We Blog CRM

Currently, Forrester rankings show that SAP and Oracle-Siebel are the leaders in CRM software. However, competition is close at their heels. Because the CRM software market has developed immensely in recent years, this has made it difficult to make distinctions between products. The Forrester report stated that the reason Siebel and SAP do so well is because they are both adequate absolute CRM software products that have a tremendously high usability.

Even with the high level of success that SAP and Siebel have achieved with their products, other companies are close behind. CDC, Microsoft, Oracle’s CRM On Demand application, RightNow, and Salesforce.com are all treading close to SAP and Siebel’s waters.
In particular, CDC’s rise in the rankings is due to a new commitment in its marketing strategies. Also Oracle’s other CRM products, (not including Siebel and On Demand) ranked fairly high as well.

As far as the CRM software market itself; it is still considered relatively healthy. A survey conducted by Forrester showed that out of 455 large organizations, 56% had already put into operation a CRM tool and an additional 17% plan to implement CRM software in the next 12 to 24 months. Another survey illustrated that of 286 businesses, 62% of business and IT professionals have put into use or are growing their customer business intelligence solutions.

New players join Oracle Siebel, Microsoft and Salesforce.com as the market seeks to empower agents and deliver next-generation service. There aren’t a lot of commonalities between the listed vendors in Magic Quadrant except that they have systems to help customers post-sale. To be fair, very few enterprises have cookie-cutter customer service requirements and these vendors try to cater to those unique needs.

The 2010 report includes 15 vendors which meet Gartner Research VP and Distinguished Analyst, Michael Maoz’s criteria for coverage. These vendors all have at least 15 customer references, have had at least five new customers for CSS in the past four quarters in at least two geographic regions and generate at least $7 million in software revenue for core CSS from new clients during the past four quarters. They are also evaluated on their cross-channel customer service efforts and whether the provider is creating or following industry leas as well as the vendor’s relationship with third-party consulting firms and systems integrators and own professional services. Lastly, Maoz’s report also took social integrations capabilities into account.

In his report, Maoz writes that four major initiatives will dominate overall customer service strategies through 2013: tying together service interaction channels; integrating social CRM capabilities, analyzing the customer experience; and apply business rules and knowledge in real time. The current leaders in the 2010 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers rank as so: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle (Siebel), Pegasystems, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com.

Last year, Pegasystems was the sole resident of the Visionary segment because of their idea of matching business rules to specific customer service processes. Maoz lauds Pegasystems for its renewed emphasis on customer service contact centers, a long tail of customer success stories, and a jump in revenue.

RightNow Technologies has focused on the business-to-consumer customer service center where there’s not a need for deepened industry knowledge of expertise, noting that Microsoft and Salesforce.com are more general purpose solutions in this regard as well. However, Maoz points out that RightNow (with its acquisition of HiveLive) and Salesforce.com (for its development of Chatter) are making strong social plays even if they seem to be heavily weighted on the sales side.

The Challengers are Amdocs and SAP. Maoz writes that SAP has yet to tap into the large B2C contact center market but praises their community efforts. Amdocs, on the other hand, is well regarded as a telecommunications contact center provider but does not offer the same resources to other industries.

There are plenty of Niche Players who provide value but “just not to everyone”. They rank: Astute Solutions, Chordiant Software, eGlue, Jacada, Neocase Software, Oracle E-Business Suite, Portrait Software and Sword Ciboodle.

In larger trends, there seems to be more of an interest in improving the agent desktop rather than replacing it. There is a big desire to make things simpler for the service agent – how can they make agents feel smarter and less exposed to the customer? Understanding customer intent and applying the right rule in real time will boost agent confidence and losing the customer’s trust is probably the biggest problem companies are trying to work through.

Navigor has launched Oracle’s Siebel-on-demand solution for SMBs in South Africa. Navigor hopes to push the new Siebel-on-demand offering as a solution for the CRM requirements of SMBs. The CRM is available as a rental option thereby putting it within reach of businesses of all sizes. Low entry costs, good broadband connectivity, no maintenance costs are some of the advantages that small businesses can hope to avail with the new Oracle offering.

Navigor will help businesses modify and categorize the CRM solution as per customer requirements. A little strangely, Navigor feels that convincing SMBs about the benefits of a hosted solution will be a challenge. It would be interesting to learn of other places apart from South Africa where SMBs need to be educated about the benefits of a hosted solution.

