According to a recent poll conducted by META Group, the customer relationship management (CRM) market is rebounding, albeit slowly. Three-quarters of the survey respondents plan to spend about the same amount or more than they did in the previous 12 months, 25% plan to spend less, with much of the spending focused on quick-win point solutions.
Recent machinations in the enterprise application market (the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards/Oracle triangle) have dampened, though not eliminated, the appeal of purchasing strategic CRM applications from an incumbent enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone provider.
"Given recent events, enterprises concerned about relying too heavily on a single technology vendor should consider incorporating offerings from CRM specialist providers into their environments," said Elizabeth Roche, vice-president with Enterprise Application Strategies at META Group. "In fact, some vendors are overhauling their architectures to enable component environments and mitigate some integration challenges. Despite this enabling technology, however, organisations must still plan for heavy investments in integration skills and technologies."
Although compelling reasons remain to provision all enterprise backbone components (eg, CRM) from the same provider, CRM specialist providers (eg, E.piphany, Siebel) can provide a hedge against further market consolidation.
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