Consultancy Unveils Top 15 CRM Award Winners

CRM vendors increasingly are shifting to in-house implementations and are expanding their wireless capabilities, according to Barton Goldenberg, president of ISM. The findings come after surveying the winners of ISM's Top 15 Software Award for enterprise and SMB business solutions, which were announced today. ISM has been giving these awards since 1990. To determine the winners ISM rates each package according to 211 selection criteria, including 109 business functions, 49 technical features, 36 implementation capabilities and 17 user-support features. Based on this testing process and a survey conducted with the 29 winners, Goldenberg predicts dramatic growth in wireless applications and vendor implementations. The 17 leading SMB companies all declared they were doing more implementations now than in 2004, with eight of them handling at least 60 percent of customer implementations. On the other hand, three vendors--Epiphany, update Software AG, and Maximizer Software--said they are outsourcing 70 percent or more. Of the winning enterprise vendors all but one does 70 percent or more of its implementations in house. Goldenberg tells CRM magazine that there are four reasons for the trend toward in-house implementation: creating customer success (because "customer failures spread like wildfire"); maintaining customer loyalty; fulfilling companies' demands for measurable ROI; and realizing that CRM is about people, process, and technology--not just the software. He notes that CRM implementation by vendors is a trend that he predicts will eventually reach 90 percent, but further emphasizes the emerging trend to go wireless. He strongly believes all applications will be 100 percent wireless by 2007. A handful of companies are 100 percent wireless today, but many more exist that are 25 to 75 percent wireless, mostly with their SFA or tech services, but not the whole suite, according to Goldenberg. All the award winners currently offer wireless applications--mainly via PDAs--and all plan to expand wireless capabilities in 2006. "Right now, wireless is more of an internal focus and has to move more to the external [customer]. It is a weakness in the industry," Goldenberg says. "The bottom line is, who's going to be the dinosaur? Salesforce.com understands that mobility modular, and is ready to understand why it needs to make things happen. That's as good as it gets. Do it, or become a dinosaur in your respected industry." There are three key customer segments that companies need to keep in mind when deciding what to do when it comes to going wireless: the late baby boomers, generation X and generation Y. "The [boomers] are not going to be totally wireless-device ready. They're happy to go home to their PC and do their thing," Goldenberg says. Then there's the gen Xers, who are on the fence. Many of them have iPods or other up-to-date technology, but are still willing to enter customer requests on their home computers, and don't need to have that immediate PDA access. The riskiest category is gen Y. This segment "has no mercy,'' Goldenberg says. "The way it works is, you either get hip or I go elsewhere. Unless a company gets to the wireless side, they become the dinosaur." In alphabetical order by vendor, the winners are: ISM Top 15 Combined Winners (enterprise and SMB) Clear Technologies OnContact Sofrware Siebel Systems ISM Top 15 CRM Enterprise Winners Amdocs ClarifyCRM v.12-Amdocs C2 CRM v. 7.07-Clear Technologies Epiphany E.6 v.6.5-Ephiphany Firstwave CRM 2004-Firstwave Technologies CMS v.8.0-OnContact Software Onyx Enterprise CRM 5.0-Onyx Software ExSellence 4.8-Optima Technologies PeopleSoft CRM 8.9-Oracle/PeopleSoft Pivotal CRM Suite 5.1-Pivotal MySAP CRM 4.0-SAP AG Saratoga iAvenue v.6.4-Saratoga Systems Siebel 7.7-Siebel Systems growBusiness Solutions v.2.5-Software Innovation SSA CRM-SSA Global Tibco Process RM v. 9.0-Tibco ISM Top 15 CRM SMB Winners (Note: Two additional companies met the SMB category criteria for a total of 17 winners)

ACCPAC CRM v. 5.7-ACCPAC International

Ardexus MODE v.4.5-Ardexus

Powertrank v.6.3-Axonom

SalesLogix v.6.2-Best Software

C2 CRM v. 7.07-Clear Technologies

GoldMine v.6.7 and HEAT v. 8.0-FrontRange Solutions

iETSolutions Enterprise v. 9.5-iETSolutions

Salesplace 2005.3-Interchange Solutions

Maximizer Enterprise 8.0-Maximizer Software

NetCRM v. 10 and Netsuite v. 10-NetSuite

CMS 8.0-OnContact Software

Relavis v.6.5-Relavis

Salesforce.com-Salesforce.com

Salespage v.4.6-Salespage

Siebel CRM OnDemand v.6.0-Siebel Systems

StayinFront Visual Elk v. 9.1-StayinFront

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