CRM sellers advised to push cloud offerings

CRM remains the fastest growing segment of the software market with customers increasingly looking to get applications delivered via the cloud.

Numbers for 2018 from Gartner show that Worldwide spending on customer experience and CRM applications grew 15.6% to reach $48.2bn and it accounts for almost a quarter of all the spending on enterprise software.

Cloud is becoming the preferred delivery platform for CRM with 72.9% of spending going on SaaS options last year and Gartner is expecting that to hit 75% by the end of 2019.

“Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20% and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6% for CRM,” said Julian Poulter, senior director analyst at Gartner. “As an early mover to the cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption.”

But the advice from the analyst house was for those delivering CRM to make sure that they had strong SaaS propositions.

“To exploit the significant market opportunity, product managers in CRM application providers should double down on cloud deployments and consider adding functionality in the fast growing marketing segment,” he added.

Salesforce continues to lead the field in terms of global vendor leadership positions with a 19.5% market share. SAP was next with 8.3% then Oracle with 5.5%.

Speaking to MicroScope at the firm's recent London event Leon Mangan, senior vice president alliances and channels EMEA at Salesforce, said that it understood the need to continue to add value to the proposition and the channel played a major role.

The firm is holding out the olive branch to the ISV community to get more added functionality available to users and he echoed the Gartner assessment of the current market growth.

"We have seen fantastic momentum this year and the consultants I have spoken to are all looking to grow their consultancies and put in more capacity, certifications and competency," said Mangan.