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Hosted CRM – an emerging paradigm in customer relation management
(By -Geetanjali Saxena)
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Hosted
CRM
offerings started to appear more than four years ago, but in last one
year the market for hosted CRM have really taken off. According to a
recently released Beagle Research Group study, the demand for hosted CRM
has exploded over the past 12 months, and mainstream users are now
adopting these solutions. However, the latest Beagle Research survey on
hosted CRM found that a nearly equal number of respondents opposed and
embraced the concept of hosted CRM. Hosted CRM market in 2005 is
expected to be $724.5 million in 2005. That's a slim percentage of the
$27.8 billion in total CRM spending that Aberdeen forecasts for 2005,
with $7.7 billion spent on applications and the rest coming from
integration services and related hardware. Forrester Research predicts
that the percentage of overall
CRM
revenues coming from hosted applications will stand at 13 percent by
2005, up from 7 percent in 2002. Gartner Inc. estimates that by 2009, 33
percent of all small to medium businesses (SMBs) will have chosen a
hosted model.
When hosted
offerings first came on the market, they were considered ideal for SMBs.
But in the recent years vendors of hosted offerings are increasingly
able to offer more areas of customization, and changes can typically be
implemented by a business administrator taking advantage of various
offerings’ built-in wizards, tools and configuration options. So, not
only SMBs but also many large companies like Hewlett-Packard, Xerox,
Sanmina-SCI, AOL Time Warner and Fujitsu Computer Products of America
are among those with units relying on a hosted CRM service.
Initially ASPs (application service
providers), Salesfoce.com and UpShot were the leading players in the
emerging market of hosted CRM. Siebel validated the ASP model by
acquiring UpShot. The success of the ASPs has prompted nearly every
CRM
vendor, including those with products targeted at the market's high end,
to make available hosted versions of their software, often through
partnerships with channel resellers. KANA has jumped into the hosted CRM
badwagon with the release of an on-demand variant of KANA Response Live.
RightNow Technologies - RightNow 7.0 is available in both hosted and
on-site versions. Entellium offers Entellium
eSalesForce and Entellium eCustomerCenter, its sales and customer
service products, respectively, as well as MyEntellium, a business
intelligence and team collaboration portal. The products are available
as individual modules or integrated suite.
PeopleSoft provides, PeopleSoft Enterprise
One and PeopleSoft World - through hosted-services. Both products offer
CRM, supply chain, financials and human-capital management. Microsoft
doesn't have a hosted CRM offering of its own but does offer the service
via some 90 certified partners. Microsoft CRM doesn't require a
client-side installation, said Alex Simons, who leads the Microsoft CRM
product team. Customers can run a copy of it on a server and configure
it to be accessed by end users either through Microsoft Outlook, or
through a Web browser. (contd.)
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