SAP's CRM offering moves into world number one slot

According to a report issued at the end of June 2006 by technology industry research house, Gartner Inc, the customer relationship management (CRM) application from global business solutions giant, SAP AG, has the largest share of the global market - based on software revenues that include new licences, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support and maintenance.

Year on year growth of 19.6% fuelled by market uncertainty about consolidation in the CRM market as well as strong take-up of SAP's new on-demand CRM option and a steady market move away from best-of-breed to pre-integrated products was responsible for SAP taking the number one position.

SAP Africa's CRM solution manager, Deon Cilliers, believes that SAP's traditional strength in the retail, manufacturing and automotive sectors also made a contribution. "Clearly, we've made inroads into sectors such as the telecommunications and financial services industries where CRM is an obvious differentiation tool and take-up has been almost automatic. But we've also found our own traditional markets turning progressively more to CRM.

"Retail, for instance, is moving strongly towards loyalty programmes that are heavily dependent on CRM technologies. And more and more industrial organisations are sending out their sales forces with mobile devices such as PDAs to capitalise on orders placed in the field and capture customer complaints accurately for fast and efficient resolution.

"So we've been able to add our installed base to our new markets - massively expanding our customer base very quickly."

SAP's CRM on-demand option is also bringing on board customers that would normally have focused exclusively on pure enterprise resource planning (ERP) or back office projects and delayed deployment of a CRM application for as much as two years until they were bedded down. "But they're discovering that being able to outsource their CRM to us and thereby immediately get the benefits of capturing and analysing customer data that their operational systems work with anyway makes delaying CRM counter-productive," Cilliers says.

"I say 'to us' because we're the only vendor to offer a hybrid CRM solution. Customers have the choice of running their CRM as a service (Software as a Service - SaaS), deploying CRM onsite in the traditional way, or running a combination of SaaS and on-premise - whichever suits their business better."

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In addition, SAP's Safe Passage programme has made it easier for organisations unnerved by mergers and acquisitions involving their incumbent CRM providers to move to the more stable environment of SAP.

SAP's steady overall growth in market share in recent years (the company gained seven percentage points of worldwide share against its peer group in 2005 alone) has been almost entirely organic.

"That gives us the advantage of being able to focus on our customers and develop exactly the products they need - whereas our competitors now have to focus on themselves in order to successfully consolidate all their different acquired companies and products," says Cilliers. "That's already driven more than 200 companies to exploit our offer of support, both financial and technical, to help them move smoothly from their existing systems to ours.

"Also, customers gain confidence from our focus on delivering strong baseline CRM functionality with deep industry processes - such as trade promotion management for consumer products, case management for public sector organisations, and intellectual property management for media, all enabled by unique SAP front-to-back-office integration."

Another feather in SAP's CRM cap is the April 2006 CRM Magazine award for best agent-facing universal desktop (AFUD). "In years gone by, we've had superior functionality for call centres and CRM operatives, but our user interface hasn't been all that easy to use," says Cilliers. "The AFUD award is confirmation that that's all changed now."