CRM Software sales grow 13.3% to $23 Billion

Gartner predicts a $36n market

The global market for CRM will total $36bn by 2017 and in 2014 we saw a 13.3% increase in sales, up from $20.5bn in 2013, according to Gartner, a research firm.  Our Market Quadrant positions the global CRM vendors that are driving this growth, in terms of their market dominance and their functionality.

Traditional vendors still dominate

Just 5 vendors, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP account for circa 50% of the market, with Salesforce alone accounting for 18%, according to Gartner.  Unsurprisingly, Salesforce retains its Market Leader position in our CRM Market Quadrant.  Also, as expected, Gartner reports that SAS/Cloud driven sales accounted for nearly half of of sales, as mature legacy deployments are retired in favour of easier to deploy and faster ROI yielding alternatives. Mature players, such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, continue to drive this predictable trend.

Smaller vendors are indispensable

However, as this market continues to mature, more smaller players continue to emerge with features and functionality that rival the top 10 and top 5 players (by market share). In fact, with the continued commoditization of the CRM landscape, there is is very clear group of what we call Functional Champions, deploying the vast range of functionality that an increasingly aware and sophisticated market demands.  With some CRM buyers, especially smaller organisations, experiencing CRM feature overload (or some say “CRM Overkill”), we continue to see a key role for Niche Players – these indispensable vendors continue to feature strongly as some of our clients demand greater simplicity and even easier deployment from their CRM vendors.  Our Market Quadrant highlights the current state of play amongst some of the most important global CRM vendors.