SAP to Rule CRM Market

by Andrew James

Research predicts that SAP will be the leading CRM vendor by the end of this year

Recent research carried out by Gartner Research, suggests that SAP is set to overtake Oracle to become the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendor. A source at Gartner declared that "Oracle bought Siebel to become the market leader in 2005, but by year-end 2006, SAP will be the larger."

According to Gartner, Oracle had the CRM lead until 2005 but it is poised to lose it by the end of this year. Sharon Mertz of Gartner explained 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."

For some years now, Oracle and SAP have stood at the top of the CRM heap, but Gartner predicted that they won't be alone for too long: "we expect one or two challengers to emerge to compete with SAP and Oracle by 2008."

Intriguingly, one of those challenges could be hosted CRM pioneer Salesforce.com, which entered the marketplace with a bang and has gone full steam ahead with its "no software" message.

This is how Gartner ranked the top 10 CRM vendors by revenue:

1. SAP
2. Oracle
3. Salesforce.com
4. Amdocs
5. SAS
6. Microsoft
7. RightNow
8. SSA Global
9. Sage
10. Teradata

These ten vendors control over half of the total CRM market, with the remaining share is distributed among nearly three hundred niche vendors.