Xpertise, which is one of the leading IT training facilities in the U.K, has added Siebel training to its already impressive list of Oracle training. The company already has a strong base in CRM training and this new addition adds further to its reputation. The company views the new addition as a natural progression since it already has industry-leading experience in offering Oracle training.

Given that CRM is not an easy area to train in, Xpertise has built up its capabilities slowly and is now one of the key training partners for Oracle.

Vodafone did a little damage control early this week Down Under, releasing a statement explaining that the recent nine-day brown out of services in Australia was due to implementation of a CRM upgrade and was expected.

From May 17 to May 27 (but completed a reported nine hours ahead of time!), Vodafone upgraded its Siebel pre-paid billing system. During the quasi-down time, could not provide new products or services including voicemail, moving customers to new plans, change rate plans, or churn customers to or from pre-paid phone accounts.

With words like “dominant” and “rules” was Oracle/Siebel’s standing in IDC research reported last week. Said research had the CRM market divided into eight verticals: financial services; government and health care; manufacturing; retail; utilities; automotive; communications and media; and the always-popular other.

Siebel was reported as the leading CRM provider in the first five listed categories; one IDC analyst was quoted in CRM Buyer as stating that “Siebel really dominates … holding more than 20 percent” in financial services, the largest vertical. Winners in the final three categories were Reynolds and Reynolds; Amdocs; and Salesforce.com, respectively.

Conspicuously absent from the list of top dogs was SAP. As Tamina Vahidy at Line56 put it, “despite the great deal of attention garnered by SAP’s claim to have overtaken Siebel in CRM revenue about two years ago, SAP was not a leader in any of the vertical categories despite having a massive ERP presence in those verticals.”

Oracle’s kudos were to end quite soon thereafter, however. Just today, Gartner Research reported that “Oracle bought Siebel to become the market leader in 2005, but by year-end 2006, SAP will be the larger.”

Worse yet for Oracle, Gartner reckons that “SAP appears to be ready for single-figure revenue growth of its CRM products in 2006, at best. Oracle is prepared for a slight decline.” On top of that, say the Gartner folks, “we expect one or two challengers to emerge to compete with SAP and Oracle by 2008.”

Following SAP and Oracle on Gartner’s top 10 CRM vendor list are Salesforce.com, Amdocs, SAS, Microsoft, RightNow, SSA Global, Sage, and Teradata. This group of ten represents half the total CRM market.

IDC is a provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. Founded in 1964, IDC now employs 850 analysts in 50 countries. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG.

Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, Inc. is a combination of four branches devoted to the gathering and analyzing of “technology-related insight”: Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events. Founded in 1979, Gartner now has 3,900 associates (including 1,200 research analysts and consultants) in 75 countries worldwide and serves 10,000 organizations.

Before the Call has received the call from Oracle. Representatives from Before the Call, an on-demand sales intelligence solutions provider, have announced that the integration of its sales intelligence suite with Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand has been successfully validated by Oracle.

Before the Call was launched in autumn 2005. Customers include industry leaders such as content manager Interwoven, automated customer service solutions provider Intervoice, and web-based volunteer management software provider AngelPoints. Before the Call is designed to increase the efficacy of sales teams, and the Oracle-validated integration promises to further assist by instantly building online lists targeting prospects using a broad set of criteria; enriching lead data with company and executive details from content partners such as Factiva and idEXEC; and lead ranking and scoring by a number of parameters.

Siebel CRM On Demand Alliances at Oracle director Marshall Leisten hoped that “the integration is a huge potential driver of user adoption and sales effectiveness, because many of our customers appreciate not having to familiarize themselves with another user interface.” Pleasanton, Calif.-based Before the Call is a privately-held company incorporated in March 2005.

The Before the Call sales intelligence solution has hundreds of users from 26 customers; among clientele are Interwoven, Intervoice, Dorado Corp., and Virsa Systems. The Oracle Partner Network is a global business network of 16,000 companies delivering software solutions based on Oracle software. And Oracle is, of course, is the world’s largest enterprise software company.

BigMachines, Inc., a most excellently named provider of web-based configuration, quote, and proposal selling tools, today announced that the integration between its on-demand Lean Front-End solution and Oracle’s Siebel CRM on demand has been successfully validated by Oracle. BigMachines has also become a Certified Partner in the Oracle partner network. BigMachines LFE seeks to allow sales staff to configure complex products, manage complex pricing and upsell options, create rich quotes and proposals, and send error-free orders to ERP systems or order entry personnel.

