SightLines decided long ago that CRM, customer relationship management software, is a very important market opportunity because it's an important business application. You need to manage the sales process; you need to execute marketing campaigns and collect data; you need to run a professional customer support system. These are vital functions for every business, so CRM is a vital business application. But after some long discussions we eventually decided that CRM by itself was not a particularly useful application, and that in order to really have value CRM must be fully integrated with the full suite of business applications, like accounting and inventory. After all, the point of sales and marketing is not just new leads and opportunities, but new sales and greater revenue. We eventually came to the conclusion that selling CRM also undermined our message of the great value of the integrated business suite, i.e., NetSuite. The other major argument about CRM is that when you strip away the integration with accounting and inventory you have a commodity that, for all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from its competitors. This past summer I took a look at several CRM packages, all of the them available as online software as a service. I demoed salesforce.com, Zoho, Entellium Rave and Tactile. My conclusion was that they are basically all the same, though some are broader than the others. Salesforce.com has the broadest functionality and Tactile the narrowest, but frankly there is not a lot to any of them. The market has evidently come to the same conclusion, as one of our guest bloggers Phil Wainewright writes in his Software as Service blog:
In less than two years’ time, up-and-coming SaaS applications suite Zoho expects to have more users on its CRM application than current market leader Salesforce.com has on its flagship product. That was the confident prediction I heard from its CEO Sridhar Vembu when we met at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last month
Phil lays out the argument in great detail and it was a slap in the face frankly. In the software as a service model it is a pretty quick march from new market to commodity. What can you conclude from the fact that Zoho is going to be have more customers and users than publicly traded salesforce? First, I think that salesforce is exposed and they probably need to start looking at a much broader suite. The idea that partners will develop on their force.com platform and interface is interesting but in the end the last thing that small and medium enterprise owners want is an interface to maintain. What they want, and need, is a full suite. Second, the CRM market is changing rapidly and the low cost providers are starting to cut into the future prospects of larger vendors. In the end there just isn't enough to differentiate the products. I would tell anyone looking, for whatever reason, for a standalone CRM to check out the four above. You can pay as little as $8/user/month. Of course your sales orders will never become invoices, and you won't know if you are promising inventory that you do not own, but you may still fond value on maintaining a database of leads, contacts and opportunities | 
