Suppliers of customer relationship management (CRM) software will receive some added publicity when US-based CRM company Salesforce.com goes public on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow.
This is according to Gary Stanley, CEO and founder of Cape Town-based CRM developer Gush. He says such an initial public offering (IPO) is good for the whole CRM market.
CRM software is reported to be increasingly important in SA as the country attempts to compete on a global scale to attract outsourcing business such as call centres.
"Salesforce.com is known to be a good company. It was founded in 2000 with venture capital from Oracle and it has survived the dot-com crash. It is positioned to go places," Stanley says.
According to US financial news site TheStreet.com, shares of Salesforce.com will go public at a premium price of $11 (R67) a share, $1 higher than the high end of the software company's recently boosted range, according to underwriter Morgan Stanley.
"In one of the most highly anticipated tech IPOs of the year behind Google, underwriters for the San Francisco-based maker of CRM software priced 10 million shares Tuesday evening, raising $110 million," TheStreet.com says.
Stanley says while Salesforce.com is smaller than its rival Siebel Systems, it has taken the lead in selling CRM software on demand over the Internet.
"They are forcing a larger and older company to adapt for their survival," he says.
Stanley says South African companies are lagging behind their overseas counterparts in the implementation of CRM solutions.
"They are beginning to talk about it, however, it is not really being implemented at the moment - mainly because of bandwidth and technology costs," he says.
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