Recently when Oracle bought Siebel I heard the comment that "salesforce.com is the next Siebel" - a best of breed, standalone CRM offering that is going to hit a wall just like Siebel did. There could be some truth in this. The CRM market is really hot right now and one must wonder who will come out of the fire. First, a lot of ERP systems that service the Small and Medium size business market and going to emulate their big brothers like Oracle and SAP and add CRM to the offering. So if you have manufacturing and/or distribution software, plus accounting of course, from vendor XYZ, it will only be a matter of time before they add the CRM pieces as well. In fact, it's amazing that they haven't so far. And we're not talking about a separate CRM software that comes with a pre-built interface, but a fully functional CRM module that's completely integrated with the core ERP system. Any ERP vendor that doesn't recognize this integrated CRM-ERP strategy as key to survival needs to have a steaming hot cup of reality, and soon. From a technical perspective it seems to me that the CRM modules make the vendors package 2X more attractive while only adding 25% more technical requirements and overhead. CRM, frankly, is much less difficult to code and maintain than ERP. For companies that for whatever reason do not have an integrated CRM-ERP there is another opportunity in the background and that's open-source CRM. This must be viewed as a real threat to the on-demand, standalone CRM vendors, especially. Open source minimizes the up front licensing and gives the customer an opportunity to try CRM without doing the full 3 and one half backward somersaults and 2 twists from the 10 meter board. The opportunity for stand alone CRM that I have seen and thought pretty interesting is institutions that have large, mostly custom ERP systems where an integrated CRM system is not imaginable, or even required. Educational institutions and even hospitals, could benefit immensely from a better understanding of who their prospective students or patients are and make the correct, timely and appropriate contacts. In these contexts we are not seeing the "quote to order to fulfillment to invoice" process. A stand-alone CRM works fine here and if you have ever been a student or a patient, you know that it's necessary. |