The integration of BigMachines with Siebel CRM On Demand promises users the opportunity to populate quotes and orders directly with Siebel CRM customer contact data, and then link detailed quote and order information directly to CRM opportunities. BigMachines LFE can be configured to customer needs using on-demand or on-premise platforms, and can integrate with Siebel CRM on Demand or on premises.

Also of note from BigMachines was the reminder of the exclusive BigIdeas conference set for September 18-19, 2006 at San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, a forum to explore lean selling processes using web technology. The Oracle Partner Network is a global business network of 16,000 companies who create software solutions based on Oracle software. Through access to Oracle’s resources, the Oracle Partner Network program provides partners with the resources they need. Partners who are “able to demonstrate superior product knowledge, technical expertise and a commitment to doing business with Oracle” qualify for the Oracle Certified Partner levels.

Founded in 1999, BigMachines, Inc. provides web-based configuration and quoting software and services to help companies streamline sales processes. BigMachines Lean Front-End solution digitizes selling processes and captures an organization’s tribal knowledge to provide online product selection, configurator, quoting, and ordering capabilities for new products and aftermarket parts. BigMachines LFE provides reporting capabilities and integrates to existing ERP, CAD, and CRM systems.

Another “Magic Quadrant” member has presented itself and surely to the surprise of few, it is Oracle. With over four million CRM deployed seats and over 150 million registered self-service users, Oracle was certain to have its Siebel CRM applications positioned in the “Leader Quadrant” of the Gartner “Magic Quadrant” in sales force automation.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant seeks to provide guidance for organizations seeking to purchase, replace or upgrade a sales force automation solution. Gartner positions a vendor in the “Leader” quadrant when its assessment of those companies reveals the company to be “performing well today, [to] have a clear vision of market direction and [to be] actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.”

Gartner, which uses client references as part of its evaluation of the service providers, undertakes this annual assessment to provide enterprises with data and analysis to help clients select their CRM service providers. The Magic Quadrant is a graphic representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. The analysis depicts how certain vendors measure up against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by the Gartner Group.

According to Gartner, “Quadrant Leaders” demonstrate market strength; broad installed bases using sales opportunity, solution and operations management among several industry segments; and the ability to affect market trends in all the categories of criteria on which they are evaluated. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant positions vendors in a particular market segment based on their vision and ability to execute that vision.

To be included in the 2006 SFA Magic Quadrant, a vendor had to demonstrate that it had customers that have deployed or are actively deploying opportunity management functionality within the past two years; is actively selling or marketing SFA applications to multiple industries and geographies; has proved deployable in sales organizations of over 100 users; has established or will gain market visibility and name recognition for SFA in the next year; and has professional-service resources dedicated to SFA.

The report “2006 Gartner CRM Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant” can be found at mediaproducts.gartner.com.

All over the news first thing in the morning today was the big Siebel / IBM / Oracle brouhaha; of course, with names like this involved, who’s surprised at the prominence of this particular news bite? As is being reported everywhere, the Big Blue back-end powering Siebel’s CRM OnDemand hosted software service is “being ripped out” and replaced with Oracle’s own hosting infrastructure.

The announcement (and earnest near-violent imagery) came from Oracle president Charles Phillips yesterday in a conference call with press. Launched in October 2003, Siebel CRM OnDemand represented a joint offering with IBM, which acted as host to Siebel infrastructure and database software. Siebel was a nice big name SaaS client for IBM and likewise did the IBM name benefit Siebel. It was profit lust at first sight. As late as October 2004, Siebel and IBM were said to be connected together until 2009 via the building of a new service center.

Enter Oracle, exit previous Siebel alliances with IBM. Once he and his company were acquired in September 2005, Siebel product chief Bruce Cleveland was able to backpedal enough to state that the Siebel OnDemand system had no technical reliance on IBM infrastructure. Cleveland ultimately left Oracle last week and got on with InterWest Partners. Meanwhile, Siebel has migrated. And the Oracle beast still hungers. New Siebel CRM on-demand customers are already running on the Oracle technology stack, with others to be transitioned this summer. The move will be seamless and beneficial for users, pledge Oracle executives.