The play for CRM in the mid-market

It's interesting to see some of the big boys (including Microsoft) throw their hats into the front-office and chase the mid-market CRM clients over the past 5 years or so.

On one hand, you have products from the likes of Sage who's CRM products started at the low end with ACT! and moved up with SalesLogix and Sage CRM (Microsoft is also at this level with BCM and MS CRM). They need to achieve better scalability and develop an understanding of longer, more complex sales cycles.

On the other hand, Seibel, SAP, Oracle and others who come from the world of large data warehouse implementations are trying to move down-stream to meet a price point of the sites smaller than they have historically developed.

It seems to me that those who started at the bottom typically have better usability in the interface for those working on the "coal face", but those starting at the top can drive business with superior scalability and management reporting... but both need to learn from the other to get the mix right for the market they are all chasing.

One can see Sage's direction in their 2010 White Paper, which shows that they are finally planning to integrate their offerings and embrase Web 2.0 technologies.

Interested to hears other's views on this and, if you agree with my analysis, who do you think is winning and why?

2 comments:

Darren said...

Hi Mike, Very keen on Sage's new 2010 vision. At the moment Saleforce.com is obviously flavour of the month, however as SAAS becomes just one of the configuration options available along with onsite and offline configuration options that novelty will inevitably wear off.

I see that Sage with it's interoperability across 3 CRM products and their range of on demand and on premise options should be uniquely placed. Would be nice to see Sage start getting some love from the Analysts in the future.

GLComputing said...

My only worry with the integration of the CRM products is if ACT! loses it's independence and becomes just a front-end to the bigger solutions.

One hopes the ACT! Consultants will keep reminding the Sage managers like David van Toor that the integration should not be at the expense of the ease-of-use of functionality to the individual users, SMEs and corporate work groups that it does so well