Siebel Leads Enterprise CRM Rankings

Research firm META Group has released its latest "METAspectrum" ranking of CRM vendors. The report scores nine developers of on-premise CRM solutions: Amdocs, E.piphany, KANA, Onyx, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Pivotal, SAP, and Siebel. Siebel takes the top honor as the CRM Leader, with the other eight firms clustered in the Challenger segment. No companies were included in the lowest tier, Follower, in this report. META assigns CRM vendors composite ratings based on the performance of their solutions, and their position and strength in the market. Both are weighted equally for the vendor rankings. Liz Roche, CRM vice president and practice lead at META, says that KANA reasserted itself after a stay in the Follower segment, in part because the report's rankings have come to better account for both vertical applications and deep focus on specific areas of CRM functionality. "Many of these vendors have decided that they want to be full-spectrum suite players, but also want to have a specialty, and KANA is deep in issue management and resolution, so [in the past, KANA was] artificially penalized, because they were so deep in service, but not so deep in sales and marketing." Siebel routinely rests alone in META's Leaders segment, but the firm gives Siebel a much larger edge in the more intangible Presence category over closer rivals PeopleSoft and SAP. Is there enough room in the CRM market for two or more companies to maintain a leader-size portion of mindshare and presence? "I sure hope so. Yes," Roche says. "There have always been two very strong players--Siebel's always been the only leader, but PeopleSoft is almost always there and is moving up, and it's interesting to me how much SAP has improved and moved up. Now there is a triad at the top." META chose to omit from these rankings midmarket or SMB firms without significant enterprise overlap, as well as pure-play on-demand CRM providers. "Our client base may look at those folks as a tactical solution, but they're not looking at them as being long-term strategic partners," Roche says. Related articles: KANA to Acquire Hipbone Siebel Scores Big in Gartner's Slew of Market Reports CRM Magazine Reveals the Winners of Its 2004 CRM Leader Awards