There’s an article in today’s NY Times on Siebel and CRM. Siebel’s CEO gave his first interview since taking the helm. The article puts quite the positive spin on Siebel’s position, calling them the CRM expert and that they have a best in breed solution. Further, Siebel got the spin on salesforce.com that they like: “small and scrappy” and “good for small and medium size businesses.” I’m sure Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce, would have loved to get a quote, but instead they gave it to the CEO of RightNow. What Benioff would have said is that on-demand, utility computing is the future, Siebel never lets folks like PC Mag test its on-demand product nor do they release their utilization numbers so who knows how succesful it is, c) salesforce.com CAN scale to suit large companies. Alas, this last point is where the whole CRM market gets interesting. Benioff himself has said that if salesforce is to become a very big deal it needs to have customers that have 4, 5, 10 thousand users. Right now the highest is a customer with two thousand. The other interesting thing about this space is how Oracle/SAP approach it. Oracle is going in saying we can provide 70% of what you need and have it seamlessly integrate with our eBusiness suite so every part of your business runs on our softare. That’s a powerful propostion.
Overall, a very interesting market to watch. And for me, to play in.
Edit – one other thing: SugarCRM announced that they raised $2M from Draper Fisher. They sell a completely open-source CRM product. Another interesting development.
There are other companies out there in the marketplace as well. Even though Salesforce CLAIMS that they are targeting small businesses, they are not priced right for the 5 to 20 computer offices (80% of the market). I will be interesting indeed to see what Sugar CRM is made of as they launch this year.