BPMonline]. I think they will likely gain share over the next couple of years." Stealing the spotlight as winner of the industry's popular CRM Idol competition in 2011, it appears the company could be on a path of acceleration. -K.L.
Small business CRM Suite
The Market
Small businesses are social businesses. With a smaller number of employees and customers than large corporations, SMBs have the advantage of being able to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with consumers and engage with them through different channels. As social media continues to play an increasingly important role in business, small businesses are embracing this industry shift and turning to social CRM.
"If your business is focused on social engagement instead of traditional customer relationships, as small businesses are, then [social CRM] solutions could easily be the right choice,"
Typically budget-conscious, small businesses are also looking for vendors to provide more comprehensive but affordable solutions. "CRM functionality is being added to integrated marketing suite products, and other software for that matter," King says. Features and functionality that were once meant only for companies with massive budgets are being enabled efficiently and affordably through software, and small businesses stand to benefit.
The Leaders
Perhaps better suited for the larger end of the small business market, King maintains that "
Our winner last year,
The winners
After last year's defeat,
One to Watch
Also named one of our Rising Stars, Infusionsoft comes in as our One to Watch this year. The company has been on Inc.'s 500/5000 list of fastest-growing companies for the last six years and snagged a coveted spot among Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 in 2012. This year, the company received
Sales Forch Automation
The Market
As salespeople increasingly rely on smartphones and tablets to conduct business, it's only natural their preferred devices would affect their choice of contact management and sales force automation (SFA) solutions. "You're seeing more of an emphasis on integrating sales intelligence and team collaboration via Chatter/Yammerlike corporate social networks and an accelerated move away from laptop-based operations" to mobile devices, comments
Subsequently, CRM vendors who develop SFA tools with mobility and collaboration in mind will be the ones that gain the most momentum in the years to come. In fact, organizations that provide sales teams with mobile access to CRM see, on average, a 14.6 percent increase in productivity, according to the
The Leaders
Although
The winners
For the eighth year in a row,
one to watch
Incentive Management
The market
Incentive management is a market that "remains viable," according to
After a number of major acquisitions in the incentive management market last year, vendors continued to evaluate ways to make sales managers and sales reps more efficient, with mobile features and deeper analytics. However, as Galvin points out, one of the greatest challenges continues to be encouraging companies to align their compensation plans with business objectives. "You can adjust and rewrite your [comp] plans, but once they're in tune with your business objectives, you can then apply the power of what incentive management can bring in terms of analytics and make more fact-based decisions."
The Leaders
Softscape once again made it to the leaderboard this year. Acquired by human capital management company
Now that Varicent is part of the
The Winners
Hats off to
one tp watch
Marketing Solutions
The Market
The role of the traditional marketer is being redefined. A study by
"Social media has had a profound impact on marketing," Mail Online Chief Marketing Officer
The Leaders
"
Acquired by
Unica holds its spot on our leaderboard for the third year in a row. The company was acquired by
The winners
For the third year in a row,
one to watch
Earning the experts' nod as One to Watch this year,
Business Intelligence
The Market
Big data is still causing a buzz in the business intelligence field, says
The cloud has garnered a lot of attention, but not enough deployments, Howson asserts. Though a recent
BI vendors must re-evaluate their products and design them to be cloud-ready, "with multitenancy and the ability to work with data retained on premises," Howson says. "Soon, the cloud will become a routine deployment option rather than a product differentiator."
The Leaders
Though it earned high marks in other categories,
"Qliktech is the leader in data discovery capabilities," Beca says. The company performed well in all categories, though it earned its highest marks for product cost. In June, the company named
SAP Business Objects remains the most widely used BI reporting software, Moulthrop claims. The company scored a 4.2 in company direction, though Beca believes that while its "B2B outlook is strong, the B2C outlook needs some work" SAP took on B2B commerce with its
Scoring a 4.6 in depth of functionality,
The Winner
Winning for the fifth year in a row,
At its annual Pulse conference,
one to watch
The only enterprise-caliber business intelligence platform born in the cloud, Birst is a young company engineered with an automated data warehouse and rich, visual analytics, to give meaning to data. Birst earned a strong 4.5 in depth of functionality, and
Data Quality
The Market
The data quality market in 2012 was worth around
But while industry growth was slow, there was certainly no shortage of demand. Companies responding to a recent
Data quality issues consume, on average, about 30 percent of companies' budgets for master data management projects, The Information Difference statistics show. With a growing interest in big data initiatives, data quality vendors that grew up around name and address verification in customer contact records quickly had to expand their scope to include everything from product codes to social media posts. Additionally, full data quality suites emerged to handle everything from data profiling and discovery to data correction, analysis, and reporting. This has wreaked havoc throughout the business environment "Big data and the need to capture information from disparate sources, both internally and externally, has shifted IT environments from relatively structured data to the Wild West, where anything goes,"
To handle the increase in unstructured and semistructured data from so many sources, vendors have sought to leverage cloud storage and computing to make the information available to a workforce that is also increasingly mobile, requiring access from anywhere and on any device.
