The CRM space has gone through an interesting cycle during the past 10 years. In the mid-90’s, CRM was clearly in the Hype Cycle, with vendors promising almost instantaneous ROI. As with ERP before it, once customers began to understand the ongoing commitment and workflow changes necessary for successful CRM, they began to see positive results.
In CRM sales suites, Siebel has clearly been the 800 lb gorilla. While the large software players (Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft) and niche providers (Onyx, Pivotal, etc.) fought among themselves for a distant second place, Siebel took commanding market share.
More recently, the hosted (ASP) model players began to make inroads, particularly among SMBs. Salesforce.com has shown strong and steady growth, while Siebel acquired its strongest competitor, UpShot. Siebel has struggled a bit during the past two years, with founder Tom Siebel stepping down last year, and his replacement, Mike Lawrie being replaced by George Shaheen (ex-Webvan) a year later.
Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel should put the CRM provider back in steady hands. It will solidify Oracle’s position vs. SAP positioned Siebel to retain its status as the solution of choice for large-scale CRM implementations. Leveraging the Oracle tools, Siebel will have very strong data integration capabilities along with a vast number of analytic solutions. Following on the footsteps of Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft, this will continue to round out the application stack which sits on top of the database platform.
In related news, SalesForce.com announced the release of AppExchange, which they hope will transform SalesForce into a development platform. One of the initial AppExchange partners is OneSource, whose application will allow their Account Intelligence product to be integrated directly with SalesForce.com. Through this integration, the OneSource content will become part of the user’s workflow, whether for prospecting, sales management, territory analysis or marketing. More and more, we are beginning to see integrated solutions of content and technology, increasing the value of both the software and the information.
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