Last month in CRM software – a catch up on April’s CRM news

May 12, 2013 Richard Boardman

In summary: Salesforce overtakes SAP to be number one, SugarCRM’s SugarCon, and great results from Netsuite and Rimini Street…

It’s long been on the cards, but April seemed to confirm that Salesforce.com had grabbed the number one CRM vendor slot from SAP. Gartner’s ‘Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2012’ report had Salesforce pegged at number one with 14% of the market, followed by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM at number five. The top five vendors represented nearly 50% of a market which Gartner estimates has grown 12.5% to $18 billion in 2012.

How accurate these figures are, given that few vendors break out their CRM results from other lines of business, is open to question, but if nothing else it certainly seems to capture the general direction of the market, with Salesforce and Microsoft both showing 26% growth rates, over 0.1 and 7.8 per cent for SAP and Oracle respectively.

The Gartner report also identified that software as a service (SaaS) offerings represented 40% of the overall CRM market and that marketing functionality was a key area of investment.

A point that was rather underlined by Salesforce.com’s April announcement that it was extending its Marketing Cloud with Social.com, an integration between its Buddy Media social advertising platform, Radian6, its social listening application, and its core CRM system. Social.com will allow brands and advertising agencies to create, optimise, and automate highly targeted social advertising campaigns. While in pilot currently, Social.com is expected to be generally available with Salesforce’s Summer 2013 release.

In other news, SugarCRM staged its SugarCon 2013 event at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Key announcements included: Sugar 7, also due for release in Summer 2013, featuring a range of new social capabilities; a new Sugar Mobile application for iOS and Android operating systems, and the release of Sugar Private cloud which adds to its SaaS and on premise options with the ability to run a managed private instance of SugarCRM in the cloud.

Curiously SugarCRM also seem to be running with the customer focused positioning which Salesforce.com also seemed to have adopted in preference to their previous emphasis on the social enterprise. It will be interesting to see whether other vendors also jump on board and if it gains traction with potential buyers.

In financial news, ERP/CRM vendor Netsuite announced its Q1 results with revenue of $91 million up from $69 million in the same period in 2012. While the net loss also increased from $7.7 million to $13 million in 2013, the sharp, 32%, growth in turnover moved Netsuite CEO, Zach Nelson, to call the results ‘the finest Q1 in our history’.

Rimini Street, the third party support and maintenance provider, also announced its Q1 results, with invoicing up 57% year on year. Given this momentum despite a looming date in court with Oracle, we can expect the third party market to really take off if the verdict goes Rimini Street’s way.

Anyway, that concludes my take on the news for April 2013. If I’ve missed or misunderstood anything significant please feel free to comment!