By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is “What’s The Use of Gettin’ Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)?” by
Louis Jordan:
Fueled by continued demand
for ERP
and CRM equipment, small and medium businesses in the United States
are on track to spend $2.2 billion on
enterprise software this year, up 10 percent from last year, according to a
recent report from AMI-Partners.
“More MBs in the U.S. now seek to streamline and automate
business processes and thereby maximize the value from their current assets,”
says Sau Lam, New York-based research analyst at AMI-Partners.
Lam thinks the healthy growth” for enterprise software
spending comes mainly from medium businesses, defined as those with 100-999
employees. He suggests that “many of these MBs also want to ensure they meet
new regulatory requirements and see automation as the best way to do that.”
The halcyon days of the huge, multi-million dollar land
grabs, installing IBM, Coca-Cola or First CoffeeSM with CRM systems
are long gone, the sweet spot for ERP and CRM vendors these days is the SMB
market, emphasis on M.
ERP itself is becoming a mainstream application for MBs, AMI’s
research finds. Currently, 31 percent of MBs use ERP products, a percentage
which will only go up with “close to a quarter of MBs indicating their interest
in adopting ERP products in the next 12 months.”
CRM adoption is also higher among MBs than among SBs. Over
half of MBs currently use and/or plan to use CRM products in the next 12
months, compared with 23 percent of SBs. Although ACT! and other packaged
software offerings are most prevalent, survey data shows salesforce.com gaining
traction in both small and medium businesses.
Salesforce.com would do well to speed up that $50 million
overhaul of their service to avoid such obnoxious service outages as happened
on February 9th, lasting for over an hour. Load balancing’s a great
idea, it makes an even better reality.
Adoption of such hosted, software-as-services products is
low, but growing, AMI found: “A majority of SMBs have yet to embrace the
software as services model, but pervasive high speed Internet access, growing
awareness and wider availability of products will fuel future growth across
many application areas. Currently, less than a fifth of SBs and 27 percent of
MBs use or plan to adopt SaS and hosted applications.”
Those who do adopt on-demand CRM such as that peddled by
salesforce.com are generally low-tech types of companies, and not likely to
have in-house capabilities to glide past service outages, making such lapses on
the part of salesforce.com even more aggravating, according to David Dobrin, an
analyst at B2B Analysts Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Are their service outages “an
artifact of their changeover to a more robust, dual data center model?” he
asks. “Is it a size problem? Are they having the same problems with their
hardware and software vendors that other people frequently have?”
AMI-Partners’ report, “2005-2006 U.S. SMB Applications &
Products Market Overview and Assessment,” tracks a broad spectrum of issues
pertaining to budgets, purchase behaviors, decision influencers, channel preferences,
outsourcing, service and support.
…
It’s the day to catch up on market studies of CRM,
evidently, as according to a recent IDC study, the Western European market for CRM applications reached $2.55 billion
in 2004, evidently the proverbial last year for which reliable data can be
found.
The five major countries – France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
and the U.K. – made up 72 percent of the total market. Siebel and SAP each led
five vertical industries.
IDC’s still flogging the report, itself written at the end
of 2005. Seems to me the proper response to such knowledge at this point,
however, is “Oh. Hm, gee.” Studies like this are great, but it’s almost March
of 2006, one wonders how much business value can be extracted from knowing what
things were like at the end of 2004, it’s like knowing what your girlfriend
looked like a couple years ago. The point is…
Predictably enough, though, “SAP has sold its CRM product in
the industries where it has a strong ERP installed base such as manufacturing,
transport, and utilities,” said Bo Lykkegaard, program manager, European
Enterprise Applications. Lykkegaard also finds that Siebel defends its turf in
industries where it has developed industry-specific offerings, such as finance
and communications.
Who’ll win in the future? That, Lykkegaard says, will be
determined by factors such as the ability to transition to a service-oriented
architecture and increase usability and ease of deployment of their CRM products.”
The largest vertical segment in the Western European CRM
applications market is finance, followed by communications and discrete
manufacturing. Siebel leads in communications, retail/wholesale, finance,
government, and education and healthcare, while SAP leads in discrete and
process manufacturing, transport, utilities, and business services, the study
finds.
The U.K. is the largest single country market, followed by
Germany. Vendor ranking across the five countries shows SAP dominating in
Germany, while Siebel leads in France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. Presumably such trends have held true in the past 14 months, it not being a static world.
There are a few exceptions at the country/industry level,
such as Oracle’s lead in government in the U.K. and SAP’s lead in utilities
across Western Europe, except the U.K.
…
Over the weekend First CoffeeSM heard from yet
another happy camper who made the
mistake of ordering from Caiman.com:
Look, I’ve ordered
online extensively for many years. I’ve never filed fraud complaints before.
They jerked my refund about for MONTHS after repeatedly lying to me about a
product they never had. It took the intervention of the authorities to shake my
money loose.
It was too late for me
to leave eBay feedback. They’d stalled me out. I’m not angry, I’m aware. I
posted here to provide feedback which can be taken into account for those
inclined.
First CoffeeSM, himself victimized by Caiman.com’s
false “ship-by” dates, is surprised how his account of the bad experience has
brought forth so many accounts of similar – and worse – experiences with this
one vendor, which is still allowed to sell on Amazon.com, eBay, and other
online markets.
It’s gotten to the point where a significant number of burned
customers are getting law enforcement’s attention, as another customer tells me,
and Amazon.com might finally be waking up:
Well, they never delivered, and it was definitely
NOT a hard to find item that I ordered. Again, this was not just myself, but 3
other classmates as well. The REAL problem is that many people don’t bother to
give any feedback on the Amazon site...however, when I talked to the customer
service people at Amazon I was told they have received numerous complaints and “A-Z
Guarantee” claims lately, and are researching if they should stop Caiman.com
from being able to do business through them.
And not being angry Kelly, but if you want
to talk about the “truth”, don’t go by what a few people may or may not have
said on Amazon’s site, contact the Florida state Attorney General’s office- I
did...there have been a LARGE number of complaints filed, and Caiman is being
looked at for possible fraud charges.
Oh one more thing...by the way, the comment
that “there is always the option to cancel...” well no, with Caiman there is
not. They supposedly ship within 2 days (which has also been shown not to be
the case) and once they have “shipped” they can/will no longer cancel an order.
Tried that one when they failed to deliver.
The
bottom line for such companies, who damage the credibility of online commerce
itself, should be obvious. Here’s hoping Amazon.com and other online commerce
sites do the right thing by their customers.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
