Cloud-based business apps to grow

Cloud-based business applications are garnering considerable attention from US SMEs, according to AMI-Partners' latest US SMB Cloud Services Study, writes Channel Insider.

The software as a service (SaaS) customer relationship management (CRM) market, already representing 570 000 US SME firms, is set to undergo double-digit year-over-year growth in the next five years, the report projected.

According to TechJournal, during this period, spending on SaaS CRM will outpace on-premise CRM by a margin of nearly four to one.

The advent of cloud services has changed the US SME landscape tremendously, and has allowed SMEs to acquire enterprise-class solutions, such as CRM, at significantly less total cost of ownership.

“More and more SMBs are attempting to attract and retain customers over social media channels,” Information Management quotes Jacqueline Atkinson, research manager at AMI-Partners, as saying.

“Enterprise social CRM can translate what these companies readily perceive on their social communities into actionable insights for timely business planning.”

Atkinson points to SaaS CRM vendors that offer a social component as having an edge in capturing the growing market, such as Salesforce.com with its Radian6 platform, or Sage's SalesLogix Cloud CRM application. She says these vendors will influence SMEs toward leveraging social CRM.