Enterprise applications standouts Oracle and SAP earned high marks for their customer relationship management (CRM) offerings in a recent analyst report, but a phalanx of contenders is building new functionality and playing up various unique attributes in a quest to upset the market hierarchy.
That’s the word from Forrester Research, which recently published two new analyses for prospective CRM customers — one for mid-sized organizations and one for large companies. For overall CRM performance, writes William Band, a principal analyst at Forrester and co-author of the reports, the two enterprise applications kingpins still reign with Oracle Siebel CRM and SAP CRM, which Band and team call “the most complete solutions.”
Hot on their heels, according to Forrester, are a number of products that underscore the changing dynamics of CRM software deployment, including CDC Pivotal, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM On Demand, RightNow, and salesforce.com. The vendors behind these offerings continue to enhance core CRM functionality, the report notes, but their calling card in most cases is quicker deployments — in most cases courtesy of the SaaS model — and greater flexibility than the solutions that top the list, according to Forrester.