The Leaders
As an open-source software provider, Talend this year emerged as a leader solely on the basis of cost, with a score of 4.2, more than a half-point ahead of its nearest competitor. But its reputation for quality cannot be ignored, according to some analysts.
The Winners
Informática, which won the category for the past three years, this year has to share the spotlight, despite taking top scores in depth of functionality (4.5), company direction (4.3), and customer satisfaction (4.2). It's a favorite among some analysts. In a recent report,
one to watch
Pitney Bowes, an industry leader last year, fell off the leaderboard this year to finish as a One to Watch. While its scores were slightly better than average in most judging criteria, it failed to impress the way it had in past years. Arussy, for example, characterized the company as "a me-too player" of late. -L.K.
Open-Source CRM
The Market
With a low entry cost, platform flexibility, new delivery channels, freedom from vendor lock-in, and devoted user communities, open-source software is becoming more attractive to a growing number of businesses. As such, the market has become densely populated. Especially among small and midsized businesses and nonprofit organizations, open-source CRM-so named because the source code is available to the public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge-is seen as a viable alternative to the traditional commercial products from the industry's giants.
Still, despite making some waves, the open-source CRM market has not grown as quickly as some had expected. Many say open-source's own limitations and its low visibility compared to other mainstream CRM software providers are preventing it from achieving more prominence. That's likely to change in the not-too-distant future if the vendors have anything to say.
The Leaders
Adempiere's greatest strength year after year has been its user community, which is among the most devoted and influential in the business. Though it maintains a reputation among analysts for a high-quality application suite that is well tested by its critical mass of users-who play a key role in the development of recent application suite add-ons and feature enhancements-the company is still largely known as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor with limited CRM capabilities.
VTiger has appeared on the leaderboard in five of the past six years, but analysts fear it might be at a crossroads. Its product is solid, they say, but its visibility and messaging are extremely limited. Still, CEO
XTuple, last year's one to watch, has moved up the ranks. It finished only a few tenths of a point behind the winner, lifted by scores of 4.0 in depth of functionality, company direction, and customer satisfaction. Its real strength is its integration of multiple business management products for accounting, time and expense management, CRM, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and distribution into one system that can run in Mac, Windows, and Linux environments.
The Winner
one to watch
As the only vendor to cater exclusively to the nonprofit sector, CiviCRM provides a full Web-based software suite to help organizations manage their relationships with donors and advocates. A newcomer to the top ranks this year, the company- and several analysts-have high hopes for CiviCRM as it releases a new and much improved CiviCRM 4.4. Though purely a niche player, what it does it does well, offering a range of features for managing fundraising efforts, email blasts, event registration, organizational membership, grants, and more. It doesn't hurt the company to have a few high-profile and very satisfied customers like
Consultancies
The Market
Most CRM deployments today will require some level of customization, ranging from something as simple as using postal abbreviations instead of the full names of states to something as complex as the addition of unstructured social media content into contact center workflows. More often than not, it's this need for customization that drives companies to CRM consultants' doors.
Across the industry, many consulting firms have aligned themselves with specific vendors or have even further become experts in specific products.
The Leaders
Perhaps its real strength, though, lies in the amount of expertise it has in many different areas. "
Deloitte this year undertook a real effort to expand its social CRM coverage, adding to an already strong stable of central offerings around cloud computing, talent management, IT infrastructure, analytics, customer transformation, and service delivery. "Deloitte continues to develop new customer management advisory services that are closely aligned with advances in technology. Examples include customer analytics best practices, pricing optimization guidelines, and social strategies for corporate reputation management policies," says
The Winner
For the second straight year, Cognizant rose to the top, with the highest scores in company direction (4.2) and customer satisfaction (3.9). The company also finished in the top five in ability to execute and cost. According to Ament, the company's recipe for success is "steady customer gains, increased capabilities in consumer-focused analytics and intelligence advisory offerings, and customer management expertise to share with clients." -
one to watch
Capgemini's profile dipped a little this year, leading to a fall from the leaders' list for the first time in many years. Nonetheless, the French firm continues to hold on to a very loyal clientele, which is made up primarily of large European and multinational firms. This, analysts say, is its strength. "Capgemini is able to handle global initiatives well," Dickie observes. - L.K.
| Copyright: | (c) 2013 Information Today, Inc. |
| Wordcount: | 7200 |
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