Ovum names Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP as market leaders in the CRM market as organisations continue to invest

Find out about Jeremy Cox’s latest research on the Customer Adaptive Enterprise at Ovum’s CX Forum, taking place in London this October. What’s more, end-user IT professionals can claim a free pass for the event.

Although customer relationship management (CRM) is a mature market from an enterprise perspective, many organizations across all sectors and regions of the world continue to invest in CRM systems, says global analyst firm Ovum. Some organizations are already into their third or even fourth deployments.

In its latest evaluation of CRM solutions, Ovum found that organizations that have made great strides in creating a seamless customer experience are now looking further ahead to what Ovum refers to as the customer-adaptive enterprise (CAE). Such an organization has highly acute peripheral vision and can sense and respond rapidly to changes in customer demand and adapt at the right frequency to remain persistently relevant to its customers.

“Continuous, timely, and relevant innovation is the hallmark of such an organization,” explains Jeremy Cox, principal analyst of Software – Enterprise Solutions at Ovum. “Any transformational CRM vision, whether focused on the customer experience or CAE, requires a portfolio of applications that work seamlessly together to enable anyone in contact with the customer to deliver context-aware, relevant information.”

Ovum identifies Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM, Salesforce.com, and SAP CRM as the market leaders. These solutions are comprehensive, suitable for a broad range of large enterprise requirements, and are widely recognized and successful in the CRM market. Two of the solutions in the leader category – Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com – are eminently suitable for the mid-market. Meanwhile, Oracle Siebel CRM features a deep industry sector-specific expertise (e.g. pharmaceutical organizations where specific sales processes are supported, such as e-detailing).

Cloud: transforming the IAM industry

Andrew Kellett, Principal Analyst – Software and IT Solutions, has been sharing his thoughts on the problems and opportunities that Cloud presents to the identity and access management industry. Andrew will be presenting his latest research on the topic at Ovum’s 2nd Annual Identity and Access Management Forum, taking place in London in October. Read more below, and on the Ovum website:

The cloud provides significant problems and opportunities for the identity and access management (IAM) industry, according to global analyst firm Ovum. It is a disruptive technology that is challenging the status quo within the IAM sector.

New research from the global analyst firm examined the impact of cloud computing and identity-as-a-service (IaaS) on the IAM sector. Traditional platform vendors are coming under pressure from a new generation of cloud-based specialists that are changing the way that IAM services will be consumed in the future.

According to Andrew Kellett, principal analyst for IT security solutions and author of the report, “The increasing use of cloud-based services is driving the need for better and more interactive single sign-on (SSO) and federated identity management (FIM) facilities. For the foreseeable future, organisations will continue to make use of a mixed range of on-premise, hosted and cloud-based systems and services.”