Siebel Takes CRM Analytics Apps Market Share

IDC names Siebel Systems the 2004 market-share leader in CRM analytics applications in its report "Worldwide CRM Analytic Applications 2004 Vendor Shares: Strength and Churn," and attributes part of the company's success in CRM analytics to enhanced analytics functionality through its 2001 acquisition of nQuire Software. Siebel also had the top market share and in 2002 and 2003. Robert Blumstein, research director of CRM analytics and marketing applications at IDC, says, "They were very intelligent in the way they went about integrating that acquisition into their own offering, so that the analytics are really embedded in the operations. Last year they even went beyond CRM analytics," referring to Siebel's October 2004 release of analytics applications for business functions like supply chain management and workforce/employee performance management. "They are positioning themselves as offering enterprise analytics." Blumstein also says that virtually all of Siebel's CRM analytics share is on the core analytics side. Second-largest market-share winner, SAS Institute, is the largest predictive analytics vendor in CRM. According to Blumstein, "Predictive analytics include all analytics (both tools and packaged applications), [and are] more complex in their mathematics than core analytics. Predictive analytics are used to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the likelihood of a current state where it is unknown." These analytics include data mining, clustering, decision trees, market basket analysis, regression modeling, neural nets, genetic algorithms, text mining, hypothesis testing, and decision analytics, and may also include or be linked with a scoring capability. "SAS has for many years specialized in predictive analytics of various types. Typically, a very large number of IT departments and other types of tech analysis departments use SAS. It was the province of the technical analysts and probably still most of what they do analytically is in that province, but they have in recent years developed the predictive packaged analytics side of the business." Blumstein also noted trends within the CRM analytics application sect, including the move to software-as-a-service. "It is certainly growing, but is still a very small portion of CRM analytics," he says. "On-demand CRM is still a small portion of CRM, and of that portion, the analytics will ride along when you're looking at suites," adding that the predictive analytics market, for now, is almost all on premise. Also prevalent is the race for connectivity, Blumstein says. "It used to be that just to connect to your most immediate promotional database or data mart was enough. Now we're saying you really need to be able to connect across all of your channels. It's in the interest of companies to coordinate and have a single view of the customer and to be able to optimize the use of different media in combination with each other." Related articles: CRM Analytics: Opportunities and Challenges 12 Tips for Generating Rich Data Marketers Are Unsure of ROI Measurements