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It is a telling statement on CRM usage that company employees often prefer to continue with the software they have been using for account management instead of shifting to CRM deployments instituted by the company.

SAP has taken cognizance of this fact and in an effort to increase usage among workers, it has announced an update to its CRM software, which will now feature a Web 2.0-style interface. SAP ’s Vice President of CRM product management Stefan Haenisch hopes to fulfill customer expectations regarding ease of use. The lack of employee buy-in into expensive CRM deployments can result in delayed ROI.

It is a sign of the impact that Web 2.0 applications have had on consumer behavior that even enterprise applications are now being redesigned such that their user interfaces satisfy customer expectations regarding ease of use from business software.

Oracle probably has the broadest set of CRM capabilities, thanks to its acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft, said Vuk Trifkovic, an analyst with Datamonitor in the U.K. “But I don’t think that reflects badly on SAP, they have good tools with a lot of features, and they’re a natural for anyone in the SAP ecosystem,” he said.

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