Siebel and SAP Dominate Western European CRM

Siebel and SAP dominate the majority of industry verticals throughout Western Europe, according to a new study by IDC. "Western European CRM Applications Vertical Competitive Analysis, 2005" also found that the Western European CRM applications market has reached $2.55 billion. Five countries, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, comprise 72 percent of the total market. The largest vertical segment in the European CRM market is financial services, followed by communications and discrete manufacturing. Siebel leads in communications, retail/wholesale, financial services, government, education, and healthcare, while SAP is the leader in process manufacturing, transport, utilities, and business services. Considering the CRM applications market by the five major countries in the region, the U.K. is the largest single country in terms of CRM adoption, followed by Germany. SAP is the leader in its home country of Germany, but the study found that Siebel dominates in France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. As for other enterprise CRM vendors, there were few exceptions at either the country or industry level, other than Oracle's lead in government implementations in the U.K., according to Bo Lykkegaard, IDC's program manager for European enterprise applications. Siebel's dominance over SAP in this market across verticals and countries could be a sign that SAP's strengths still lie in ERP, supply chain management, and other back-office applications, while Siebel has stronger CRM offerings. "SAP has successfully sold its CRM solution in the industries where it has a strong ERP installed base, such as manufacturing, transport, and utilities," Lykkegaard says. "Siebel maintains strong leadership in industries where it has deployed very industry specific offerings, such as finance and communications." Lykkegaard concludes future application leadership in Western Europe will be determined by how these vendors continue to advance their offerings to make them easier and cheaper to deploy, and to develop the business relationships to sell their products to foreign customers. "Their [the vendors'] success will be determined by factors such as the ability to transition to a service-oriented architecture, the ability to increase usability and ease of deployment of their CRM systems, and the ability to construct a powerful ecosystem of services and software partners." Related articles: The Sage Group Takes a Local Europe Orders Out for IT Jobs